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Review of The Overloaded Liberal: Shopping, Investing, Parenting, and Other Daily Dilemmas in an Age of Political Activism, by Fran Hawthorne, Beacon Press, 223 pages, $24.95; and Parenting Out of Control: Anxious Parents in Uncertain Times, by Margaret K. Nelson, New York University Press, 257 pages, $27.95

Fran Hawthorne opens The Overloaded Liberal with a concise definition of the emergence of what I’d call pocketbook activism: “harnessing everyday life to change something bigger in the world.” She contrasts this with the traditional activism of picketers, marchers, and other protesters, who use “extraordinary measures to change some aspect of everyday life.”  

This is a book about the dilemmas of activists who brandish their wallets at monumental problems like global warming, worker exploitation, and environmental destruction—a guide for “educated, empowered consumers [whose] purchasing and investing dollars are a form of influence to be wielded.” But it’s also a book for people who feel overwhelmed by that charge, who are troubled by the simplistic nature of some of these calculations, and who are stressed and exhausted from constantly juggling competing priorities.

If that includes you, read on.

At the beginning of her journey, Hawthorne is alternately smug and self-deprecating about where she’s drawn the line between doing what’s best for the planet, animals, workers, and others on the traditional liberal agenda, and doing what’s cheapest or most convenient: yes to composting, no to vegetarianism, yes to recycling batteries, no to drying clothes on a line. She takes readers along as she researches what really makes a difference and how to strike a balance between the benefits to the planet and its inhabitants and the burden to herself and her family. She has no use for the conventional “how to save the planet” lists. She wants to make her own choices based on her own top priorities. 

At first, she hasn’t ranked those priorities. She wants “to make the world a better place” in as many ways as possible: by taking on “climate change, pollution, global working conditions, the price of oil and other commodities, the survival of endangered species, the union movement, poverty, international financial stability, and the wars that often erupt from these pressures.” But as she already knew—and as her research documents—efforts on behalf of one of those aspects of world-betterment can be counter to another. The more she knows, the tougher it gets. “There’s got to be a manageable system for organizing the cacophony of too much consumer information and too many competing demands,” she laments. 

Hawthorne works hard to help us navigate the cacophony, if not manage it. She walks us through the pros and cons of big-box stores and local co-ops, clothing that is Made in the USA and Made in Honduras, out-of-state organic produce and local noncertified produce. She cites studies and articles, and talks with numerous consumers and activists, including Chip Giller, founder of Grist, a non-profit environmental news organization, who says, “We’re not going to buy our way out of our environmental problems.” Hawthorne and her sources admit there’s no one, identifiable place to draw the line, and that emotions as well as evidence affect our decisions. And she’s not afraid to tell us what she thinks.

“So we pick and choose, and we all have different reasons for choosing which green steps we take and which we ignore,” she writes more than a hundred pages into the book. Which is more or less where she leaves us at the end. We have more information about the costs and benefits of various choices; we are savvier about the trade-offs in Socially Responsible Investing (sometimes called Sustainable and Responsible Investing). But we’re still, to use her word, “Juggling.”