Pollyanna Rhee, Natural Attachments: The Domestication of American Environmentalism, 1920–1970 Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025. Pp. 220. ISBN 978-0-226-84063-5. $32.00 (paper).
Year: 2026
Type: book-review
Abstract: Owning a home in the United States allows owners to more easily become members of their community by involving themselves in community organizations and politics.But owning a home is a monetary investment.Homeowners tend to be conservative about how they perceive changes in their surrounding environment.Keeping up the value of one's home can be a paramount concern.Rhee argues that homeowners and their concerns shaped the modern American environmental movement and allowed the movement to become a long-lasting priority in policy and culture.Using the affluent coastal city of Santa Barbara, California and her training as a landscape architect, Rhee argues that homeownership provided homeowners with the cultural and political authority to decide the priorities of the post-war environmental movement -that is, its concern with retaining open space and mitigating suburban sprawl.Rhee begins the study after the First World War, which she contends assists her in tying environmentalism to territorial expansion, Indigenous displacement and racial segregation.She believes that starting the study prior to the Depression and the Second World War links the environmental movement more directly to conservation.Using Santa Barbara's homeowners as a lens, Rhee explores multiple scales, from small yards to the soon-to-be oil-soaked Santa Barbara beaches, to attempt to show that these affluent homeowners allowed the environmental movement to become a hindrance to issues of environmental justice.Rhee begins and ends the story with disasters -the 1925 earthquake and the 1969 oil spill.The residents of Santa Barbara woke up to a shock that provided them with an opportunity to remake their community.The earthquake destroyed many buildings but it gave political and community leaders and architects the authority to direct homeowners to improve their properties and embrace Spanish colonial revival architecture to create a unified style for Santa Barbara's built environment.As Santa Barbara residents rebuilt, the community leaders used women-led community organizations to educate homeowners in this aesthetic style for their individual homes.As the community melded with its natural surroundings and showed civic pride, Santa Barbara homeowners were able to look at their community as inspired by its Mexican forebears, and as a distinct product of affluent, white ownership.Expanding to parks and larger community gardens, Rhee explores the landscape of Santa Barbara and how the choice of plants erased the Indigenous inhabitants and marked the permanence of territorial expansion.Centring on the term euthenics, Rhee reveals how Santa Barbara homeowners created natural landscapes with native and non-native plants to
Author: Teresa Sabol Spezio
Language: English
Subfield: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7140204173
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