Joy Parr

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.

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.

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.

Because the nose is by nature "out there," its olfactory perceptors in a "relatively unprotected position," it readily registers matter borne in the air.³ Yet smell is more likely to have a phenomenology than a semiotics, to be known directly rather than mediated through words, to be present as an "unpremeditated encounter with the environment and its features." Its messages are sensations held metaphorically, in imperfect analogies, for in European languages smell has relatively few words of its own. Smell registers with the bodily drawing in of air. This "radical interiority" makes the boundaries of the body permeable so that olfactory messages may seem to invade the privatized body, to be particularly intimate, affecting as effect.⁴ Smell has a history as warning of contamination linked to practices of self-preservation, its interiority, like that of taste, historically often a ground for authoritative truth-telling. It can be recalled by place, and yet by nature it is a sensation more strongly perceived when first encountered than with the passing of time.⁵ These, ironically, are warning signs that fade even as their source persists. Their qualities and intensity being difficult to hold in memory for retrospective comparison, olfactory meanings are culturally susceptible to being remade radically.⁶ Its boundaries being as vaporous as the air that bears it toward, into, and away from sensing bodies, rarely can a smell be placed with precision. As "the sense of transitions, of thresholds and margins," the liminal material qualities of smell often, historically, have become the stuff of politics.⁷

This essay is about a place of recreation and pastoral dwelling, low lands below a high ancient shoreline: the eastern shore of Lake Huron at the base of Ontario's Bruce Peninsula. It was used by European settlers from 1852 as a commons, in fall to hunt for migrating birds and to scavenge wood, in summer to find relief at the water's edge from sweaty labors in the fields and gardens inland from the cliff. In the 1950s the Crown gathered up the rights to these lands held by scattered absentee titleholder, and the federal government proceeded to build an experimental nuclear generating station at Douglas Point. Ontario also decided to create Inverhuron Provincial Park. By the 1960s, both the park and the generator were welcomed as opportunities by both local residents and seasonal visitors. The small reactor was a show-piece of leading-edge Canadian technology, presently to be joined by two commercial-scale generating stations as the Bruce Nuclear Power Development (BNPD), a happy source of well-waged work. Inverhuron Provincial Park shared the shoreline, and became a holiday favorite for families from all over southwestern Ontario, appreciated for its fine long sand beach, its camping places and well-documented archaeological sites.⁸

Figure 1. Bruce Heavy Water Plant Site.

From Ontario Hydro.

In 1969, plans for a new installation at BNPD were announced: a plant to produce the heavy water that served as coolant and moderator in Canadian nuclear reactors. The BNPD buildings and their high intensity site lighting were visible along the shore, and the construction work and increased traffic had created a certain din. But the key impact that the heavy water plant would have on the surrounding sensory environment was olfactory: the odor of hydrogen sulphide(H₂S), an airborne by-product of the process by which ordinary water was made heavy. The human neighbors, campers and a pastoral family raising sheep and producing yarn adjacent to the site, and cottagers immediately south of the provincial park, came to know the heavy water plant by the presence of this olfactory sensation—the rotten egg smell of hydrogen sulphide released from the plant into the air of their living space.

The agency regulating the Canadian nuclear industry, then called the Atomic Energy Control Board (AECB) and later the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC), was charged to license the plant only if, by some combination of empirical measurement and theoretical modeling, its operation could be proven safe. That small releases from the plant might be a nuisance, reducing the pleasures of being in the park and along the shore and of pursing a chosen pastoral life, was not an issue for the AECB. Its statutory obligation was to consider safety, which then meant not avoiding long-term exposures to low levels of H₂S, but ensuring there would not be a catastrophic large release of the toxic waste, endangering the safe operation of the neighboring nuclear generating stations, and lives of all nearby. Nor was ambient industrial waste apparently a matter of legal resort for anyone at the time, for the builders and operators of the heavy water plant were Crown Corporations, and by that status in statute then customarily exempt from civil prosecution, including prosecutions under the relatively new Environmental Protection Act (S.O. 197, c 86).⁹

Considering the history of this industrial plant within this regulatory regime, while at the same time considering how human bodies understood the sensuous changes in their dwelling place, usefully complicates the environmental historian's task. Sensing, science, and statute linked the ways of knowing and reasons for acting, locally, provincially, and nationally, along intersecting paths through time and space. This is a narrative about risk and uncertainty on the permeable boundary between the material and the cultural. Here the evanescent olfactory, measurement dilemmas, and local cultural dispositions clouded assessments of risk. This instance suggests why the historically specific sensing body is, as much as policy and technology, a useful category of analysis in environmental history.

HISTORICALLY SPECIFIC SENSING BODIES

ROME'S CALL FOR a more sensuous environmental history is well-founded, for the sense through which information comes to the people we study constrains what they know about their surroundings and what meanings they make of that knowledge.¹⁰ For centuries in the west this epistemology was the terrain of philosophical treatises on aesthetics.¹¹ In the middle of the last century, these studies began to be historicized. Scholars of the media and communications then argued that the sensing human body had been retuned when, with the invention of print, the listening ear became less important than the reading eye. As environmental historians, we enter the field as such "grand evolutionary narratives" of the sensuous are being challenged by anthropologists.¹² Their cross-cultural work has led them to the processes of embodiment. This concept, first articulated by Marcel Mauss as technique and subsequently elaborated by Pierre Bourdieu as habitus, reveals sensory perception as the product of daily practice in time and place, and recognizes the sensing body as at once a physical receptor and a storehouse of historical and cultural knowledge.¹³ It provides a rich opportunity for environmental historians.

Readers of this journal were introduced to these challenges in 1999 by Christopher Sellers's call for "an embodied environmental history," in which human bodies would be "artifacts of time and circumstance" entangled "with a nature at once 'us' and 'other' from us." Beginning with Judith Butler's Bodies that Matter and Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain, Sellers noted how our bodies, the material instrument through which we know the world around us, draw in and work with the "shared symbols and circumstances" of the social world we inhabit.¹⁴ But Sellers also noted that the body exceeds the reach of symbolic representations. As Michael Polanyi noted decades ago, "We know more than we can tell."¹⁵ Sellers advised us to investigate and question so as to mediate the sharpness between naturalist and culturalist perspectives.¹⁶ Given the precedence of discourse and social construction in contemporary knowledge cultures, bringing nature back in to such thoroughly "named" territory may be a challenge, but it is a project which will yield environmental historians ample rewards.

Margaret Lock, an eminent McGill medical anthropologist, labeled this phenomenon—where sensing bodies are retuned individually to their shifting circumstances—as "local biologies."¹⁷ It is a useful phrase to employ in sensory history. As historian Michelle Murphy articulated more clearly, histories pass through bodies, and they do not pass through unscathed. There are "elsewheres within here," domains where the natural and the artifactual interact, instances which require a rematerialized body be reckoned with.¹⁸ The body is a product of culture but also the forming instrument with which culture is made. It matters, for example, that human bodies are usually standing upright as they attend to the landscapes that the cultural processes of building and tilling have transformed.¹⁹ Situated knowledge is a product of situated perception of material circumstances that are not reducible to culture but persist as natural, physical domains, which are "elsewhere" even as we grapple with them "in here."²⁰

SYNOPSIS OF THE NATURALIST/CULTURALIST EDGE

THREE NATURAL ELEMENTS will be considered here: the gas, H₂S, which moves through the air with specific physical properties and settles on the ground; the bodies of humans and sheep, which breathe gases; and the site, a place of seasonally variable winds by a great inland sea, backing onto steeply rising cliff. A conspicuous hybrid is the Girdler-Sulphide process through which the heavy water was made. Among the elements being variously culturally construed were the compatible uses of the site, as an industrial and pastoral workplace and as a place of recreation; the aesthetic distinction between tolerable and unsupportable odors; and the changes to be borne locally by all in trade for the well-paying, long-term employment for some in the heavy water plant. The nuclear generating stations do not figure here as contestable, for by the late 1960s they had been accorded a secure place as part of the present and future of the region.

Consider also the two kinds of risk to be appraised. First, the possible release of many hundreds of metric tons of H₂S and its kindred combustion product, sulphur dioxide (SO₂), which might cause many deaths and compromise the safe operation of the nearby nuclear reactors. Second, the long-term exposure to low levels of the gas leaking from the plant that also could compromise the health of humans and their animals. Three sources of uncertainty were present in these interactions: the sensory uncertainty in discerning the provenance and possible hazard of the rotten egg smell; the scientific and engineering uncertainty about whether the AECB models and measurements dependably described the dimensions, dispersion, and density of the plume that would follow a catastrophic release; and the public uncertainty which derived from the statutory secrecy that shielded the operations of both the federal regulator, the AECB, and the Ontario government from public scrutiny.

