Sellers, Christopher. Crabgrass Crucible: Suburban Nature and the Rise of Environmentalism in Twentieth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.

== Summary ==
Crabgrass Crucible is about how the small moments of
experiencing nature in the Suburbs led to the first “stirrings” of
environmentalism. The environmental movement was not born out of the Sierra
Club or urban progressive reform, “but through the searches for nature along cities’
“elusive edges,” the suburbs of post-WWII society. Just as New York and Los
Angeles (case studies) and their growing suburbs were the first to acquire a
freeway, it also “played host to forerunning environmental mobilizations,
significantly prior to the first Earth Day in 1970.” (3) The outward expansion
of cities (suburbanization) was spearheaded “by quests for more natural
surroundings, whether from greenery or privacy or small-town comfort or
countryside,” and as a result, led post-war suburbanites to gravitate to new
ecological ways of thinking. Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, became the movement’s chief manifesto. By the time
of this book’s publication, suburban residents of New York and Los Angeles had
already began to conceive of a new form of naturalism, free of chemicals.
Sellers thus writes: “The contribution of Silent
Spring, along with a slew of other popular volumes that are less
remembered, was to render this message more sweeping and portable.” (9) What
made smog or open space or pesticides so galvanizing in the suburbs was not
scientific study or policy, but “by reaching into lay experiences, by striking
nerves across neighborhoods.” (9) Along the rapidly growing suburbs of the
postwar period, a concern for air and water pollution also grew alongside (and
logically linked to) the afflictions of wildlife and the needs for park making
and better rules for land use. Concerns for public health and wildlife
officials (often treated separately) overlapped in the backyards and bodies of
suburbanites (shared personal experiences/local knowledge). By the 1990s and
early 2000s, however, the suburban roots of environmentalism were forgotten,
partly due to the excesses that came to define the suburb (big cars, excessive
use of electricity, etc.), but also the result of its successes – the rise of a
professional environmental activist who have become more considered with the
larger, more symbolic images of environmental decay (nuclear plans, WTO, etc.).
Yet, what made the environmental movement successful in its early years,
Sellers argues, was its ability to take seriously the nature where most people
lived (the suburbs).