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Book Review
| Smoke and Mirrors: The Politics and Culture of Air Pollution. Edited by E. Melanie DuPuis. New York: New York University Press, 2004. viii + 360 pp. Notes, references, index. $65 hard cover, $22 paper.
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| Melanie DuPuis's provocative stage-setting "Introduction" to this engaging collection of fifteen essays on air pollution over the past 150 years rejects the economic-deterministic interpretation of the "environmental Kuznets curve"—that at a specific level of income (or wealth) societies automatically discover that air pollution is a problem before proceeding to control it. Instead, she notes, society's perception of, and solutions to, the problem of (smoke) pollution mirrors society's social and cultural relationships and interactions—hence the collection's intriguing title (pp. 2-3). |
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Several essays in this collection—Peter Brimblecombe's overview of urban smoke pollution in Victorian England and its effects on language, literature, art, and architecture; Harold Platt and Stephen Moseley's complementary articles on the halting progress toward the Smokeless City in Manchester; Joshua Dunsby's account of the collision between the health-seeker vision of a therapeutic Los Angeles and its postwar smog-laden reality; and Alexander Farrell's brief on institutional, political, and economic trends shaping Spain's air pollution policy since the 1950s—vindicate the premise implicit in the book's title, but they also show that wealth, technological change, and knowledge are critical to shaping the social, cultural, and social context in which a society views, and acts on, pollution. Dunsby, for instance, quoting Arie Haagen-Smit, the Caltech scientist who elucidated the nature and origin of Los Angeles's photochemical smog, notes that "progress" was once measured by the number of smokestacks, but by the 1950s it was measured by the number of control devices on rooftops, a testament to advances in society's "standard of living and social consciousness" (p. 193). This evolution in society's collective view of smoke—from being perceived as a solution to poverty and want to being perceived as a problem for health and welfare—is consistent with the "environmental transition" hypothesis that I have written about in Clearing the Air. |
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