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Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Justice, by Phaedra Pezzullo. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007. xiii + 265 pp.
The subject of Phaedra Pezzullo's book, Toxic Tourism, concerns the use of the toxic tour as a performative re-definition of tours and tourism. The book examines the ways in which environmental justice activists use tours to raise awareness of the often invisible environmental problems in various communities and their tragic effects on human bodies. Pezzullo defines toxic tours as "embodied rhetorics of resistance aimed at mobilizing public sentiment and dissent against material and symbolic toxic patterns" (3). Tour guides lead groups into polluted co?iimunities showing sites of contamination, talking with residents who are victims of this contamination, and educating the tourists about the source of the toxins. The purpose of the toxic tour, according to Pezzullo, is to "inspire a motivated sense of agency, to translate the seemingly controversial feeling that toxic pollution needs to stop into concrete practices that prevent further pollution and provide redress for the harm we have already allowed to occur" (172).
Scholars interested in rhetoric, tourism, social movements, performance studies, and environmental communication will find an emotionally engaged analysis in Pezzullo's project. This is not a book for the cynical or the dispassionate, for Pezzullo's position is one of hope and possibility inspired by this unique rhetorical approach to dealing with environmental devastation. She brings to this project her experience as an environmental justice advocate and scholar with an impressive body of work on this subject. A primarily ethnographic work, Pezzullo's book is based on the author's experiences as a participant observer on three toxic tours throughout the United States and Mexico.
The book's first chapter, "Tourist Itineraries," explains how toxic tourism negotiates typical characteristics of tourism and tourist practices. The reason that Pezzullo chooses to start the book off with a broad overview of tourism is because she views toxic tours as "an appropriation of tourism as a discourse, a pragmatic mode of communication, and a way of acting in the world" (26). The form of these tours is very much in keeping with the tourist tradition (with tour guides, buses, sites of observation) but the content is strikingly different (witnessing scarred landscapes, disturbing sights, and meeting...