clipped from www.orionmagazine.org

IN 1997, environmental historian Robert Gottlieb took up a position at Occidental College in Los Angeles that encouraged him to teach and research, but, somewhat uniquely, also to continue his activist role in the community. Four years earlier Gottlieb had published his groundbreaking Forcing the Spring, which brought the issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and class into the environmental dialogue. Gottlieb was determined that urban communities be seen as a critical context for environmental action, and his 2005 revision of that book validated his conviction. Occidental would prove to be fertile ground for the professor.

by Robert Gottlieb
reviewed by William L. Fox

The MIT Press, 2007. $24.95, 440 pages.

Gottlieb never defines it as such, but his richly informative book is really about flow—of resources, people, history—and about how we all need to put our hands into that urban stream as participants directing community, a word he sensibly makes very nearly synonymous with environment.