Clipped from recent LA Times article, "Eco Friendly Consumption? Critics Don't Buy It":
"It's cynical on the part of the manufacturers and the people who want to sell this stuff," said Andrew Szasz, a sociology professor at UC Santa Barbara and author of the new book "Shopping Our Way to Safety: How We Changed From Protecting the Environment to Protecting Ourselves."
"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."
I need to check out that book. (Eco-criticism, anthropology, psychology, and now sociology! I might be taking this interdisciplinary mandate a bit far, but it's been wildly rewarding and eye-opening so far... so why not?)
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