The Ontario province, through its ministries and agencies, owned the nuclear site and the park. The human actors in this unfolding narrative included, at the federal level, the Atomic Energy Control Board and its scientific staff; the legislators of Ontario and the public servants who worked for its electrical utility, Ontario Hydro, and for its ministries of natural resources and the environment; the permanent residents of the region who welcomed work in all parts of the nuclear site; the shepherd whose flocks grazed on its margins; and the long-time seasonal residents in the cottages along the shore, who were captured by the technological sublime of the nuclear reactors but unsettled by the odorous industrial pall of the heavy water plant.

UNCERTAINTY 1: SMELLING AIR-BORNE HYDROGEN SULPHIDE

IN THE STORY of environmental hazard on the eastern shore of Lake Huron, smell had a starring role. The first "whiff of danger" was sulphur, at first encounter a strong and readily distinguishable odor. But as an airborne industrial byproduct, hydrogen sulphide is particularly menacing. It is a hazard "with poor warning properties."²¹ At low levels, 0.13 ppm, it is perceptible to humans as an unpleasant odor like rotten eggs. Ironically, however, at higher and more noxious levels, at 100–150 ppm, this odor ceases to be perceptible. This is not a mere cultural habituation, but a daunting visceral dilemma oil field workers learn early in their careers about the "sour gas," H₂S, a common presence in their trade. At middling concentrations, H₂S kills the olfactory cells, physically extinguishing the sense of smell. An oil worker "knows" she is in grave danger when she ceases to be able to the smell the sulphur, or anything else. The next stages of the physiological and perceptual effects are more dire still. At 500 ppm, humans experience excitement, headache, dizziness, and staggering followed by unconsciousness (a consequence known in the oil fields as "knock-down"). Respiratory failure follows within five minutes to one hour.²²

Delayed and chronic effects, particularly of long-term exposure to low levels of H₂S, have been difficult to demonstrate definitively and remain contested, particularly for open air exposures, because ambient levels of the gas are more difficult to monitor than in contained work places. Because it is heavier than air, when released into the environment at ground level H₂S settles into low areas, persisting invisibly after the release seems to have been borne away by the wind. Survivors of acute exposures have presented with an array of neurological and psychiatric symptoms including memory loss and depression. The more common intermittent exposures of residents near gas emitting sites to low and intermediate concentrations (50–100 ppm) yield reports of lingering fatigue, headaches, coughs, hoarseness and irritability, effects not specific to H₂S and sometimes categorized as subjective.²³ Perhaps most insidiously, a hydrogen sulphide event is invisible to the eye, perceptible by smell only at low concentrations when its bodily effects are minimal or moot. At high concentrations an H₂S plume can be either deadly or enigmatically disabling.

Figure 2. Wind Rose Patterns for Bruce Area.

From Michael Prior, Michelle Mostrom, Robert Coppock, and Zack Florence, "Environmental Health Scoping Study at Bruce Heavy Water Plant," report prepared for the Atomic Energy Control Board, March 17, 1993, AECB Project No 3. 168, 40.

These material traits made the olfactory perception of H₂S both a source of uncertainty and a ground for suspicion. These were sensations registered in the bodies of the public which, as we shall learn, by reinforcing apprehensions of secret dealings, eroded trust in public organizations.²⁴

Most of the best hydro power sites in central and maritime Canada already had been dammed by the late 1960s. Three provincial utilities were developing nuclear alternatives. As in the United States and Europe, the Canadian engagement with the applications of nuclear reactions had begun with weaponry.²⁵ In the mid-1950s, the Canadian nuclear project parted company, technologically, with Americans and Europeans with the choice to develop the CANDU (Canada Deuterium Uranium). These were power reactors fueled by natural rather than enriched uranium, and moderated and cooled by heavy water (deuterium oxide) rather than light water.²⁶

The production of heavy water is one of many contemporary large-scale technologies to which the insights of Ulrich Beck (later elaborated by Frank Fisher) apply. Knowledge of its safe functioning could "be derived only after its construction and operation."²⁷ The Girdler-Sulphide (G-S) process to be used at BNPD had been developed and tested at the relatively small military site at Savannah River in Georgia.²⁸ The Bruce plant, however, would be four times larger than the scale proven in American installations. Its operation would be its proving ground, both the test and demonstration of its safety.

A complex project in industrial chemistry, the G-S process used copious amounts of hydrogen sulphide and fresh water circulating through flow trays in tall enrichment towers. In the presence of gaseous hydrogen sulphide (H₂S), liquid water undergoes a spontaneous exchange reaction. At low temperatures, this mixture is at equilibrium when the deuterium concentration in the water is slightly higher than in the gas. At high temperatures the reverse is true. Heavy water is made from light water by a deuterium isotope exchange reaction that exploits this difference.²⁹

The Bruce plants were sited near the nuclear stations in order to take advantage of the steam and power they would produce. All were located by the shore, for they all depended upon fresh water drawn from the lake. The radical increase in the size of the Bruce plant, by comparison with its American predecessors, proved challenging.³⁰ In 1979 the plant flared more than 2,000 metric tons of H₂S, and in the early 1980s still flared an annual average of 1,500 metric tons. By the mid-1980s emissions were successfully abated to about 500 metric tons yearly. Still, from 1987 until the plant closed in 1997, these flare discharge levels persisted at about 200 metric tons yearly.³¹

Because their emissions were blown in the wind, the heavy water plants were not "poster-child" high technologies, precisely situated in time and space, creatures of calculation, exactitudes disciplined by engineering expertise. Rather, their hydrogen sulphide emissions were a dreadful uncertainty. While their sources could be pin-pointed, their airborne presence eluded specification.³² Today there is a wind farm on the site of the Bruce generating station successfully producing power. During the time of the heavy water plant, these atmospheric characteristics of the site were troublesome rather than constructive.

Figure 3. Hydrogen Sulphide Flares and the Number of Complaints Received, 1979 1992.

From Prior et al., "Environmental Health Scoping Study at Bruce Heavy Water Plant," p. 36.

In spring and summer, when people were most likely to be outdoors, the wind rarely blew from the east so as to carry plant emissions safely out over the lake. The strongest winds in all seasons came from the northwest, over the plant toward the townships where, in 1979, 80 percent of the permanent ninety thousand area residents within a forty-eight kilometer radius lived. The air currents were strong.³³ In these circumstances, tracking the plume of H₂S emissions was a cat- and-mouse game. Jim Dalton, the estimable veteran superintendent in charge of the plant for Lummis, the transnational construction firm which built the facility, observed, "Given the weather conditions, you had no idea where the plume was going to hit ground. You can make an educated guess, and you do that by sending monitoring teams down the stream of the plume to measure it, to see where it is actually coming down. And so whenever you had a release... first thing, the monitoring teams were despatched... in complete protective gear and they had monitors.... So you could actually plot where the plume was by those results you were getting from the monitoring teams. And that was the only way you had of doing it."³⁴ The potentially deadly gas had no color and made no sound. In this place of strong and shifting air currents, it became one with the wind. Where the plume was and whether it consisted of merely annoying or potentially deadly concentrations was vexaciously uncertain.

Experts hoped that smell might tell, but it did not. In the 1990s the AECB commissioned studies to correlate gas releases with olfactory events. But through much of the history of the plant, there was relatively little association between the volumes of H₂S flared and the number of complaints from residents who, by smell, had registered the presence of the gas.

