Rather than professing an idealistic view of how people should treat the environment, Bowers wants readers to imagine how to creatively and responsibly engage with how to work with industrial waste materials, inasmuch as they are regrettably here to stay. Highly recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students and faculty. General readers.

Choice Reviews

In "Environmentalism and Contemporary Heterotopia," Thomas Bowers astutely argues for a new discourse to inform environmental consciousness and advocacy, one that resists the polarized rhetoric of the ecologically clean or collapsed, while firmly situating itself within the reality of waste. This book offers an urgent and influential ecological reality check. The dirtied spaces are here to stay, and we need to learn how to work with them and talk about them in a way that promotes ethical and creative use of our wastelands and waste materials. This book is a sharp investigation and necessary step in that direction.

Donelle Dreese, Northern Kentucky University and green burial activist

Environmentalism and Contemporary Heterotopia is a major intervention in environmental rhetoric. With fascinating, theoretically-informed case studies of ecological spaces in which humans and their waste interact in unexpected, even productive ways, Tom Bowers calls for a new rhetoric of environmentalism—one that accounts for and interprets the ethical dimensions of human emplacement in a dirty world.

Brooke Rollins, Lehigh University