| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

E. Melanie DuPuis, editor. Smoke and Mirrors: The Politics and Culture of Air Pollution. New York: New York University Press. 2004. Pp. viii, 360. Cloth, $65.00, paper $22.00.
In the introduction to this book, editor E. Melanie DuPuis notes that a "growing number of studies are looking at environmental issues as a struggle over power and meaning" (p. 1). The volume, which consists of fifteen essays, examines air pollution in this manner, with DuPuis noting that a society's reaction to "smoke" (and other forms of air pollution) is a "mirror" of that society. Each of the contributing authors, about half of whom are historians, peers into that mirror for different times, places, and conflicts.	1
DuPuis points out that she embarked on this project partly as an antidote to economists and policy analysts who blindly place their faith in cost-benefit studies, risk analyses, and other tools that disguise political choices as technical calculations. Expressing frustration with those who ignore historical and social complexity, she and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Cruz, organized a conference to bring together scholars who did pay attention to such complexities. The book under review emerged from that conference.	2
The various authors succeed in dissuading readers of any simplistic notion that air pollution is a purely technical problem best left to be solved by experts. For the most part, they do so not by highlighting the weaknesses of analytical tools but by examining the broader context of particular cases. In the process, they reveal how responses to air pollution are embedded in a matrix of values, perceptions, knowledge, and power. At the very least, DuPuis suggests, those who perceive themselves as using "objective" decision-making models should become aware of this broader context and, perhaps, the limits of their tools.	3
Organizationally, the book is divided into two sections: one on the emergence of air pollution as a problem (eight chapters) and another on the construction of current air pollution policy (seven chapters). The tightest chapters are the first four, which illuminate the English response to the dense black smoke that poured out of nineteenth-century industrial centers such as Manchester. In these chapters, authors Peter Brimblecombe, Harold Platt, Stephen Mosley, and Matthew Osborn examine how different groups of people perceived, experienced, and responded to that smoke. Here, one is struck both by the complex ways in which various groups wrestled with the problem and by their failure to achieve much in the way of a systematic solution. For example, Platt demonstrates that nineteenth-century scientists understood that gases such as sulfur dioxide were as great a problem as the dense black smoke, representing an "invisible evil" that smoke abatement alone would not solve. Osborn also focuses on this invisible evil, but from another perspective: its acidic effect on land surrounding industrial centers. Both Brimblecombe and Mosley examine, among other things, the different ways in which various groups perceived the smoke, with an interesting twist being how the visual aspects of smoke got entangled with romantic perceptions of fog.	. . .

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