Recently, I found myself at an international environmental conference, watching László Andor, the EU Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs, and Inclusion, welcoming the conference participants by video message. Andor reminded us of a number of routine facts: global climate change is already here; its effects are being felt disproportionately by the poorest people; action is needed, especially by those who consume the most; no group will be able to insulate itself from the effects of climate change, which are not only environmental but also social and political. Andor made no controversial claims at all, but the speech was shocking to me as an American unused to hearing politicians say true things about climate change. I turned to my neighbor to ask how this was possible. “Oh,” she said with a smile, “if he were a national politician, it would be different.”

Why do most of us, and especially our politicians, find it impossible to speak even the most mundane truths about environmental problems? Our environmental ethicists debate the correct formula by which to distribute the costs of carbon emissions; our celebrated panels of scientific experts model climate change and its complex, interactive effects; our military leaders include environmental security challenges among the threats for which readiness is required. Yet there is a huge gap between these elite discourses and public discourse on the environment, even with regard to the most basic facts of the matter. A common response to this gap has been to read it as a consequence of people's basic unwillingness to make the sacrifices necessary to address climate change. The contributors to The Environmental Politics of Sacrifice challenge that assumption, and in so doing, they take a giant step toward the goal of a reality-based public debate about environmental policy.

In their introduction to the volume, John M. Meyer and Michael Maniates note that prevailing North American environmental discourses range from debilitating disaster scenarios to Promethean technological fantasies. All of them take for granted the premise that American consumers will not make sacrifices for environmental goals. Meyer and Maniates announce their intention to counter that premise by taking the rhetoric of sacrifice seriously, uncovering existing sacrifice and engaging in a “critical investigation of sacrifice [that] becomes a vehicle for discerning the structural in the everyday” (p. 7). The effort to understand how prevailing environmental discourses conceal structural problems leads the contributors to confront the pervasive individualization of risk in our society (p. 4). Thus, even as the book nicely focuses its attention on understanding the environmental politics of sacrifice, it wrestles with some of the most important general questions in present-day political theory. Contributors from a variety of perspectives engage the topic, but—and this is critical to the book's success—they do not seek to represent their perspectives by performing “the liberal,” “the communitarian,” or “the ecocentric” take on the rhetoric of sacrifice. Instead, each contributor engages theoretically and empirically with some aspect of the real discourse of sacrifice in environmental politics; this thoughtful and non-dogmatic method makes the volume an object lesson not only in environmental political thought but in how to do engaged political theory.

As Ian Shapiro has written, one of the most important things political theorists do is “problematizing redescription”: “One shows that the accepted way of characterizing a piece of political reality fails to capture an important feature of what stands in need of explanation or justification. One then offers a recharacterization that speaks to the inadequacies in the prior account. When convincingly done, prior adherents to the old view will be unable to ignore it and remain plausible” (Shapiro, The Flight from Reality in the Human Sciences, 2005, p. 202). The Environmental Politics of Sacrifice achieves exactly this, problematizing the dominant characterization of environmental options (as a choice between sacrifice and catastrophe), and redescribing the political environment as one in which sacrifice is already pervasive. For example, the contributors call our attention to the sacrifices associated with “automobility,” including losses of life, health, clean air, unpaved landscapes, and even the loss of the community values and possibilities for active citizenship caused by suburbanization. As Cheryl Hall argues in her essay, we make many sacrifices for the current order, but they are usually unconscious and invisible (p. 72). Anna Peterson adds that the “American way of life already requires numerous sacrifices … time with families, open spaces, clean air and water, and security for future generations … many Americans have come to accept these sacrifices and even to believe that they are necessary and inevitable” (p. 109).

The volume is remarkably focused and coherent; each chapter's analysis contributes to the volume's problematizing redescription of the environmental politics of sacrifice. In his essay, Peter Cannavò describes the suburbs' tragic evolution into a way of life that denies even the possibility of sacrifice for the common good. As he explains it, suburban life subverts authentic community by preventing the “realization of an expanded self beyond the narrow, impoverished life of privatized consumption” (p. 218). Justin Williams, in his chapter on urban biking policy, contributes to the volume's effort to “discern the structural in the everyday” by demonstrating that automobile-centered infrastructures are the products of choice and need not represent “the immutable power of the status quo” (p. 256). Simon Nicholson similarly contributes to the goals of the volume in his chapter on the history of geoengineering efforts, observing that while “sacrifices are hidden, they are present and demand our close scrutiny, lest particular technological developments be allowed to draw us in unexpected, gnarly directions” (p. 274, and including perhaps the first and certainly a delightful scholarly use of the term “gnarly”: the electronic version of the Oxford English Dictionary [entry updated 2003] lists only popular sources such as surfer magazines, novels, and newspapers). Karen Liften voices a recurring theme of the volume when she argues that inquiry into the rhetoric of sacrifice enables “conscious choice” (p. 135).

In considering alternatives to the prevailing environmental discourses, the volume's contributors look both within and outside traditional green politics. Pointing to an example outside green politics, Sudhir Chella Rajan notes that the resources for a robust politics of sacrifice are already available in our parenting practices (p. 182). Looking instead within green politics, Michael Maniates provides a case study of grassroots efforts to limit personal consumption and expand available free time, concluding that a “rights-averse, sacrifice-free strategy” is a mistake for green politics (p. 306). Similarly, Shane Gunster employs a brilliant analysis of British Columbia's experiment with a carbon tax to demonstrate that framing environmental policies in terms of narrow self-interest undermines public willingness to support collective sacrifice for the environment. “In bringing our political ambitions and discourse down to this [narrowly market-oriented] level … we call into being the fictional public that we fear the most: selfish, apathetic, and motivated by nothing other than the utilitarian calculus of financial cost and benefit” (p. 208).

The essays, like Gunster's, that make the most progress toward the goal of redescribing prevailing environmental rhetorics all focus on the real politics of conflicting interests that is ignored by the dominant discourse of individualized risk and sacrifice. Paul Wapner, for example, expresses doubt that “win-win” discourses like green consumerism will have much of an effect (he even dares suggest that locally produced food may not always be the greenest food, p. 42). Thomas Princen's powerful indictment of the rhetoric of consumer sovereignty and heroic sacrifice also highlights the material conflicts of interest at work in the environmental politics of sacrifice: “In the end, the idea of consumer sovereignty is a myth convenient for those who would locate responsibility for social and environmental problems on the backs of those very consumers, absolving those who truly have market power and who write the rules of the game and who benefit most” (pp. 145–46; repeated on p. 152). When energy interests routinely spend on the order of $500 million just to influence eighteen months' worth of climate change policy (New York Times, October 21, 2010), we will not come closer to a reality-based debate on environmental policy without taking interest-group politics seriously.

In sum, The Environmental Politics of Sacrifice is an essential contribution to the literature on environmental political theory, environmental politics, and political theory generally.