Consumer-driven environmental protest stopped at the edge of homeowners’ own property

Evidence

The Bulldozer in the Countryside offers a further qualification of Hays’s argument about the relationship between consumerism and environmentalism. Even when homeowners protested against threats to environmental quality, the protests had limited aims. In the late 1950s, for example, suds began to pour out of the faucets of thousands of suburban homes – the residue of nonbiodegradable detergents in septic tanks had contaminated drinking wells – and the resulting outcry helped to make water pollution a national concern. Yet the desire for a better quality of life only partially restrained the disruptive impact of septic tanks on the nonhuman world. The nation’s lawmakers ultimately protected consumers from the principal domestic problems caused by the sprawl of septic-tank suburbs, but backyard waste-disposal systems continue to harm life in lakes and streams across the country. The consumer perspective was myopic: Homeowners only cared about certain elements of the environment. — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 50

Categorization

• XREF: The myopia of consumption-side concern — protecting the well at one’s door while ignoring downstream lakes — echoes the Justice and legal-system distinction between private nuisance and public harm. — connects to: Homeowners frame environmental pollution as a personal property-value threat. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 82