Technology and Culture

Written for a wide readership, La Contamination du monde presents a global history of pollution from the beginning of industrial capitalism in the eighteenth century to 1973. During this time period, the production of industrial contamination went through a succession of pollution regimes. The introduction of new materials and the intensification of manufacturing processes expanded the scope of polluting activities. Regulations to restrain the deleterious sanitary and environmental impacts of productive activities, which initially addressed local controversies, were taken over by national governments. Pollution regimes are therefore characterized by changes of scale that concerned industrial technologies, cultural changes, and regulatory strategies.

The book is divided in three parts covering successive pollution regimes. The first period, ca. 1700 to 1830, witnessed the shift from a predominantly rural, proto-industrial organic economy to workshops and small manufacturers concentrated in urban settings that relied on mineral substances developed by a new scientific chemistry. The detrimental sanitary and environmental impacts of these new production processes, especially the use of strong and aggressive (sulfuric, nitric, and hydrochloric) acids, provoked the ire of neighboring communities. Local regulations sometimes enabled the closing of noxious facilities. Starting in the first decades of the nineteenth century, however, the central state took precedence over these local arrangements and declared the national usefulness of these industries and the necessity to tolerate their inconvenience. The European wars of the late eighteenth century are important in this story, for they enticed a total mobilization of industrial production and the introduction of new manufacturing processes, while facilitating a close alliance between industrialists, the State, and scientists.

The industrial landscape that emerged in 1830 and its attending legal framework naturalized pollution as a necessary component of industrial and economic progress. Trends set up under this first pollution regime intensified between 1830 and 1914, with the densification of urban populations and the concentration of polluting activities in industrial towns, especially [End Page 902] around the iron and coal basins (the Ruhr or the Middleborough, for example). Alongside the augmented generation of urban waste, the introduction of new toxic substances and the diffusion of coal as a prime source of energy multiplied the sources and quantities of contaminating agents, which affected the Western world in particular, as it was responsible for 80 percent of the global industrial output in 1914 (p. 105). In this new political economy, pollution appeared inherent to industrialization and national prosperity. By the end of the nineteenth century, legal efforts by civic organizations and governments seeking to constrain environmental contamination were thwarted by the rising multinational corporations that imposed their own definition of what constituted a polluting substance. Alleviation of pollution rested in technical solutions, notably through the concentration and recycling of by-products from industrial processes, as well as the dilution of contaminants in waters, streams, or in the atmosphere.

A third regime was initiated at the onset of World War I and ended in the early 1970s, with the emergence of a global neo-liberal system of industrial production. Military conflicts of the twentieth century were central to that regime. They normalized pollution as one of the many sacrifices to be endured under wartime conditions. They also facilitated the introduction of complex manufacturing processes that surreptitiously and chronically poisoned ecosystems and human health through the diffusion of contaminating elements. A diversity of new petrochemical products proliferated through the mass production and consumption of manufactured goods. Acronyms such as DDT, PVC, and PCB became household names, at the same time that their sanitary and environmental consequences were, paradoxically, rendered invisible. The sources of contaminating elements had multiplied, and their dissemination was redrawn at the planetary scale, following the delocalization of western industries in emerging economies. The growth of international civic and governmental organizations such as Greenpeace in 1971 or the United Nations Environment Program in 1972 illustrates the globalization of pollution issues. The authors offer no conclusion, but an...