Suburban environmental concern, not just affluence or wilderness, fueled environmentalism

Evidence

Though a growing concern about the loss of wilderness obviously contributed to the rise of environmentalism, the movement also was a response to environmental change at the edges of the nation’s cities. In The Greening of a Nation?, Hal Rothman argues that the battle in the mid-1950s to preserve Echo Park was the great catalyst of the environmental movement. His argument follows a number of works – from Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind to Stephen Fox’s John Muir and His Legacy – that root environmentalism in the preservationist tradition exemplified by the Sierra Club. Yet scholars have not explained fully why Americans were more concerned about the fate of wilderness after World War II than before. In a fine study of the Echo Park controversy, Mark Harvey argues that the rapidly growing population of suburbia gave new strength to the wilderness cause. That argument accords with the common view that the environmental movement has always relied on the support of affluent suburbanites. Yet The Bulldozer in the Countryside shows that suburban environmentalism was much more than a function of affluence. The residents of postwar suburbs lived in the midst of one of the most profound environmental transformations in the nation’s history. Every year, a territory roughly the size of Rhode Island was bulldozed for urban development. Forests, marshes, creeks, hills, cornfields, and orchards all were destroyed in order to create subdivisions. Though some of the environmental consequences of suburban development were invisible to untrained observers, others were obvious. Again and again, the destruction of nearby open spaces robbed children of beloved places to play – and the losses hit home more vitally than the threats to far-off sites like Echo Park ever could. The desire to preserve wilderness was the tip of an iceberg, the most visible part of a much larger concern about the destructive sprawl of urban civilization. — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 43

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the polyad’s environmental origins thread and connects to the Eco-Justice course’s wilderness-vs-habitability framing. — connects to: Environmental history scholarship overlooked the suburban origins of environmentalism — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 13; Environmental history has privileged rural production over metropolitan land use — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 14; Suburban development relocated environmental threats from distant wilderness to the suburban home itself — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 570 (+4 more)
• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source

Broader Connections

• Suburban development relocated environmental threats from distant wilderness to the suburban home itself #expands (0.85) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 570
• Suburban open-space campaigns shaped environmentalist rhetoric and organizing #expands (0.85) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 541
• Postwar suburban sprawl provoked organized protest against its environmental costs #exemplifies (0.85) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 0
• Suburban sprawl pulled established conservation groups toward urban environmental concerns #expands (0.80) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 553
• Suburbanization restructured space to make car and oil consumption a necessity #expands (0.75) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 577