If winter winds forcefully and unpredictably plumed H₂S away from the plant, in the summer becalmed air presented a different potential problem. Then, tropical air masses from the southwest, cooled as they passed over the lake, became stable in their lower layers. Heavier than air, H₂S gas released at ground level could be held in place by the resulting temperature inversions. The most extreme of these, Pasquill stability categories (E and F), present at the Bruce site more that 20 percent of the time from May through September, would confine gas in gullies where creeks flowed through the park into the lake, in the sheltered spots campers favored and the low areas of the rough grazing lands to the east where errant sheep might wander.³⁵

Ten years after the Bruce heavy water plants began production, uncertainties about the safety of the plants in close proximity to the nuclear generating stations persisted, even among the best informed experts.³⁶

UNCERTAINTY 2: THE REGULATOR'S MEASUREMENT CONUNDRUMS

HYDROGEN SULPHIDE IS difficult for the body to know precisely by smell, but it also eludes measuring instruments, so creating a satisfactory theoretical model for the dispersing plume has proven difficult. Troubled by these emerging issues, the AECB early in 1969 convened a Heavy Water Plant Safety Advisory Committee to augment the nuclear competence of AECB staff with experts on toxicity, pollution, industrial safety, and public health from the federal and Ontario public services. The goal was to establish limits for allowable normal releases, define the range of possible accidents, and formulate operating precautions and emergency procedures. All this work was predicated on being able to record the presence of the dispersing plume.³⁷

At the Atomic Energy Control Board, the federal regulator's deliberations over this case do not appear to have placed any pre-determined policy goal above safety. But because its evidence and reasoning were inaccessible to the public, its decisions were often judged arbitrary, captive, or flawed by the citizens whose lives it influenced. Certainly these institutional conventions, as we shall see, led thoughtful citizens party to the controversy to hold fast for decades to ill-founded positions minimizing risk of a catastrophic release.³⁸ In these arising thickets of misunderstanding, the elusiveness of the plume to precise measurement provided a continuing thorn.

Within weeks, the Safety Advisory Committee concluded that the heavy water plant, its toxic material necessarily separated "from the outside world by only a single membrane," was a greater threat to public safety than the adjacent nuclear station, which had thick walls to contain high pressures and limit leaks.³⁹ The committee expressed doubt to the power utility that their chosen Bruce location would meet licensing requirements. The designers of the plant were relying on a flaring system for H₂S and its combustion product, sulphur dioxide (SO₂), based on models and calculations of "doubtful validity" for the proposed Bruce gas dispersion system. Two years later, the results of numerous attempts to produce a valid model suggested that a "maximum feasible accident" during adverse weather conditions would result in near-lethal gas concentrations up to six miles downwind. Process leaks of H₂S at ground level, in the presence of the thermal inversions common at the site, would exceed Ontario limits of .03 ppm at distances as far as three miles from the source.⁴⁰

If smell did not tell, what about the readings on the gas detectors set out along the most likely path of the plume? Within the committee, members debated the sensitivity of persons to H₂S and whether the reliance on monitors was "as adequate as individuals' own senses," a question which figured in public controversies locally through the history of the site. If doses were being measured at the boundaries of individual bodies, when those bodies had different exposure histories, what would the measurements signify?⁴¹

The place that posed the most urgent problem was Inverhuron Provincial Park, the 545 acre recreational area immediately south of the rising heavy water plant. Over 200,000 day visitors and 25,000 campers used the park in 1971. Early on the committee questioned the compatibility of plant and park as near neighbors, and over the following three years researched the issue with increasing alarm for the park was heavily wooded and accessible only by narrow twisting tracks. In an emergency, "collecting and shepherding young children who may be swimming, exploring or sleeping in the area" would be a nightmare.⁴² While local residents could shelter themselves from the passing gas cloud in their homes or vehicles, campers and visitors would have no timely access to such protection. The park, the Safety Advisory Committee concluded, would require as strenuous protection against a gas emergency as the plant itself.⁴³

The AECB continued the search for better scientific data, for a better theory to explain the data, and commissioned experiments at defense research sites hoping for telling analogies about the possible plume.⁴⁴ But fifteen years of lab work and field work left the Safety Advisory Committee with data and interpretation of ambiguous implication, with a problem which was "untunable." Before a material phenomenon which kept slipping "through the nets of proof," surrounded by mounting piles of scientific information which underscored their uncertainty, researchers were not confident as to what practical advice to offer.⁴⁵

On July 28, 1971, the Safety Advisory Committee decided to err on the side of caution. The park should be closed during the first season when hydrogen sulphide was introduced into the plant; plant production must not occur in winter, and production must begin only after emergency plans were shown to be fully operational.⁴⁶ The Bruce Heavy Water Plant, by then loaded with H₂S, began production in the fall of 1972. Soon thereafter its presence became perceptible by smell to neighboring residents. They did not respond with one voice. What people smelled, how they interpreted the smell and what its fleeting presence moved them to do depended on their location both as physical receptors of the sensation and as social beings.

UNCERTAINTY 3: THE RESORT TO INDUSTRIAL AND CULTURAL FATALISM

TO WORKERS WITH JOBS at the heavy water plant, smell was a positive sign. The plant soon became known in the county as a good place to work, in part because its odor made H₂S "a known hazard," "tangible" by comparison with the imperceptible radiation fields at the nuclear generating stations next door. Maintainers out and about the plant came to know their adversary. Smell was a warning that nearby there might be greater danger and no olfactory sensation; smell in a tight spot required immediate retreat. Employees, who all carried seven-minute air packs, worked in pairs, and performed monthly practice drills, came to think of H₂S as a risk they understood and could live with.⁴⁷

There were some memorable moments. Barry Schell, who grew up on a farm nearby, recalled a boyhood day in 1976 when he and his older brother, while hunting groundhogs along the shore, entered an H₂S plume so strong that they rushed to the truck radio expecting to learn of a major event at the site. Later Schell became a scaffold-builder at the heavy water plant. This was a skilled and creative outdoor trade which gave him great satisfaction. He worked around the flare stacks and exterior piping in the way of both H₂S leaks and plumed SO₂, yet, once flare stacks were built, he recalled never smelling the gas again. This may have been a product of physiology; (persistent occupational exposures to hydrogen sulphide have been reported to yield permanent olfactory deficits), or "industrial fatalism" (a form of denial in the absence of good access to reliable information) or both. Schell reported both that his concerns were allayed and, with some irony, that "there wasn't much news given to the general public."⁴⁸

The danger, however, was considerable. Ben Cleary, who came to the Bruce site after working with the gas in eastern petroleum refineries and the earlier Nova Scotian heavy water plants, called hydrogen sulphide "unforgiving .... 400 tons of H₂S circulating around in a unit, if that ever got free.... The Glace Bay plant got shut down in 1969, literally because it wasn't a safe plant." But the many improvements built into the Bruce facility over its history inspired his expert confidence that the workers there were employed in safe conditions.⁴⁹

Though with time the emissions were reduced to 10 percent of their initial levels, the smell remained, fleetingly pungent and thus enigmatic.⁵⁰ Representatives of the utility refeatured this uncertainty as safety, noting that "rotten egg gas" was a "natural" ingredient in the sour gas processed by petroleum refineries, a smell familiar to high school chem-lab students, and like the ammonia in old type refrigerators, "as tame as a kitten" so long as it was properly handled.⁵¹ Long-time local residents were disposed to accept these blandishments for the smell of H₂S was the smell of money. Family security, in the form of jobs, was welcome in a region for three generations characterized by out-migration. Like the inhabitants of California fish processing centers that Connie Chiang has studied, villagers "learned to turn their noses away." Or like some residents of the nineteenth century cities learned to value airborne wastes as proof of industrial prosperity.⁵² Thus the reeve of Bruce Township emphasized the imperative "financial reasons to put up with" the smell. Meanwhile, the newspaper editor in nearby Kincardine deployed his own metaphors to describe the situation: "Now that we've married the project, like a faithful wife who finds out her husband is a cad, we'll have to stick with it and make the best we can. It's too late now to start screaming, the horse is out of the barn."⁵³ Residents in nearby Tiverton grew unconcerned about the smell and, leaning into officials' most optimistic inflections, distilled the Emergency Measures Organisation's warning instructions about the possible range of gas releases into a simple maxim: "they taught us it was a safety thing ... that it's good when you smell it because we're burning off something."⁵⁴

The liminality of the smell made it a physical sensory trace readily refeatured culturally, in this case as an inevitability. This construction of the material traits of the sensuous sign worked in tandem with two other local cultural dispositions toward fatalism. Jim Dalton, the plant superintendent, who as an employee of the construction firm Lummis had experience introducing such facilities into other hinterland regions, noted the first of these, an "ethnic" trait that smoothed the way for public acceptance of the Bruce heavy water plant. The Scots and German settlers of the area, unlike cosmopolitan city protestors, were "very practical people." Eldon Roppel, a Tiverton local historian made a similar observation, "I think it was like Cape Breton and the coal mines, when you're in a deprived area, you probably have less need to complain."⁵⁵

The second was a disposition invoked by the daunting complexity and unknowable long-term implications of late twentieth century technologies, a strategic play between being and knowing that had contributed to the earlier decision to locate the first Canadian nuclear power reactor outside the large Atomic Energy of Canada Limited nuclear reserve at Chalk River in the Ontario agricultural periphery at Douglas Point.⁵⁶ As Dalton observed, "People only want to talk about things they understand. Hard to understand a heavy water plant, even harder a nuclear plant."⁵⁷

For year-round local residents, sensing the smell of rotten egg from the plant became ordinary.⁵⁸ Yet such olfactory stoicism was not unambiguously self-protecting. Maintaining a keen awareness in the public mind of the inherent liminality of the H₂S smell—that this was a routine by-product of economic development that on occasion should prompt extraordinary alarm—was key to the safety of the community. Dalton understood this well. As local residents learned the economic benefits of tolerating a chemical plant in their neighborhood, many became "comfortable" with the presence of the heavy water plant.

