The Contamination of the Earth: A History of Pollutions in the Industrial Age

by Francois Jarrige, Thomas Le Roux, Janice Egan (Translator), Michael Egan (Translator)

Overview

The trajectories of pollution in global capitalism, from the toxic waste of early tanneries to the poisonous effects of pesticides in the twentieth century.

Through the centuries, the march of economic progress has been accompanied by the spread of industrial pollution. As our capacities for production and our aptitude for consumption have increased, so have their byproducts—chemical contamination from fertilizers and pesticides, diesel emissions, oil spills, a vast "plastic continent" found floating in the ocean. The Contamination of the Earth offers a social and political history of industrial pollution, mapping its trajectories over three centuries, from the toxic wastes of early tanneries to the fossil fuel energy regime of the twentieth century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262542739
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	11/16/2021
Series:	History for a Sustainable Future
Pages:	480
Product dimensions:	5.63(w) x 8.69(h) x 1.13(d)

About the Author

François Jarrige is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary History at the University of Burgundy's Georges Chevrier Centre. Thomas Le Roux is a tenured Researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), based at the Centre for Historical Research in the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (CRH-EHESS) in Paris.

Read an Excerpt

There are many ways to think about pollutions: as a benchmark of technological deficiencies requiring improvement, a fundamental byproduct of all productive activity, an essentially chemical issue requiring further understanding of the molecular makeup of the world; or, more profoundly, as a critical intersection at the crossroads of political, economic, social, and scientific issues, locally and globally. Pollutions insidiously impact everyday life. Their invisibility and dilution render them controversial and subject to denial, fueled by “merchants of doubt,” who interfere with and manipulate scientific data and public discourse. Pollutions are legion and various: widespread or accidental, preexisting or unforeseen, they are rarely adequately understood. Their place in modern history is amplified or underestimated by scandal, pressure groups, expert discussions, ecologists’ actions, and ambitious politicians and corporations. Their magnitude and complexity, much like their cause and effect, are difficult and controversial topics to encompass. That is undoubtedly why no single work has attempted to present a historic panorama of pollutions in order to provide a greater understanding of their workings. Such a study would need to discern what is at stake and follow the global spread of pollutions in time and space, and all the necessary preconditions for responding and reacting to them. Between paralyzing catastrophism and reassuring explanations, it is difficult to know how to consider pollutions, when each expert and specialist imposes her or his own vision of the subject.
Over the last few decades, environmental history has become a well-established subject, initially in the United States, then gradually on a global scale. As a field, it has helped give a new and heretofore overlooked perspective on pollutions. Histories of contamination have been central in the emergence and development of the field since its inception in the 1970s. By and large, these histories of industrial trespasses into the environment have constituted a “tragic” environmental history, effectively an accounting of the damage caused to natural environments by human activities. Subsequently, this history gave way to other approaches that focused more on exchanges and interactions between humans and nature, relegating pollutions to the background as subsidiary to larger systems of organization. In France, very few works have explored the history of pollutions—and those that have do not examine the dynamics of industrial pollution in any depth, at best considering it a partial aspect of greater environmental transformations. Over the last decade, however, many new monographs have markedly expanded the historical understanding of pollutions. They have permitted a more focused exploration of the subject’s depths, complexities, and chronologies—and topics requiring still further consideration. But this literature is generally not very accessible, and tends to concentrate on specific industries, regions, or countries, thus offering something of a scattered or incomplete overview. While this book relies heavily on these studies, it attempts a global synthesis by linking the traditions of social and economic history, the history of law and the state, and the histories of science and technology, with new directions in environmental history.
While it is evidently not possible to cover everything—an encyclopedia would be needed—this book endeavors to bring together often segmented approaches, illuminating key dynamics at work while pointing out new challenges and issues that need to be explored. By proposing a social and political history of pollutions since the beginning of the industrial age, the aim is to present a global, historic vision of what has polluted different environments—air, soil, and water—over a period of three centuries. Special attention is paid to relations of social power, which shaped successive pollution cycles, their appearance and disappearance. Too, it takes especial care to map the contours of cultural changes, such as various regulatory strategies designed to deal with pollutions.

