Although suburb-building created major environmental problems,
Christopher Sellers demonstrates that the environmental movement
originated within suburbs--not just in response to unchecked urban
sprawl. Drawn to the countryside as early as the late nineteenth
century, new suburbanites turned to taming the wildness of their
surroundings. They cultivated a fondness for the natural world
around them, and in the decades that followed, they became
sensitized to potential threats. Sellers shows how the philosophy,
science, and emotions that catalyzed the environmental movement
sprang directly from suburbanites' lives and their ideas about
nature, as well as the unique ecology of the neighborhoods in which
they dwelt.
Sellers focuses on the spreading edges of New York and Los Angeles
over the middle of the twentieth century to create an intimate
portrait of what it was like to live amid suburban nature. As
suburbanites learned about their land, became aware of pollution,
and saw the forests shrinking around them, the vulnerability of
both their bodies and their homes became apparent. Worries crossed
lines of class and race and necessitated new ways of thinking and
acting, Sellers argues, concluding that suburb-dwellers, through
the knowledge and politics they forged, deserve much of the credit
for inventing modern environmentalism.