Larry Koenigsberg
1915 Fairmount Blvd
Eugene, OR 97403-1766
139-40-0619
THE LAND THAT COULD BE: ENVIRONMENTALISM AND DEMOCRACY IN THE
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
William A. Shutkin
Current Affairs
Reviewed by Larry Koenigsberg
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William A. Shutkin’s prescription for addressing social and environmental problems through
broad participation in community planning.
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William A. Shutkin links the contemporary maladies of social disaffection and decline of
public participation in civil life with the environmental deterioration of the communities in
which people’s lives take place. In his early chapters, he focuses on how social and economic
disparities result in environmental harms in poorer communities, abetting further deterioration.
Traditional environmentalism, with its emphasis on wilderness, and environmental law, largely
concerned with standards for individual pollutants rather than finding alternatives, have done
little to help beleaguered communities.
Understanding environmental harms instead requires the systems approach which
Shutkin advocates, since pollutants migrate among such media as air, land and water. Thus air
pollution creates acid rain, and abandoned toxic sites can contaminate a water supply. Pollutants
are cumulative in effect as well, so that communities with numerous toxic sites and substances
are inadequately served by regulation. Understanding deterioration’s economic framework of
development, production and consumption likewise requires a systems approach.
To remedy and prevent detrimental outcomes, Shutkin proposes another model, one
based on planning principles and stakeholder involvement. In this paradigm, often initiated by
civic activist organizations, communities make use of their historic assets to create public /
private partnerships that can generate alternatives to the usual detrimental uses of the local
environment. In four later chapters, he reviews efforts in communities to apply these principles.
While activists Roxbury in Boston and Oakland, California have created innovative approaches
to inner city environmental and social deterioration, those in Routt County, Colorado have
created new models for addressing the looming destruction of a cherished landscape, or indeed in
suburban New Jersey of any open space at all.
Shutkin’s approach, while sometimes laden with planning terminology, illustrates well
both the need and some promising means of making social and environmental changes.
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(The MIT Press, 2000, 273 pages, $27.95, ISBN 0-262-19435-X)
See also:
LOSING GROUND by Mark Dowie
EPA: ASKING THE WRONG QUESTIONS by Mark Land
THE POWER OF PLACE: URBAN LANDSCAPES AS PUBLIC HISTORY, by Dolores
Hayden