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LINDA NASH
FORUM
purity and danger: historical reflections on the regulation of environmental pollutants
| FOR THOSE WHO STUDY current environmental problems, it is easy to assume that the history of those problems, however interesting, is not essential or even relevant to their solution. Yet as we debate how to respond to contemporary dilemmas, we might consider the knowledge and the vocabulary with which we conduct the argument. Debates over chemicals and their regulation are, at root, debates about the relationship between bodies and their environments. Embedded within these arguments are assumptions about the nature of both bodies and the spaces within which those bodies dwell: It is history that allows us to understand how we came to perceive health, disease, and environmental pollution in the ways that we do. So what are the contexts that gave rise to modern forms of environmental regulation in the United States? And what historical assumptions about bodies and disease do we reproduce in current discussions of regulation and chemical pollutants? |
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Two different intellectual contexts underlie twentieth-century environmental standards. The first is what we might call the germ-theory theory of the environment. In this view, the natural environment is intrinsically healthful, while the healthy body is a pure body, a body free from disease-causing agents. Nonhuman landscapes are not harmful in themselves, though they may be periodically traversed by dangerous pathogens and chemicals.1 This perspective is widely familiar today, but it is, historically speaking, a relatively recent and uneven development. It has its roots in the rise of bacteriology in the latter nineteenth century, although it reached its apotheosis only in the early 1900s as sanitarians and doctors undertook vigorous campaigns against germs, insects, and unhygienic behaviors. What preceded those developments was something quite different. In earlier periods, bodies were widely understood as porous and open to their environment. For both physicians and lay people, "health" signified not a pure body but a body that was in balance with its surroundings. Natural environments could be either healthy or unhealthy; and a given locale might be healthy for some bodies and dangerous for others, or healthy in some seasons and sickly in others. Environments seeped into and shaped human bodies; however, natural environments were not presumed to be healthful, and a healthy place was not necessarily a clean or uncontaminated landscape. Health was not a matter of keeping pathogens out of the body but of ensuring the proper interaction between a body and its surroundings.2 |
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These earlier ideas gave way among public health professionals at the turn of the last century as they came to understand the microbial sources of many major illnesses. Germ theory located the cause of disease not in the broader environment but within specific pathogens. Disease became bounded, and environments far less relevant. For a new generation of medical professionals the insights of bacteriology were nothing less than revolutionary. As Hibbert Winslow Hill, one of the leading popularizers of germ theory and the "New Public Health," wrote in 1916: "We do not fear or dread anything from our skins out. Nothing outside can hurt us until it gets into us.... Only from our skins in can anything harm us; and this is why we have turned from regarding the environment and doctoring it, to regarding ourselves and keeping ourselves diseaseless."3 |
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At the same moment that Hill was writing, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) was struggling to devise the first national water quality standards. The PHS's principal concern lay with typhoid, a disease often spread through drinking water, and the agency responded by establishing a committee in 1913 to devise the nation's first water quality standards. Surgeon General Rupert Blue invoked the language of environmental purity when he announced "the necessity for a federal standard of purity for drinking water" [emphasis added]. The need to keep pathogenic organisms out of the body necessitated keeping those same organisms out of water supplies.4 |
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