"As you got closer to the plant and Inverhuron," Dalton recalled, "especially in the farming community, there were concerns because anybody spraying manure, specially pig manure, on their farmlands, that would be mistaken for H₂S. So there would be a lot of phone calls coming complaining about the smell. Every one of them had to be investigated... because you didn't want them to get to the point that every time they smelled something, they thought it was manure, because the two can smell alike at times."

Dalton's safety challenge with the surrounding residents was to retain and work with the inherent ambiguity of the olfactory, to put bounds on the local cultural disposition to acquiesce, "You didn't want them to be comfortable with that smell, even though that was what was happening."⁵⁹

UNCERTAINTY 4: THE SHROUD OF STATE SECRECY

SMELL WAS AN AMBIGUOUS sensation, vaporous and thus elusive to scientific measurement in the open air, evanescent and thus easily discounted or amplified as a sensuous sign. These sources of uncertainty surrounding H₂S were complicated by contemporary conventions governing public access to information. Until the late 1980s, Canadian governments, both at the federal and provincial federal levels, used in-house scientific expertise to inform the risk assessments upon which policy decisions were based. This scientific advice was not widely circulated, even within the scholarly community. It was particularly closely held when "essential data to support a preferred policy choice" was lacking.⁶⁰ William Leiss, a close student of the problem, has argued that the resultant absence of public scrutiny "was especially useful for covering up the existence of huge uncertainties and the lack of essential data to support a preferred policy choice."⁶¹ Cognizant of the imperfections in both the engineering design of the plant and the scientific knowledge of the dispersing plume, the AECB had done all it could to forestall and constrain the charging of the heavy water plant with H₂S. But the government of Ontario and its public utility, Ontario Hydro, faced with looming shortages of electricity, succeeded in circumventing the federal regulator, and with doubts about this course of action shielded from public view, hurried the heavy water plant through construction into production.

The shroud of state secrecy hung particularly heavily over changes in public access to the beloved spaces of Inverhuron Park. There was no ambiguity in the terms of the lease approved by the provincial cabinet in November 1972 and signed July 24, 1973, transferring the park from the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources to the Ontario Hydro. The transfer occurred for one reason, to comply with the safety regulations imposed by the AECB. The ministry would operate the lands as a provincial park for 999 years subject only to limitations specified by the federal regulatory authorities. The priority of recreational use was made plain. The Ministry alone had the option to terminate the lease. Land assembly commenced for an additional park upwind from the nuclear site at MacGregor Point to accommodate overnight camping. Recreational day-use at Inverhuron Park would continue.⁶² But the terms of the lease and the land assembly were not public.⁶³

Two men with whom I spoke three decades later were certain the park could not have continued as a family camping place once the heavy water plant was operating. Ben Cleary, on the basis of years working with hydrogen sulphide in petroleum refineries and heavy water plants, was one. "It was a big controversy. People were losing that park. But in my own mind, ... I think it was better to be safe than sorry." Robert Wilson, a health physicist at the Bruce Nuclear site, and later a senior member of the Health Services Group at Ontario Hydro, with a number of his colleagues was similarly disposed. Between the fission products in the nuclear reactors and the open air were many barriers. At the heavy water plant, "no containment ... [presented] a much more serious problem."⁶⁴ But few among the Ontario public had such insider knowledge.

The Ontario government was involved at many different levels in the remaking of Inverhuron Park. The Ministry of Natural Resources owned the land; the Ministry of the Environment was charged to monitor airborne industrial wastes. Ontario Hydro owned the nuclear site, and had engaged a federal agency, AECL, to build the heavy water plant. The provincial Emergency Measures Organisation was to implement warning and evacuation plans. All these decisions, among them about title to the park, rested finally with the provincial cabinet, which, during the oil crisis of the 1970s, was focused on the need for additional nuclear generating capacity. For whatever reasons, these bodies shared imperfectly, both among themselves and with the citizenry, information about the decisions to close the park and the public safety implications of a catastrophic H₂S release. The hope may have been, as science studies scholar Sheila Jasonoff has observed in a similar case of uncertainty, to present "to the outside world" a facade of "quiet authority."⁶⁵

Aside from the acculturated knowledge through smell, the public had some sources of information about hydrogen sulphide. The daily urban newspaper most often then read in the area, the London Free Press, carried reports of air-borne H_sS releases in Ontario's "chemical valley" at Sarnia, across the river from Port Huron Michigan at the base of the lake, and of evacuations after well ruptures of sour gas in the Alberta oil fields and in the Persian Gulf.⁶⁶ Other senses filled in the blanks.

In the summer of 1972 an Emergency Measures Organisation (EMO) pamphlet had been delivered to residents within five miles of the site describing the behavior of hydrogen sulphide and the low-pitched audible warning signal they should take as a sign to take shelter in closed buildings or vehicles. When in the fall of 1972 six hundred tons of H₂S were loaded into the heavy water plant and production commenced, residents began to hear the periodic testing of these gas warning sirens. Visible signs also clued the public into the potentially dangerous situation. That fall, five new buildings, called "assembly halls" by the ministry and "poison gas shelters" by the press, were installed in the park. Visitors during the summers of 1973, 1974, and 1975 observed that these emergency facilities were staffed around the clock and saw new emergency patrolmen and more gate attendants about.⁶⁷ Cabinet members regretted these signs of grave danger but decided there was no alternative for the period when overnight camping at Inverhuron would continue, until the new park at MacGregor Point, leeward from the plant, was available for use in 1976.⁶⁸

Besides the audible and visible signs, there were smells. Midway through the winter of 1972–1973, start-up incidents made smelling of H₂S common south of the plant as cross-country skiers telemarked past the new "assembly-hall-gas-shelters" in the park. In 1973, during the first two weeks of July when the nearby campsites and cottages were full, there were daily complaints of "smellings" along the shore. The exclusion zone the AECB required be implemented around the site, which Ontario Hydro and the AECL preferred to refer as a "controlled area," by restricting further residential development within the five miles of the plant, suggested there might indeed be health issues. Owners began to consider their property values.⁶⁹

Of particular relevance here is that at the highest political levels of the provincial government, smell mattered. James Auld, the Minister of the Environment, when informed in 1973 that reductions in H₂S emissions could not be achieved for another three years, put the chairman of Ontario Hydro and his ministerial colleagues at Energy and at Natural Resources on notice that the current "occurrence of malodours" was unacceptable.⁷⁰ But the urgency of the public safety and public relations issue did not prompt full disclosure either to the public or between government agencies. Line staff in Auld's Industrial Wastes Branch, who regarded the amounts of H₂S being released as "significant," reminded their superiors in October 1973 that "to date, the public have not been made aware of the frequencies of the H₂S losses nor the overall level at which they have occurred," a particularly testy and testing silence given their effect on the users of Inverhuron Park. The supervisor in charge of park planning reported that "despite close questioning," Atomic Energy officials "simply will not and probably cannot commit themselves as to the probabilities" of a "catastrophic release of H₂S gas with the wind blowing in the direction of the park during the park operating season." Their colleagues in the provincial Ministry of the Environment could offer only "crude" if troubling analogies with releases of chlorine gas and ammonia.⁷¹

While ceding little information about the risk assessments, AECL, the utility's agent building the plant, and the provincial Emergency Measures Organisation worked together in a program to re-school inhabitants in the meanings of their bodily perceptions, for these were signs of risk out there in the open air. Smellings in themselves, officials advised, should not be taken as whiffs of danger. Were they worrisome, the EMO coordinator suggested, these might rather be referred for expert interpretation to the shift supervisor at the police station.⁷² These blandishments knitted well into local cultural and economic fatalism to minimize the threat.

