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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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Other highlights in this collection include Peter Thorsheim's retelling of the December 1952 London fog episode; Roger Raufer's perspective on cultural differences between developing and developed worlds, and between various stakeholders that plague the discourse over pollution-control policy; and DuPuis's analysis of the contradictions inherent in government-sanctioned trading of emission rights (to reduce acid rain, for example) even as it insists that the right to trade does not imply a property right to pollute. While helping develop EPA's emissions trading policy in the early 1980s, I quickly learned that the ethical and philosophical implications of the implied "right to pollute" were major barriers to environmentalists' acceptance of that policy. But as DuPuis notes, emissions trading is less controversial today (p. 238). Environmentalists, recognizing that such trading minimizes control costs, making additional controls more palatable to the body politic, increasingly have chosen pragmatism over principle. Emissions trading, now enshrined in the Kyoto Protocol and in competing Democratic and Republican bills to further control U.S. emissions, is an integral part of today's national and international air pollution control policy landscape. |
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As in every collection, not all essays shine equally brightly. Frank Uekotter argues that U.S. and German failures to control automobile exhaust prior to 1945 proves the merits of the precautionary principle. But, as the ever-perceptive Joel Tarr warns in his Afterword, a writer should guard against projecting the "values and scientific and medical knowledge of the writer's own time" on to his or her material (p. 340). Moreover, absent any discussion of the social, cultural, and economic context into which the automobile was introduced, the reader is left perplexed as to why this obviously foul contraption, with its smoke, odor, carbon monoxide, lead and dust, was even tolerated in the first place, let alone why it was the favored mode of personal transportation by most people who could afford it. Was it because, as Tarr has shown, it displaced another powerful environmental threat, the horse-drawn vehicle, or was it because of the perceived benefits of automobility (pp. 206-207)? Uekotter's embrace of the precautionary principle might have been more cautious had he more carefully read Jill Harrison's piece on pesticides in California's Central Valley, which notes that restrictions on persistent organochlorine pesticides (for example, DDT)—an outcome that many claim is compelled by the precautionary principle—led, perversely, to greater use of less persistent but more toxic pesticides (p. 296). |
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Sudhir Chella Rajan's chapter on "Automobile Pollution Control Strategies in California" is marred by the apparent inability to grasp that in democratic systems, legislatures—and their surrogates, the regulators—would rather regulate the few (automobile companies) no matter how rich, than the many (the millions of automobile owners), and wealth translates into power only to the extent that it can help garnish votes. This explains why it is manufacturers that are charged with ensuring compliance with new tailpipe standards, and why inspection and maintenance programs inconveniencing millions were instituted only reluctantly. |
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In "Clearing the Air and Breathing Freely," Phil Brown and coauthors commend the efforts of environmental justice activists in keeping the focus on outdoor air pollution to mitigate asthma in poor urban areas. But, as the authors themselves observe, outdoor air quality "has improved over time, while asthma rates have risen" (p. 271). Moreover, most people spend less than 10 percent of their time outdoors (Raufer, p. 309). This chapter should have been titled "Clearing the Air but Not Breathing Freely." Unwittingly, it validates Tarr's concern that this book's social constructionist approach to air pollution might, by ignoring scientific knowledge, create blind spots for policy makers (p. 337). |
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Nevertheless, despite a few flaws, this book is well worth reading. It provides an interesting and, for the most part, informed perspective on air pollution in various settings around the world at various times. |
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Indur M. Goklany is an assistant director of science and technology policy at the Department of the Interior. He is the author of Clearing the Air (Cato Institute, 1999) and The Precautionary Principle (Cato Institute, 2001). |
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