Joy Parr

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to Enviromental History online. About 442 words from this article are provided below; about 15194 words remain.

If you are a individual subscriber to Environmental History, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a subscriber to the Environmental History, you can:: • get subscription information here.
• Purchase this article in PDF form for $10.00.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of Environmental History (8.1-present).
Instititutions can:: • get subscription information here to receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

Joy Parr | Smells Like?: Sources of Uncertainty in the History of the Great Lakes Environment | Environmental History, 11.2 | The History Cooperative

smells like?: sources of UNCERTAINTY IN THE HISTORY OF THE GREAT LAKES ENVIRONMENT

ABSTRACT

Although environmental historians have depended most often on visual evidence, our work and the knowledge of those we study relies upon full-body contact with our surroundings. Our senses carry qualitatively different environmental information. Smells are evanescent. In the safety considerations surrounding a large chemical plant on the Lake Huron shore, transient "whiffs of danger" complicated the regulatory, statutory, and scientific sources of uncertainty. This study of hydrogen sulphide emissions shows how sensory perception is contextually tuned and constrained, and by extension how sensing human bodies are historically specific.

CONSIDER THE DIFFERENCE between an "eyesore" and a "whiff of danger," both culturally informed judgments about "matter out of place."¹ Place yourself on a street corner on a bright and breezy spring day in a student neighborhood. The eyesore is the solid and settled line of rubbish at the curbside, the various detritus of a winter's habitation, most conspicuously piles of upholstered furniture befouled by undergraduate immoderation. Then a whiff of something comes to you as you pass into the open space at the end of a lane. Of what it is, you are uncertain, perhaps merely eggs rotting in one of the trash bags. The smell is also like a kitchen familiar, the uncombusted natural gas present in the moment before the pilot light ignites.	1
My guess is that you would barely pause to consider either of these "matters" your body has registered and, instead, proceed home. Body and matter, both are historically specific and susceptible to scrutiny. You know that the eyesore will vanish on a predictable schedule, on that certain spring day when municipal employees come with the right number of trucks to carry away the tangible debris. Thanks be to them. As for the smell, it vanishes as soon as you move on, the fleeting scent having offered no certain reason to linger and raise the alarm.	2
Adam Rome, the previous editor of this journal, recently urged historians to pay greater attention the senses in their studies of the environment.² Here I follow his cue in a study of one sense—smell—and pursue the meanings that are made of an olfactory sensation as bodies and matter meet, as the traits of the physiology by which we register sensations summon the sensuous histories our bodies have stored. In this case, physiological and technological histories create qualitatively similar information. They generate uncertainty. The environmental narrative is driven by uncertainty, a story which would have unfolded differently, I contend, had it been sensed principally through the eye or the ear.	. . .

There are about 15194 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.