Urban campers, who had come to vacation in the clean air of the shore, perceived the matter differently. Here were risks with calamitous potentialities and exceedingly small probabilities, risks first knowable, the general public were told in the daily press, by a "rotten egg" odor, which could "cause anything from the simple nuisance of bad smell to unconsciousness and death." The public relations officer for the nuclear site re-asserted that the possibility of a serious gas release was "remote," and in January 1973, the executive assistant to the minister of natural resources, surely disingenuously given the November 1972 cabinet decision, insisted that the ministry was "not considering" selling the park. Yet among visitors, the accumulating contradictions gave rise to suspicion. When in July 1973 the foreman of Inverhuron Provincial Park reassured the press that none of the releases that had registered on the noses of campers was "serious" enough to have registered on monitors in the campground, there came a tipping point.⁷³

The facade of quiet authority was crumbling. As the contradictions grew sharper between what visitors' sensing bodies could apprehend and what public bodies would disclose, the environmental crisis that the presence of the heavy water plant might bring to campers in the park was morphing into a "crisis of institutions."⁷⁴ In the presence of these apparently conflicting messages, on behalf of AECL, the federally owned operator of the plant, Donald S. MacDonald, the respected federal minister of Energy Mines and Resources, undertook not only to discount the significance of olfactory sensations, but to question the risk assessment of the federal regulator that had mandated the emergency measures. MacDonald insisted, in a letter carried both in the local and the regional urban press, that the AECB Safety Advisory Committee "greatly overstated" the area over which dangerous concentrations of hydrogen sulphide "can be expected," and overplayed the "extreme" unlikelihood "that such a situation would occur." Residents were assured by an Ontario Hydro technical supervisor that the 0.5 ppm SO₂ recorded over the first year of heavy water plant operation would "easily be surpassed most days" in the industrial cities of the province.⁷⁵ MacDonald's intervention only deepened seasonal residents' senses of suspicion and uncertainty. A Canadian Press wire service story out of Toronto based on Hydro documents two days later reported that "the measuring equipment on the site" was not good enough to register hydrogen sulphide emissions above the legal levels.⁷⁶

UNCERTAINTY 5: STATISTICAL INFERENCE AS DUPLICITY

SMELL WAS THE quotidian key to local knowledge of a modern technologically made event of low probability and high consequence. But between being aware of a "whiff of danger" and specifying the dimensions of the imminent threat lay a gap that was eluding the best specialists in the land. For citizens who were neither chemists nor statisticians, with imperfect information and a good deal to lose, the processes of inference soon seemed a sign of bad faith.

Among seasonal residents, Inverhuron Park prompted deeply informed loyalties. Fritz Knechtel, one of the several bookish offspring of a leading county furniture manufacturer, had for five decades participated in archeological investigations of the Archaic and Middle Woodlands sites at Inverhuron, occupance which dated from 1500 BC. Summer field schools run by the Royal Ontario Museum and the University of Toronto through the 1950s and 1960s had yielded fine studies of these sites, forming an exceptional foundation for the popular interpretive program park employees provided each summer.⁷⁷ As Knechtel pointed out in his many erudite letters to ministers and the press during the summer and fall after the heavy water plant began production, MacGregor Point was a poor substitute for Inverhuron. If H₂S were really the issue, why was MacGregor Point also well "within the possible smelling area" of the heavy water plant?⁷⁸

Knechtel's appraisal of the risk was different from that of the AECB. Official secrecy kept him from knowing that smell alone did not tell, that the dimensions of the possible catastrophic event were far more grave downwind at Inverhuron than upwind at MacGregor Point. And Knechtel was employing a different kind of risk appraisal, using a cultural rather than a technical rationality to weigh the tangible present values of the park against a small and distant inferential danger.⁷⁹

On the long weekend of May 24, 1973, plant managers got unlucky. Canadians still celebrate Queen Victoria's birthday on the Monday nearest the 24th as the first holiday of the summer season. Eighty percent of the campsites at Inverhuron were occupied. Amateur naturalists were out in force, for in late May migrating birds follow a flyway along the Huron shore. Many would have been in lower boggy areas where H₂S would settle seeking out the spring orchids for which the Bruce is renowned. At 2 p.m. on Monday, the accidental tripping of a circuit switch resulted in a release of a quantity of H₂S overwhelming the capacities of the gas dispersion flares at the plant.⁸⁰

June Ruddock, a bird-watcher, conservationist and, since 1934, a local cottager, was in Inverhuron Park at that hour with her weekend visitors. For the whole of their two hour park visit, as she promptly reported to the premier, the "natural environment" of the park was "changed into a chemical environment" by "noxious fumes" from the heavy water plant. It seemed an "anomalous" situation: the province that had been spending prodigiously to improve the park and at the same time urging residents to heat with electricity and buy energy hungry appliances, now apparently prepared to sacrifice the park to service the engorged energy load they had encouraged. By her account, there had never been "any hint that this odour would occur" and many assurances that the gas shelters had been erected merely "as a precaution." Like Knechtel, she was reasoning with an "expanded vocabulary of risk," facing a state agency whose secrecy and motives she was growing to suspect.⁸¹ For Ruddock and Knechtel, who were familiar with many Ontario Parks, a threat, officially defined as remote, and a mobile and transient sensation known to the body public in many places, were being used to justify encroachment on one special shared space.⁸²

On the basis of the same evanescence of the sensation and paucity of information that led local inhabitants to make their peace with the plant, the university-educated summer residents concluded that the closure of the park was unnecessary. Partly this may have been because from their physical location they rarely did smell the gas. "It was a quirky, inconsistent kind of pattern... and of course at that point we didn't even know what we were smelling."⁸³ Only northeast winds would have carried H₂S over the their cottages, and these winds were accompanied by stormy weather that made summer residents happy to be indoors.

As Frank Fisher, Sheila Jasanoff, and Brian Wynne have described, residents had grounds to be suspicious of distant decision-makers, in this case with the Crown Corporations, and made their own judgments about the risks at play.⁸⁴ Several shoreline residents grew convinced that the closure of the park was merely a way for Ontario Hydro more thriftily to manage its contingent liabilities. Or more darkly, given the Crown Corporation's privileged history as a huge "industrial machine... run a muck" with "easy access to financing, ... so little restraint, so little control" and a vanguardist "engineering management," others put the official silences and fleeting olfactory sensations together and concluded that the provincial government, in the interests of ever expanding electricity supplies, had authorized a land grab that soon would see the park paved for a parking lot, or cleared as the site for yet another generating station.⁸⁵

In addition to the liminality of the sensuous signs, and the shroud of official secrecy, there was an epistemological gap dividing parties appraising the situation at Inverhuron. The summer residents were mostly humanists and social scientists by training.⁸⁶ They were part of the educated postwar generation who had absorbed the postwar state promise of high technologies as products of engineering exactitude and scientific certainty, a promise purveyed by both the Atomic Energy Canada Limited and Ontario Hydro. As teachers, the Ruddocks and their neighbors valued and expected clear writing; as graduates of university arts faculties, they may have been unfamiliar with processes of statistical inference and the confidence-levels estimates of risk analysis. For example, Ruddock's husband, William, a professor of French at Trinity College of the University of Toronto, pointed to "the wooly and indeed wily prose of Ontario Hydro and the Atomic Energy Control Board" and demanded not "hasty and shallow" probabilistic contortions, but clear "statements by competent neutral professional engineers." Another cottager demanded the "data" that informed the directives to close the park. In support of the group, Stephen Lewis, leader of the provincial social democratic party, the New Democrats, rose in the House to condemn actions taken "allegedly in terms of public safety, although one will never know."⁸⁷ When a series of closely worded inquires through the summer of 1973 from the staff biologist for June Ruddock's allies in the Federation of Ontario Naturalists forced the Ministry of the Environment to concede that the gas levels within Inverhuron Park were not being measured in the field but determined by "calculatory methods," the suspicions of the cottagers, on their own terms, were confirmed.⁸⁸ Thirty years later, the Ruddocks' son, Frank, a Canadian diplomat, remembered with incredulity his parents' Ontario Hydro adversaries: "They knew perfectly well they had an agitated public; they knew perfectly well what they were concerned about; and they were poorly prepared and didn't answer the questions. It could lead to only one of two conclusions: they were prevaricating, or they simply were not all that competent."⁸⁹

Like citizens in many parts of western Europe and North America, the cottagers at Inverhuron were coming to question the imbalance between economic development and the environment that had characterized the postwar technological and political consensus. That summer they did what citizens around the North Atlantic were doing, they organized.

