Owning a home in the United States allows owners to more easily become members of their community by involving themselves in community organizations and politics. But owning a home is a monetary investment. Homeowners tend to be conservative about how they perceive changes in their surrounding environment. Keeping up the value of one’s home can be a paramount concern. Rhee argues that homeowners and their concerns shaped the modern American environmental movement and allowed the movement to become a long-lasting priority in policy and culture.
Using the affluent coastal city of Santa Barbara, California and her training as a landscape architect, Rhee argues that homeownership provided homeowners with the cultural and political authority to decide the priorities of the post-war environmental movement – that is, its concern with retaining open space and mitigating suburban sprawl. Rhee begins the study after the First World War, which she contends assists her in tying environmentalism to territorial expansion, Indigenous displacement and racial segregation. She believes that starting the study prior to the Depression and the Second World War links the environmental movement more directly to conservation. Using Santa Barbara’s homeowners as a lens, Rhee explores multiple scales, from small yards to the soon-to-be oil-soaked Santa Barbara beaches, to attempt to show that these affluent homeowners allowed the environmental movement to become a hindrance to issues of environmental justice.
Rhee begins and ends the story with disasters – the 1925 earthquake and the 1969 oil spill. The residents of Santa Barbara woke up to a shock that provided them with an opportunity to remake their community. The earthquake destroyed many buildings but it gave political and community leaders and architects the authority to direct homeowners to improve their properties and embrace Spanish colonial revival architecture to create a unified style for Santa Barbara’s built environment. As Santa Barbara residents rebuilt, the community leaders used women-led community organizations to educate homeowners in this aesthetic style for their individual homes. As the community melded with its natural surroundings and showed civic pride, Santa Barbara homeowners were able to look at their community as inspired by its Mexican forebears, and as a distinct product of affluent, white ownership.
Expanding to parks and larger community gardens, Rhee explores the landscape of Santa Barbara and how the choice of plants erased the Indigenous inhabitants and marked the permanence of territorial expansion. Centring on the term euthenics, Rhee reveals how Santa Barbara homeowners created natural landscapes with native and non-native plants to enhance the natural environment and improve individuals and society. She does acknowledge that Santa Barbara is uniquely situated to allow for a plethora of ecosystems due to its multiple habitats and its temperate climate. With the botanic garden as a guide, the home garden allowed property owners to control and shape their direct surroundings into an idealized landscape.
As the population of California expanded after the Second World War, Santa Barbara property owners faced a rapid influx of newcomers. Rhee shows that the Santa Barbara’s attractive character created by the earlier social controls gave Santa Barbara property owners a rationale for stricter zoning that rejected affordable-housing projects. Santa Barbara’s beauty was created by its open spaces, lack of apartment buildings and singular community character, which residents sought to protect from the newly arrived masses. Like many other cities, Santa Barbara residents voted overwhelmingly for Proposition 14, which exempted apartment and homeowners from most anti-discrimination legislation. But Santa Barbara homeowners rallied around protecting the natural landscape and cited neighbourhood character as the reason for acceptance of Proposition 14. Rhee notes that declining property values was a constant worry associated with the population changes.
In Chapter 5, Rhee gets to the rationale for using Santa Barbara as the location of interest – the 1969 oil spill. The spill made international news and brought Santa Barbara to the forefront of the environmental movement. Residents were aghast at the damage and created anti-oil groups. Rhee observes that Santa Barbara residents were perplexed that the federal government and the oil companies had allowed this to happen. Their affluent community should have been protected. Santa Barbara residents were unable to fathom that their lifestyle played an active role in oil drilling, which blunted the anti-oil drilling protests. They wanted oil drilling to stop in their backyard but not in other areas of the United States, such as the Gulf of Mexico. Their property values, their beautiful Spanish colonial revival homes and their lush gardens must be protected – ignoring the environmental catastrophes plaguing other less white and poorer communities.
Santa Barbara provides the perfect, and I would say idealized, location to illustrate that homeownership dulled the impact of the environmental movement in the years before the rise of environmental justice. But using Santa Barbara also limits the impact of the argument. Rhee ignores pre-spill oil drilling and the constant seepage of oil onto its pristine beaches. Oil is not mentioned until page 128 of a 165-page book, and without the spill, Santa Barbara residents would not have played such a large role in the environmental movement. Ultimately, Rhee desires to show that Santa Barbara is ‘distinctive, exclusive, and timeless’ (p. 14), which lessens the force of her argument. There really is no place like Santa Barbara, so its property owners may not be the most emblematic example of the lack of environmental justice issues in the environmental movement. But there is no doubt that homeownership has shaped the environmental movement both positively and negatively.
Rhee brings the eye of a landscape architect into the continuing exploration of how the environmental movement in its first few decades was limited and largely dominated by the concerns of suburban homeowners. Examining architectural style and garden design opens more windows into how humans shape their local environment and how that reflects their attitudes toward the environmental movement.
