Commentary and Reviews
Commentary, Interviews, Related Writings by the Author
--"Suburban Nature and Environmentalism on PostWWII Long Island," video of presentation at 2nd Annual Conference of Long Island Nature Organization, December 6, 2013
--"Suburban End Games," New Geography Website, December 13, 2013
"Are America’s suburbs facing end times? That’s what a host of recent authors would have you believe. The declaration comes in variety of guises, from Alan Ehrenhalt’s The Great Inversion (2012), to “the peaking of sprawl” pronounced by urban planner Christopher Leinberger to, most recently, to Leigh Gallagher’s The End of Suburbs(2013). Suburbs and sprawl have joined the ranks of “history” and “nature” as fixtures of our lives that teeter on the verge of demise—if we’re to lend credence to this latest clamor from journalists, planners, and academics.
When you declare the “ending” of a place where you acknowledge over half of Americans now live, just what does that mean? One sure bet is that their demise won’t prove nearly as definitive or thorough-going as advertised....[Read more]"
--"Cicadian Rhythms: How Suburbs Saved – and Threaten – the US’s 17-Year Cicadas," Beyond the Trees (Blog of the Rachel Carson Institute), July 17, 2013
"With piercing red eyes and a song like the soundtrack from a 50’s science-fiction film, the 17-year cicadas have stormed up out of the soils of the Eastern seaboard of the U.S. for their single month or so of adult life. Though their brief otherworldly chorus is, in human terms, ancient, only over the last century have Americans started to listen less with rank fear, more in annoyance or wonder... [Read more]" .
"As we approach the 43rd Earth Day, American climate activism has finally gotten feisty. It is even starting to look more like the antipollution movement of the 60’s, out of which the first Earth Day sprang... As to what this new climate movement’s future may hold, that earlier movement against pollution, so stunning in its achievements, sheds an instructive light....[Read more]
--Interview with Christopher Sellers about Crabgrass Crucible, by Jim Quigley, "Sustain It" Radio Program on WUSB, March 8, 2013,discussing Sellers' arguments about the suburban origins of environmentalism and their implications for efforts toward sustainability today.
--"How Green Was My Lawn," op-ed piece in the New York Times, September 20, 2012
"FIFTY years ago this month Rachel Carson, already a best-selling writer, published “Silent Spring,” the book many credit with inspiring the modern environmental movement. Nowadays, when environmental causes are often under political siege, it bears remembering that they were once extraordinarily popular, especially where both the book and the movement were born: in the suburbs..". [Read more]
---"Cities and Suburbs," in Douglas Sackman, editor, A Companion to American Environmental History (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2010),462-82-
--"Suburban Nature and Environmentalism in Levittown," in Dianne Harris, editor, Second Suburb: Levittown, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 281-313
--“Cities and Suburbs in Environmental History,” essay for TeacherServe Website entitled Nature Transformed, posted by National Humanities Center, 2008
--“Nature and Blackness in Suburban Passage,” in Diane Glave and Mark Stoll, eds., “To Love the Wind and Rain”: Essays in African American Environmental History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 93-119
Reviews
H-Net Roundtable on Crabgrass Crucible
With introduction by Jacob Hamblin (Oregon State University), commentary by Andrew Kirk (University of Nevada-Las Vegas), Kara Schlicting (Towson University), and Michael Rawson (Brooklyn College and CUNY)
"Most modern Americans started in the suburbs, so it's no surprise that much of our sense of the world around began there as well. They are edge communities, and therefore an ecological niche open to a great many ideas, as this fascinating account shows!"
Bill McKibben, author Deep Economy
"Puts to rest the narrative of suburbia as a purely nature-destroying phenomenon. The challenge now is how we might exploit these low-density settlements for ecological and social benefit."--The Dirt
"The importance of Sellers' work cannot be overstated."--Treehugger.com
"Crabgrass Crucible covers a broad and important theme with insight,imagination, and literary distinction even while demonstrating enormous research, deep intelligence, and impressive conceptualization. It
should be required reading for anyone with a passing interest in suburban, urban, or environmental history."
--Kenneth Jackson, Columbia University, editor of The Encyclopedia of New York and author of Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States
"Historians have long known that America's suburbs were the birthplace of environmentalism. But this important book reconsiders why postwar suburbs mattered as both unique physical places as well as cultural spaces. The scholarship is cutting edge, the research prodigious, the analysis sharp, and the findings significant. Sellers says things that environmentalists and policymakers need to know."
--Matthew Klingle, Bowdoin College, author of Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle
"Christopher Sellers focuses on the place of nature in American suburbs and its influence on nature-seeking by suburbanites, confronting the definition of modern environmentalism. Crabgrass Crucible engages a central theme in urban history in a sophisticated and extraordinarily aggressive way."
--Martin Melosi, University of Houston, author of Precious Commodity: Providing Water for America’s Cities
"Delivering significant insights and fearless observations in spirited prose, it is not only a highly engaging book but also an important one, which should reinvigorate debate over the past and indeed future of environmentalism, urban sustainability and human-environment relationships more generally."
--Andrea Gaynor, Environment and History
"Speaking to the idea that the environmental movement started with suburbanites, Sellers’ tome really reflects the sprawling suburb that is LA. The book is both informative and relaxing to read—perfect as you soak up a slice of California’s environment at the beach."
Los Angeles Confidential Magazine
"The strength of Sellers's book is how he does, indeed, localize it within suburbs through the experiences of suburbanites themselves. He reveals how suburbanites encountered nature within suburban places that subsequently mediated how they came to understand the environment... The real treat of Sellers's book is his masterful use of oral histories with suburbanites to provide snapshot biographies ranging over class, race, and environment...In a powerful concluding chapter and epilogue, Sellers shows how localization is the key to both the rise and fall of a more effective environmentalism..."
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