Andrew Szasz’s keen sociological imagination enables him to show how health-conscious individuals’ efforts to protect themselves from toxics via personal, lifestyle choices undermine their sense of the necessity for political action on behalf of environmental protection.

Shopping Our Way to Safety is an important reconceptualization of individual responses to social and environmental threats. It exposes the political implications of confusing personal troubles and social issues.

It’s cynical on the part of the manufacturers and the people who want to sell this stuff. In a world where people want to continue to aspire to middle-class consumption patterns, but they are also wanting to feel like they are responsible citizens who care about social and environment issues, how do they reconcile that? They go shopping for something that declares itself to be ecologically friendly.

Szasz’s message is timely and incisive.

Szasz brings up an intriguing puzzle based on the two types of organic customers. No doubt his book will find its way into many college classrooms.

Environmentalism strives to fire citizens up, get them to act collectively, politically; to organize and force real change. Environmental awareness does push many people toward activism, for sure, but we now see that environmental awareness can also lead to this other response, in which people act not as political subjects, not as citizens, but as consumers who seem interested only in individual acts of self-protection, in trying to keep contaminants out of their bodies.

We need stronger regulation of production. We need to encourage technological innovations that provide us with adequate amounts of material goods while dumping lower levels of hazardous materials in our environment. For that, we will need a new kind of environmental activism. That will happen, in turn, only if Americans reject the mirage of inverted quarantine, reject the seductive but false idea that there are individual solutions to our collective problems.

The consumer of these goods does not get the protection she or he hopes to get. That’s a problem for the individual. The problem for society is that false belief produces political anesthesia. It’s a classic case of unintended consequences. When enough people flee to inverted quarantine, society’s ability or willingness to face the problem diminishes. Meanwhile, the threat persists. The threat may well intensify, so that collective conditions continue to deteriorate. As it does, everyone, certainly too the consumer who placed her or his faith in those inverted-quarantine goods, is at ever-greater risk.

Szasz is right—Americans are not going to shop their way to a cleaner, healthier, more just, and more sustainable society. Whole industries have to be reorganized—and that's a much bigger task than merely offering organic and energy-efficient alternative products.

For an engaging look at the environmental beliefs and actions of the general public, look no further than Szasz’s new book. Szasz has given readers an intriguing framework for understanding current environmental issues.

Shopping Our Way to Safety is an important contribution. Szasz makes a powerful and politically astute argument about the wrong-headedness of individualized solutions to collective environmental problems, and takes the reader through the promises and pitfalls of consuming our way out of environmental crises. This well-written and accessible book nicely summarizes the key problems with individualized consumer approaches to environmental regulation. While scholarly, the book is a fine piece of public sociology that can be enjoyed by an interested lay public and undergraduate audience.

Andrew Szasz’s dry wit and engaging prose makes Shopping Our Way to Safety a pleasure to read.

Szasz’s dark vision of the futile, self-defeating paradox at the heart of green consumption is compelling.

This is a book about social consequences, not how to dodge the latest designer pesticide, and his logic. . . is hard to fault. Shopping Our Way to Safety will make the reader uncomfortable (although Szasz’s dry wit and engaging prose make the book a pleasure to read) precisely because he doesn’t give easy answers.

The best part of Shopping Our Way to Safety is that it is readable, approachable, and not overly burdened by jargon or esoteric academic debates (these are kept to extensive endnotes). This makes it an excellent teaching text, as well as a joy to read. . . . Szasz tells us that he’s been thinking on and off about these things for more than 20 years. The gestation period for the book may have been long, but it is well worth the wait.