| Book Review | Environmental History, 10.2

Book Review

From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century. By Frederick Buell. New York: Routledge, 2003, xviii + 390 pp. Notes, index. $29.95.
Frederick Buell's ambitious study chronicles a dark chapter in recent environmental history, as he traces the myriad ways in which environmental crises have settled into the fabric of everyday life. He begins by reviewing the place and reception of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), particularly the apocalyptic rhetoric that accompanied expressions of environmental crisis in the 1960s and 1970s. As his title suggests, Buell contends that the notion of crisis has shifted from the apocalyptic to the mundane over the past generation even as actual crises have increasingly intruded into the lives of growing numbers of people, particularly in the Third World. In the process of coping with degraded air or water sources, for example, these numbers or their governments engage in a range of postures: denial, rationalization, resignation, even enthusiastic acceptance in the face of current corporate spin control or popular cyber fiction or art. From Apocalypse to Way of Life suggests T. S. Eliot is correct at the end of "The Hollow Men": The world will end not with a bang, but with a series of half-hearted whimpers. Buell describes a brave new world characterized by apathy or accommodation already upon us. There is little geography of hope inscribed in this cautionary tale.	1
In his Preface Buell elaborates his thesis, that "critical environmental problems and constraints help construct society's sense of daily normality" (p. xviii), and clearly defines his book's niche: "A history of crisis thought that fully incorporates both the apparent failure of previously forecasted apocalypses and the continuance and even deepening of alarm is a necessity today" (p. xii). His "history" represents a significant contribution to the literature of environmentalism's ongoing maturation even though his focus is uncomfortable, even excruciating at times. His research ranges widely and his argument is so thoroughly worked out that it is difficult if not impossible to resist.	2
Buell builds his argument in three parts: "Contesting Crisis," "Elaborating Crisis," and "Imagining Crisis," the middle section receiving the greatest space (four chapters). Part I reviews the politics of environmental crisis particularly during the wind shifts of the Reagan, Bush (father and son), and Clinton administrations. He concludes by asserting "an end to the organized denial of environmental crisis and a recommitment by both parties to seeking out alternatives to it would reenliven faith" in the United States' future (p. 66). To counter denial, Buell leads the reader on a harrowing tour in Part II, reviewing the range of interrelated environmental crises at the twenty-first century's dawn (Chapter 3), the symbiosis between these and personal and social health (Chapter 4), the sociology of these global crises (Chapter 5), in which "the world is filled everywhere with increasingly claustrophobic social-environmental stresses" (p. 171), and finally, the post-World War II history of what he calls "crisis conceptualization" (p. 177). Chapter 6, whose title echoes the book's, distills the dark impact of Part II.	3
Finally, in Part III Buell turns to popular culture and literature as "attempts to explore crisis as a dwelling place" (p. 208), and his commentary swings from the pejorative (for example, Chapter 7, "The Culture of Hyperexuberance") to the laudatory (those films or books that treat environmental crises realistically and seriously).	4
Buell's scholarly writing does not make for fast reading, but his subject demands slow, painful reflection. Occasionally, specialized terms are left insufficiently defined. It is a carefully mounted, thoroughly documented argument, particularly in tracing the baleful impact of globalism—one focus within the book—on interrelated social-environmental problems, and in the survey of federal policies, and books and movies, that variously deny or confront these problems. The book might be stronger had Buell included some sort of conclusion to his relentless survey, one that pulls together his diverse strands and leaves the reader with a stronger sense of his own recommendations and prognostications. Instead, his Appendix—another survey—exposes three kinds of groups most responsible for the recent and ongoing whitewashing of progressive environmental problems.	5
O. Alan Weltzien, professor of English, most recently co-edited Coming into McPhee Country: John McPhee and the Art of Literary Nonfiction (Utah, 2003). Currently he is completing a memoir about his late father and an island in Washington's Puget Sound.

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