Quinn’s Review of Silicon Valley and the Environmental Inequalities of High-Tech Urbanism by Jason A. Heppler

BOOK REVIEW

Silicon Valley and the Environmental Inequalities of High-Tech Urbanism
by Jason A. Heppler

University of Oklahoma Press
2024. 224 pp.
(paper) ISBN 978-0-8061-9374-8

Reviewed by Adam Quinn (University of Oregon)

“Silicon Valley” is often framed not as a physical place but an ethereal concept, encompassing Big Tech, the digital world, and the future. The actual location in California has been remarked upon for its “placelessness” and imagined to be located “outside of history—always looking to the future, at the forefront of change and progress” (pp. 3, 15). However, by studying Silicon Valley as a place—and one that exists in historical context—we can better understand both the tech industry and the inequalities of our modern urban landscapes. This is the premise of Jason Heppler’s 2024 book, Silicon Valley and the Environmental Inequalities of High-Tech Urbanism, from the University of Oklahoma Press. Heppler examines how Silicon Valley (Santa Clara County, California) as a place was changed and defined over time, including the environmental contexts that helped the region become home to the high-tech industry and the ideas and movements that shaped the region’s idyllic metropolitan environmental identity. The book is an urban environmental history at its core, as Heppler contends that the “central story of Silicon Valley” is not the technological revolution but the “story of land, real estate, segregation, and pollution” (p. 4).

Silicon Valley and the Environmental Inequalities of High-Tech Urbanism opens with post-World War II efforts to lure businesses to the region. Boosters and university administrators built on the design language of Stanford University’s idyllic adobe campus to plan an appealing “green” and clean facade on new industrial development. In chapter 2, residents and city planners similarly tried to apply pastoral aesthetics to the development of new subdivisions while ignoring the economic and environmental plights of preexisting, redlined working-class neighborhoods. White residents sought to bring the countryside to the city through large lawns and easy access to conserved lands. Public resources focused on building luxurious subdivisions for white residents that reflected the aesthetic area’s agricultural landscape, while the farmers who worked that agricultural land lived in systemically marginalized barrios. Chapters 3 and 4 show how urban planners, environmental activists, and community organizers advanced contentious visions of an urbanizing, high-tech industrial city versus a rustic suburb. These debates over growth, industry, and livability laid both the ideological and governmental foundations for later activism, explored in chapter 5, where women residents drove anti-growth and environmentalist politics in the 1960s and 1970s. The environmentalist, racial justice, and industry threads of the story coalesce in chapter 6 (which is also one that would be of most interest to those drawn to the high-tech aspect of the book). This final chapter shows how the residential environmentalist movement of the 1970s grew into a more combative and inclusive anti-toxics movement in the wake of widespread high-tech chemical spills in the 1980s. These late-twentieth-century activists, according to Heppler, “went beyond the middle-class, suburban concerns” seen amongst earlier conservationists and instead “insisted on the environmental and structural factors that influenced human health, rather than the individuality of genetics, poor hygiene, poor sanitation, or chance” (p. 129). The story concludes around 1990, with the myth of a “clean” high-tech industry shattered.

As the chapter structure suggests, Heppler’s environmental history is not just about the region’s rich soils and bountiful trees; it’s filled to the brim with people. Boosters, industrialists, city council members, racial justice activists, academics, scientists, environmentalists, and mothers all play crucial roles in imagining what Silicon Valley’s environment ought to look like and fighting for their visions to become reality. This diversity of actors, all taken seriously and thoughtfully, is one of the main strengths of Heppler’s work. Popular histories of Silicon Valley often range from hagiographies of heroic entrepreneurs to polemical correctives about the same entrepreneurs being villainous robber barons. Heppler, in contrast, is mostly uninterested in the iconic business leaders of Silicon Valley (though he is certainly critical of the unequal social systems surrounding their success). His distinct, diverse cast allows him to vividly depict the area’s changing political and environmental textures. The wide range of characters that fill Heppler’s pages includes mid-century open space activists like Dorothy Eskine, who articulated the need for regional land management to conserve green space; Republican San Jose city councilwoman Virginia Shaffer, whose anti-growth fiscal policies in the 1960s meshed well with even liberal environmentalists’ views on urban development; and Chicano community organizer Jack Ybarra, who fought against the region’s residential segregation in the 1970s. When studied together, these kinds of actors reveal the close links between urban development, environmentalist politics, and environmental inequalities.

Heppler’s book is tight and focused (136 pages, not counting notes), providing a concise narrative of landscape change in Silicon Valley before and during the high-tech boom of the 1960s-80s (briefly gesturing towards more recent history in the final few pages). It is a mark of solid scholarship that I flipped to the final page not with any major criticisms of the book’s contents but curiosity about what else might lie beyond its scope. Did this story play out similarly in other high-tech cities that modeled themselves after Silicon Valley (even if they lacked contexts like agriculture or redlining)? Were the interiors of the region’s high-tech offices and factories similarly stratified environments (and how might this inform how we understand recent movements for racial and gender equality in high-tech workplaces)? And how did environmental justice and labor movements deal with the region’s legacies of environmental inequalities into the 1990s and 2000s? Scholars interested in these broader or more recent questions would be wise to refer to Heppler’s work, which provides a thought-provoking foundation for understanding the relationship between high-tech industries, urban development, and environmental inequalities. These topics will only become more relevant as computer chip manufacturing returns to the US and both local pollution and global climate change exacerbate earlier environmental inequalities. Anyone interested in the relationship between modern urban development and environmental inequalities, whether as scholars, activists, or citizens of an unequal, high-tech world, would be wise to learn about their historical context from Silicon Valley and the Environmental Inequalities of High-Tech Urbanism.

[This review from H-Net is reproduced here under a Creative Commons License]