Through July and August the 250 members of the Inverhuron Committee of Concern circulated pamphlets at the park and in the nearby villages and towns detailing their grounds for opposing the changes in the park. They sold and wore T-shirts proclaiming their cause, and conducted a vigorous letter-writing campaign. They mocked Hydro and AECL as a Stalinist drunken thug, a creature of the brutish and mistaken Cold War technological imperatives.

By early August teenaged Inverhuron Park supporters had collected four thousand signatures on a petition protesting the "Hydro take-over." Though they did not save the park as a campsite, they succeeded in keeping before the local and provincial press their doubts about the utility's evidence and motives for closing the park, and their alternative explanation, that there was no catastrophic risk, only a strategic opportunity to annex the park into the nuclear site.⁹⁰

UNCERTAINTY 6: THE PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF H₂S EXPOSURES

BY THE 1980s, Inverhuron Park, closed for a decade, was gradually slipping "from the public's view and mind"; the regular testing of the emergency warning sirens had become ordinary features of the sensory environment around Inverhuron.⁹¹ But leaks of H₂S at ground level and streams of SO₂ from the flawed gas dispersion system, though diminishing, continued. These chronic trace exposures introduced a new source of uncertainty, for as Allan Mazur has noted, it remains difficult "to confidently distinguish real hazards of low-level toxic exposures from false alarms."⁹²

Through the 1970s, the members of the public most directly affected bodily by the gas emissions from the heavy water plant disentangled "nature at one 'us' and 'other' from us" differently from their neighbors and the park protestors.⁹³ Eugene Bourgeois and his wife Ann were newcomers, university-educated people who arrived in Bruce County as permanent residents in 1974. They were "back-to-the-landers" who established a business, Philosopher's Wool, hoping to pursue a "traditional, simple, organic" existence, "not quite subsistence but minimalist." Unlike their neighbors, the Bourgeois's disposition toward the gas threat was not so much comfortable or cynical as cognizant. They settled on grazing lands adjacent to both the Bruce Nuclear Power Development site and Inverhuron Park.

Figure 4. "Park, What *@# Park?"

Kincardine News, June 13, 1973.

A cartoon in a local newspaper mocked Ontario Hydro and federal agency AECL as a brutish, drunken thug.

The proximity to the nuclear reactors did not unsettle them. Ann's father, a University of Cambridge physicist who had worked at the National Research Council during the development stages of the CANDU, assured his daughter and her husband that "there was really nothing to worry about." Neither did their experience with H₂S in the 1970s start-up phase of the heavy water plant trouble them. Eugene had grown up in a city of meat packers and tire manufacturers. He didn't like the smell of H₂S, but regarded it as "a nuisance that occurred sporadically... just one of the byproducts of living here." They set about to build themselves a safe place, elevating the first floor of their house above the reach of ground-level gas releases.⁹⁴ But both ground-level H₂S releases, and its combustion product, the SO₂ flared from the gas dispersion system of the plant, did intervene in the lives of the family at Philosopher's Wool and their flocks. In May of 1985, Eugene Bourgeois was overcome in his fields by nausea and a blinding headache. He smelled nothing, but vividly recalled sensing the gas by a metallic taste in his mouth. In the succeeding months he suffered from symptoms his physicians diagnosed as a central nervous system deficit. Thereafter the meaning of "smelling the gas" changed for him, from a nuisance to "something dangerous," a dreadful indwelling bodily effect. He became fearful of tending his fields and flocks and hired students to help with his work. Twice more, in April 1988 and July 1990, he was overcome in his fields.⁹⁵

Figure 5. Model of Exposure Paths at Bourgeois Farm.

From Prior et al., "Environmental Health Scoping Study at Bruce Heavy Water Plant," 33.

The health of his flocks too seemed to change. At his farm, through the period 1985 to 1993, lambs suffered a neonatal mortality rate of between 12 percent and 19.5 percent, compared to the Ontario average of 4 percent, an incidence which placed his flock in the top two to four percentile in a provincewide study. Too many of his lambs were born dead, or when born alive failed to nurse and on autopsy were found to have died of malnutrition.⁹⁶ A University of Alberta professor of pharmacology who had published on H₂S, suggested that the death of the young lambs might have been an olfactory effect, for nursing animals are dependent upon smell to find the teat and apparently hungry lambs at Philosopher's Wool would not seek out a nipple placed directly in front of them.⁹⁷

Only after a 1994 Ontario Ministry of the Environment and Energy study of phytotoxicity in the vegetation on his land showed that the heavy water plant was responsible for "a minor but measurable increase in sulphur levels," did the family's trouble abate. Plant managers henceforth took care not to flare when the gas might blow over or be trapped by thermal inversions on their land. Workers at the plant, on their own initiative, began to call the Bourgeois farm to warn of impending releases. Thereafter, lambing returned to normal on the farm and Bourgeoises ceased to smell the gas. Revised 1990 AECB siting guidelines for heavy water plants, responding to the Inverhuron instance, specified that villages, recreational areas, particularly camping facilities, and topography which would channel a gas release and limit dispersion be avoided when locating future plants.⁹⁸ In fact the two Bruce Heavy Water plants had built up such large inventories before their 1997 closing that no further production was required.

CONCLUSION

OFTEN, THEN, THERE is more than meets the eye in environmental histories. Not only will displacing the visual as the primary conduit for environmental knowledge multiply how much we can know about the material and cultural world, this broader embrace of the sensuous offers the opportunity to know differently. In a more sensuous and embodied environmental history, the senses become recognizable, qualitatively distinguishable and synergistically companionable, the body both the archive and the instrument tuned to these encounters.

In the story of the Bruce Heavy Water Plant and Inverhuron Park, smell was key, its most developed quality in this instance, uncertainty, a trait of its material form interpreted variously culturally as safety and duplicity. Its evanescent characteristics—in the absence of precise scientific measurement and interpretation—amplified doubt, corroded facades of quiet authority, and discounted the fables of political convenience crafted to cover over flawed assessments of risk. This is a narrative in which both smell and the unresolvable epistemological stance "smells like?" were forcefully at work. The visceral and evanescent presence of the olfactory were key to how the material and the cultural met. The places where they met, these technologies, these private and public bodies and the livelihoods and landscapes they shared, were defined spatially and topographically within a sensorium which privileged smell. The sensorium, the way the senses are arranged and mutually infuse, here is plainly at once an analytical tool and a character at play in historical events, an element with particular force out in the open air of the history of environments.

Joy Parr is Canada Reseach Chair in Technology, Culture and Risk in the faculty of information and media studies at the University of Western Ontario in London Ontario. The work is part of a larger study called Sensing Changes: Bodies, Technologies, Livelihoods, Landscapes.

NOTES

I am grateful to Laurel McDowell, Gerald Killan, and Linda Ivey for comments on earlier drafts, and to environmental historians at Carleton University, Ottowa, for their critique of the paper in May 2005.

^1. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (New York: Praeger, 1966).

^2. Adam Rome, "From the Editor," Environmental History 9 (April 2004): 203.

^3. Fabriziomaria Gobba, "Occupational Exposures to Chemicals and Sensory Organs: A Neglected Field of Study," Neurotoxicology 24 (August 2003): 678.

^4. Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 6; Paul Rodaway, Sensuous Geographies (New York: Routledge, 1994), 70; Constance Classen, et al., Aroma, the Cultural History of Smell (New York: Routledge, 1994), 3, 5; H. T. Lawless and T. Engen, "Associations to Odors: Inference, Mnenonics and Verbal Labelling," Journal of Experimental Psychology 3 ( January 1977): 52–59; Lisa M. Mitchell and Alberto Cambrosio, "The Invisible Topography of Power: Electromagneic Fields, Bodies and the Environment," Social Studies of Science 27 (April 1997): 226; and John Urry, "Sensing the City," in The Tourist City, ed. Dennis R. Judd and Susan Fainstein (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 81.