Table of Contents

Series Foreword vii
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
I The Industrialization and Liberalization of Environments (1700–1830) 11
1 Sketches: An Ancien Régime of Pollution 17
2 New Polluting Alchemies 39
3 The Regulatory Revolution 63
II Naturalizing Pollutions in the Age of Progress (1830–1914) 87
4 The Dark Side of Progress 91
5 Expertise in the Face of Denial and Alarm 116
6 Regulating and Governing Pollution 144
III New and Massive Scales of Pollution: The Toxic Age (1914–1973) 177
7 Industrial Wars and Pollution 183
8 A High Energy-Consuming World 205
9 Mass Consumption, Mass Contamination 231
10 The Politics of Pollution 260
Epilogue: Charging Headlong into the Abyss 294
Notes 333
Index 419

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“How well do we need to understand industrial pollution and the public health sacrifices that are made by allowing it to continue before we stop it? Francois Jarrige and Thomas Le Roux broach that question in this superb history. With Contamination of the Earth  they challenge once again the Faustian bargain humanity is making with ‘progress.’”
—Mark Dowie, investigative historian and Lecturer Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley, and author of Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century
 
“Jarrige and Le Roux’s magisterial global history of pollutions delivers on its promise. Spanning time, geography, and industry, their account synthesizes a vast historical archive with a sharp focus on the political and economic factors that explain how, why, and where global environmental contamination developed.”
—Julie Sze, University of California, Davis, and author of Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger
 
“The Contamination of the Earth is an essential corrective to how pollution(s)—fittingly pluralized—have been studied age by age, case by case, sector by sector. Few have attempted such a sweeping synthesis of pollutions’ myriad drivers and consequences.”
—Rebecca Gasior Altman, writer and environmental sociologist

Editorial Reviews

Choice 2021 Outstanding Academic Title


"The Contamination of the Earth is not a balanced view of technological progress; that is not its purpose. It is a clear and relentless exposure of the forces that have converged to ravage our environment. And it should prompt scientists and citizens to ask: am I complicit in this system? Or will I try to stand against it?"
–Nature

"Scholarly rather than polemical and of interest to students of environmental and economic history."
– Kirkus Reviews

"The result [of the study] is impressive: a high level of information, extensive analyses with a wide scope, original propositions, and a new, historical picture of global pollution. The book will become a standard work in environmental history."
—Harry Lintsen, Technology & Culture

From the Publisher

2020-05-26
Wide-ranging survey of the environmental damage wrought by industrial pollution in the last few centuries.

University of Burgundy historian Jarrige and scientific researcher Le Roux write of pollutions in the plural, for there are many channels that bring toxic materials within reach. “Never have so many chemical products—the safety of which generate widespread uncertainty—been in circulation,” they write in a narrative full of tables and hard data, adding, “chemical contamination is a feature of the entire planet.” These multiple pollutants combine and evolve along “complex pathways” that have developed over the roughly three centuries since industrialization emerged and then became economically dominant. The authors add that of course pollutions have been with us before that economic formation took shape, though in the main the concept of pollution (in the singular) was “rooted in religious cosmology and its ideas about purity and impurity”; some of those ideas associated such impurity with nonbelievers, outsiders, and the poor. With the rise of industrialization, those ideas gave way to the association of pollution as an inevitable collateral cost of progress. Still, as the authors note of the global market for recycled and castoff materials, “the waste trade is just one of the many examples that show that the burden of pollution is mainly borne by the poorest people in the poorest countries on the planet.” Meanwhile, citizens of wealthy countries are awash in goods and technologies. Laws have been written in poor and wealthy countries alike to curb pollution and polluters, the authors note, often to little avail, since, “as in the past, the most polluting industries do not cease to create new methods to resist, obfuscate, or soften environmental standards or reduce opposition.” So it is that pollutions are seen through the lens of capitalist economics as mere externalities rather than a shrouded and present danger.

Scholarly rather than polemical and of interest to students of environmental and economic history.

Kirkus Reviews