| Book Review | Environmental History, 12.4

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 12.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Culture of Flushing: A Social and Legal History of Sewage. By Jamie Benidickson. Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press, 2007. 432 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. Cloth $85.00, paper $29.95.

The Culture of Flushing: A Social and Legal History of Sewage, by Jamie Benidickson, is a welcome addition to the growing shelf of books on the historical development of urban water and sewerage systems. It concerns a troubling environmental paradox: why it is that people have been (and still are) so ready to treat the streams, rivers, and lakes that are the sources of drinking water and agricultural irrigation for millions as sinks for sewage and industrial waste. Benidickson examines this conundrum as it played itself out in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain over the course of the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. During this time all three countries underwent rapid urbanization and industrialization, dumped prodigious quantities of human and industrial waste into their water ways, and slowly, with much controversy, confusion, and litigation, developed modern water and sewerage treatment systems—systems that, tellingly, were designed to purify sewage and water, rather than prevent wastes from entering the water in the first place.

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