^5. Alain Corbin, Time, Desire and Horror: Towards a History of the Senses (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press, 1995), 191; Fernando Coronil, "Smelling Like a Market," American Historical Review 106 (February 2001): 119–29; Joy Parr, "Local Water Diversely Known: Walkerton 2000 and After," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (23,2 2005): 2; Connie Y. Chiang, "Monterey-by-the-Smell: Odors and Social Conflict on the California Coastline," Pacific Historical Review 73 (May 2004): 184; and Mark S. R. Jenner,"Civilisation and Deodorisation? Smell in Early Modern English Culture," in Civil Histories, ed. Peter Burke, Brian Harrison, and Paul Slack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 138.

^6. Corbin, Foul and Fragrant 7; J. Douglas Porteus, "Smellscape," Progress in Geography 9 (September 1985): 358–59; Mark M. Smith, "Making Sense of Social History," Journal of Social History 37 (Fall 2003): 165–86; Classen, Aroma, 57, 170–71; and Jenner, "Civilisation and Deodorisation," 133.

^7. Corbin, Time, Desire and Horror, 182; Classen, Aroma 8; Chiang, "Monterey," 185.

^8. Gerald Killan, Protected Places: A History of Ontario's Provincial Parks System (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1995), 102, 124.

^9. For a history of prosecutions under the act, see Dianne Saxe, "Fines Go Up Dramatically in Environmental Cases," Canadian Environmental Law Reports 3 (1989): 104.

^10. Though as a distinguished pioneer in the field has argued, this is no easy problem to disentangle historically. Alain Corbin, "A History and Anthropology of the Senses," in Time, Desire and Horror, 184–85.

^11. See, for example, David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, vol. 1, book 1, Of the Understanding, part 1 (1739, reprint; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973); and Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason (1781, reprint; New York: Modern Library, 1958), part 1.

^12. Walter J. Ong, "The Shifting Sensorium," in The Presence of the Word (New Haven: Yale 1967), 1–9; Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962); Rodaway, Sensuous Geographies; Douglas Porteous, Landscapes of the Mind: Worlds of Sense and Metaphor (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990); Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter, Medicine and the Five Senses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Jenner, "Civilisation and Deodorisation?, 143; David Howes, ed., Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1991); Constance Classen, Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and Across Cultures (London and New York: Routledge, 1993); and Paul Stoller Sensuous Scholarship (Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997).

^13. Michael Jackson, "Knowledge of the Body," Man 18 (June 1983): 327–45; Margaret Lock, "Cultivating the Body: Anthropology and the Epistemologies of Bodily Practice and Knowledge," Annual Review of Anthropology 22 (1990): 133–55; Thomas Csordas, "Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology," Ethos 18 ( March 1990): 5–47; Thomas Csordas, "Somatic Modes of Attention," Cultural Anthropology 8 (May 1993): 135–56; Marcel Mauss, "Techniques of the Body," Economy and Society 2 (1935): 60–80, more readily accessible as Marcel Mauss, "The Notion of Body Techniques," in his Sociology and Psychology (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1979), 97–105; Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984); Joy Parr, "Notes for a More Sensuous History of Twentieth Century Canada: The Timely, The Tacit and the Material Body," Canadian Historical Review 82 (December 2001): 720–45.

^14. Christopher Sellers, "Thoreau's Body: Towards an Embodied Environmental History," Environmental History 4 (October 1999): 486; Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), and Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Sellers, "Thoreau's Body," 501, 498.

^15. Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday Anchor, 1967), 4.

^16. Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); Sellers, "Thoreau's Body," 501.

^17. Nancy Scheper-Hugher and Margaret M. Lock, "The Mindful Body: a Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology," Medical Anthropology Quarterly 1 (March 1987): 6–41; see also Margaret Lock, Encounters with Aging: Menopause in Japan and North America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995); Maurice Merleau-Ponty situates this process in his Phenomenology of Perception (1945, reprint; London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1962). Karl Marx called "the forming of the five senses ... a labour of the entire of the history of the world down to the present" in "Private Property and Communism," The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. D. J. Struick (New York: International Publishers, 1972), 133–46, quote on 141. A recent study of these relationships is Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment (London: Routledge, 2000).

^18. Michelle Murphy, "The 'Elsewhere within Here' and Environmental Illness; or, How to Build Yourself a Body in a Safe Space," Configurations 8 (January 2000): 96–97. Murphy builds on the work of Trinh T. Min-ha Woman, Native, Other (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); and Donna Haraway, "Promises of Monsters: a Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others," in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 295.

^19. Thomas Csordas, "Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology," Ethos 18 (March 1990): 5–47, reprinted in his Body/Meaning/Healing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 62.

^20. Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism as a Site of Discourse on the Privilege of Partial Perspective," Feminist Studies 14 (Autumn 1988): 575–99; Sellers, "Thoreau's Body," 492; Michael Thompson, "The Management of Hazardous Wastes and the Hazards of Wasteful Management," in Dirty Words: Writings on the History and Culture of Pollution, ed. Hannah Bradby (London: Earthscan, 1990), 122.

^21. Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety, Hydrogen Sulphide (Hamilton Ontario: The Centre, 1985), 13. This document is in the Chemical Hazard Summary Series in microform, Toronto: Micromedia, 1994 microlog: 87-00815.

^22. Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety, Hydrogen Sulphide, 4; Rhoderic J. Reiffenstein, W. C. Hulbert, and S. H. Roth, "Effects of Hydrogen Sulphide (H₂S) on Humans and Animals," Annual Reviews of Pharmacology and Toxicology 32 (1992): 111.

^23. Paskievici and Zikovsky, "Public Health Risks" 37–39; Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety, Hydrogen Sulphide, 4–6, 13; Reiffenstein, "Effects of Hydrogen Sulphide" 112–13; on somatic effects in the Alberta sour gas fields, see Andrew Nikiforuk, Saboteurs: Wiebo Ludwig's War Against Big Oil (Toronto: Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 2002).

^24. On a similar scenario of eroding trust see Sheila Jasanoff, "Civilisation and Madness: the great BSE Scare of 1996," Public Understanding of Science 6 (July 1997): 221–32.

^25. The Manhattan project had a Montreal branch. A plant began to produce heavy water, deuterium oxide, at Trail in British Columbia in 1943. The first nuclear reactor outside the United States, a one-watt experimental pile called the ZEEP (Zero Energy Experimental Pile), went critical in September 1945, joined at the Chalk River nuclear site, 130 miles northwest of the nation's capital on the Ottawa River, in 1947 by the NRX (National Research Experimental), the pilot reactor that made the way for the Canadian transition from the production of isotopes for military and medical purposes to the production of power. Robert Bothwell, Nucleus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), chs. 1, 2, and 3; Per Dahl, Heavy Water and the Wartime Race for Nuclear Energy (Bristol and Philadelphia: Institute of Physics Publications, 1999), 238–46, 284–85.

^26. Bothwell, Nucleus 197–211; Robin Cowan, "Nuclear Power: A Study in Technological Lock-in," Journal of Economic History 50 (September 1990): 545–47. Heavy water, deuterium oxide, occurs naturally at a ratio of one part to seven thousand in ordinary water (H₂O). It contains two deuterium rather than two hydrogen atoms and is twice as heavy. In a nuclear reaction, heavy water attracts fewer neutrons than light water, and thus as a moderator will sustain a chain reaction with natural uranium, an element which during fission releases fewer neutrons than enriched uranium. Whereas builders of light water reactors used abundant ordinary water and needed supplies of expensive enriched uranium, builders of heavy water reactors could use natural uranium, which was abundant in Canada, but needed sources of expensive heavy water.
Heavy water for the first seven Canadian reactors, including the one at Douglas Point, came from Savannah River, Georgia, through an agreement with the American Atomic Energy Commission. In the 1960s, with the U.S. capacity to produce heavy water reduced and an Ontario Hydro decision in place to expand nuclear generating capacity aggressively, Atomic Energy Canada Limited (AECL), the federal agency in charge of the CANDU program, contracted with two private firms to build heavy water plants. Both were slow to come on line. Thus with some urgency, in 1969 AECL sought approval to build a heavy water plant at the Douglas Point nuclear site, where the existing small reactor presently was to be joined by two more of commercial scale. Through the 1970s, as the OPEC crisis drove up costs at fossil fueled power plants, the acute shortage of heavy water constrained the start-up schedules for new nuclear generating stations. Consistent with Canadian federal government economic development priorities, both were located in struggling coal-mining and steel-making communities in Nova Scotia. One of these at Glace Bay, designed to use sea water, failed utterly. The other, built by Lummis Canada, a subsidiary of the designer of Savannah River, until 1974 was producing at half capacity. In 1972, with Canadian heavy water production facilities still prospective, heavy water had to be begged, borrowed, and bought from Argentina, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Russia, and the United States. Subsequently the heavy water to commission new units was transferred from the research and demonstration reactors, which were shut-down on rotation until the heavy water supply crisis could be resolved. H. K. Rae, Canada Enters the Nuclear Age (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997), 334, 337, 339; the local press reported that the initial loading alone of the eight reactors under construction and planned for the Bruce site through the 1970s and early 1980s would require 6,400 tons of heavy water. Kincardine News, January 19, 1972, March, 8, 1972, March 29, 1972, April 25, 1973, July 19, 1974, and September 18, 1974; London Free Press, March 2, 1972, March 6, 1972, March 29, 1972, August 11, 1973, and January 18, 1974.

