The American consumer nation has an environmental footprint that spans the globe.
Environmental and business historians have well documented the ecological impact of American
consumerism, often tracing the history of global commodity flows. However, the retail spaces
where consumers purchase their goods has received little attention. Retail space offers a chance
to study how consumers and corporations meet and interact with the ecologies of mass-market
consumption. Within these spaces, businesses prescribe certain ideas about resources, leisure,
waste, and consumption. Simultaneously, consumers encounter—confront, even—the
relationship between their individual actions and purchases and the global scale of modern
consumption within these spaces. The link between the factory, the power plant, the home is
often in a retail space—where the material objects suggest—or suggest erasure of—links with a
broader world.
Based around their new edited collection Big Box USA: The Environmental Impact of America's Largest Retail Stores, this panel brings together a diverse group of scholars to open up a new dialogue on the
relationship between American retailers and environmental history in a roundtable discussion
encouraging audience participation. Taken together, these panelists will begin answering how and why retail matters for
the nexus of environmental and business history.