^27. Here the insights of Ulrich Beck and Frank Fisher apply. See Ulrich Beck, Ecological Enlightenment: Essays on the Politics of the Risk Society (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities International Press, 1995), 104–05; and Frank Fisher, Citizens, Experts and the Environment: The Politics of Local Knowledge (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 54.

^28. Wladimir Paskievici and L. Zikovsky, "Public Health Risks Associated with the CANDU Nuclear Fuel Cycle: Non-radiological Risks" (Ottawa: Atomic Energy Control Board, Sept 1982), 70, available on microfiche, Toronto: Micromedia, 1994 microlog 85–02818.

^29. Rae, "Heavy Water," 334–35; "Bruce Heavy Water Plant, a short description," 2. A G–S process tower contains many sieve trays, with a cold section in the top half and a hot section below. Feed water, in the Bruce case water from Lake Huron, entered from the top and passed over a series of plates. At each pass through a tray in the cold section, deuterium was exchanged from the gas to the water, so that the water picked up more deuterium as it moved down the tower. At the bottom of the cold section, some enriched water was withdrawn to be further enriched in another tower. The remainder passed into the hot section where deuterium was stripped from the water, providing enriched gas to feed the cold section. The depleted water was drawn from the bottom of the tower, passed through H₂S strippers and returned to the lake. The enriched gas passed from the top of the tower on to a second stage to be processed again. Excess H₂S was vented directly into the atmosphere from the top of the cold tower.

^30. Scales formed blocking flow through the trays; gas moving at higher velocities in the towers corroded the carbon steel portions of plant pipes particularly at the bends, causing unplanned ground level releases of H₂S through pin-hole leaks. Rae, "Heavy Water," 339–45; Author interview with Jim Dalton, Kincardine, Ontario, November 3, 2001, 1–2, 4–5, 8, 22. When this research project is complete, the interview transcripts will be deposited in the Bruce County Archives, Southampton, and in the archives of the University of Western Ontario, London. Dalton was Lummis project head for the Bruce Heavy Water Plant.

^31. AECB staff annual assessment of Bruce Heavy Water Plant, 1997 (Ottawa: AECB, 1998) in microform, Toronto: Micromedia 1999 micro log 99-07311; Michael Prior, et al., Environmental Health Scoping Study at Bruce Heavy Water Plant, AECB Project 3.168.1 (Ottawa: AECB, Oct 1995), 35–36; for H₂S emissions for the 1990s, AECB staff annual assessment of the Bruce Heavy Water Plant, 1996 4 (Ottawa: AECB, 1997) in microform, Toronto: Micromedia, 1998 micro log 98-00944.

^32. Porteous, "Smellscape," 358; Rodaway, Sensuous Geographies, 68.

^33. Mean wind speed was 20 km/hour or greater from October through January; Prior, et al., Environmental Scoping Study, 36, 40; Paskievici and Zikovsky, "Public Health Risks," 73.

^34. Dalton interview, 15.

^35. Paskievici and Zikovsky, "Public Health Risks" 73, 77; National Archive of Canada (NAC) Record Group (RG) 29 7 1106-14-3 (2); Bruce Heavy Water Plant Safety Advisory Committee (BHWPSAC) "An Evaluation of the Impact of the Plan on Health and Safety of the Surrounding Area," October 1970, 7.

^36. In 1982, the number one recommendation by scientists charged to examine non-radiological public health risks associated with the full CANDU nuclear fuel cycle was the "establishment of good theoretical plume rise formulas for (heavy water plant gaseous emission in) unstable weather classes." Paskievici and Zikovsky, "Public Health Risks," 99.

^37. The board was wary of pressure from AECL and Ontario Hydro to license the Bruce heavy water plant speedily. Board members knew from the experience with leaks, accidents, and "knock-downs" that heavy water plants at commercial scale were hazardous to people "within the range of influence" of the plant; NAC RG 29 12 1106-14-3; Minutes of the first meeting of the Heavy Water Plant Safety Advisory Committee (HWPSAC) March 19 1969, 1, 2, 7.

^38. Perhaps not surprisingly, given their formation in the universities and public services of the Commonwealth, "the cultural characteristics of caution, empiricism and restraint" that Jasanoff found "imprinted on the provision of scientific advice bearing on health, safety and environmental risks" in Britain are apparent in the work of the Board. Jasanoff, "Civilisation and Madness," 228.

^39. Between the AECB and Ontario Hydro, the most thorny issue, never resolved to the satisfaction of some experts on the advisory committee, was the relationship between safety analysis and the design of the plant. The board would have preferred the Bruce facility be re-engineered on the basis of the daunting earlier Canadian experience. AECL emphasized that adopting an existing design and proceeding rapidly with construction was the only way to meet the "urgent need for heavy water," which meant, in effect, as Ulrich Beck has observed, that "the open air of daily life" would constitute the laboratory in which "the properties, safety and long-term effects" of the technology would be studied. NAC RG 29 12 1106-14-3; F. C. Boyd to J. F. Foster, May 8, 1969, and J. F. Foster to F. C. Boyd, August 8, 1969; Fisher, Citizens, Experts and the Environment, 54; Beck, Ecological Enlightenment, 104–05.

^40. NAC RG 29 12 1106-14-3, 1 and 12, attachments to J. S. Foster, AECL to F. C. Boyd, HWPSAC, July 8, 1969, note 1 and note 3, June 9, 1969; minutes of HWPSAC private meeting, April 30, 1969; NAC RG 29 7 1106-14-3 (2); Report of the BHWPSAC, "An Evaluation of the Impact," October 8, 1970, 8; BHWPSAC, Final Report, Oct 1971, 4, 5.

^41. NAC RG 29 12 1106-14-3 1, HWSAC minutes of October 1, 1969; Murphy, "The 'Elsewhere within Here,'" 101; Mitchell and Cambrosio, "The Invisible Topography of Power," 228, 239; and Allan Mazur Hazardous Inquiry: The Rashomon Effect at Love Canal (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 58, 205, 230.

^42. NAC RG 29 12 1106-14-3 1; A. K. DasGupta to R. M. Duncan, Secretary of the HWPSAC, July 24, 1969.

^43. NAC RG 29 7 1106-14-3 (2); Report of the BHWPSAC, "An Evaluation of the Impact," 7, 11, and unpaginated summary. DasGupta was one of three signatories to this report. NAC RG 29 7 1106-14-3 2; A. K. DasGupta to Dr. A. H. Booth, Assistant Director, Environmental Health, Department of Health and Welfare, April 19, 1971.

^44. One commissioned research group modeled detonable and flammable gas clouds in the event of catastrophic failures in H₂S storage, and then refined this model for forty-three accidental release scenarios at the Bruce plant. Another, that included members of the Defense Research Establishment at Suffield, Alberta, conducted experimental tests on the detonation of H₂S in the open air and of its flame acceleration and detonation in confined environments. A. J. Saber, et al., Investigation of the Explosion Hazards of Hydrogen Sulphide, Phase I (Ottawa: AECB, 1986); Toronto: Micromedia, 1994, microlog 86-05414 1,3,4,7; I. O. Moen, Investigation of the Explosion Hazards of Hydrogen Sulphide, Phase II (Ottawa: AECB, 1986); Toronto: Micromedia, 1994 microlog 88-06131 1, 2, 6.

^45. On dilemmas, see Allan Mazur, True Warnings and False Alarms (Washington, D.C.: Resources for the Future, 2004): 4–5, 52; Joel Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Histo