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Book Review
| The Culture of Flushing: A Social and Legal History of Sewage. By Jamie Benidickson. Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press, 2007. 432 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. Cloth $85.00, paper $29.95.
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| The Culture of Flushing: A Social and Legal History of Sewage, by Jamie Benidickson, is a welcome addition to the growing shelf of books on the historical development of urban water and sewerage systems. It concerns a troubling environmental paradox: why it is that people have been (and still are) so ready to treat the streams, rivers, and lakes that are the sources of drinking water and agricultural irrigation for millions as sinks for sewage and industrial waste. Benidickson examines this conundrum as it played itself out in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain over the course of the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. During this time all three countries underwent rapid urbanization and industrialization, dumped prodigious quantities of human and industrial waste into their water ways, and slowly, with much controversy, confusion, and litigation, developed modern water and sewerage treatment systems—systems that, tellingly, were designed to purify sewage and water, rather than prevent wastes from entering the water in the first place. |
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Rather than taking a strictly chronological approach to this complicated subject, Benidickson takes a thematic approach, exploring, chapter by chapter, specific issues that affected all three countries over the time period. His story is grim. His topics include the mostly futile attempts by riparian property holders, fishermen, shippers, and bathers to prevent industry from destroying natural watercourses, how the increasing popularity of the flush toilet and other factors led to rapid increases in the demand for water as well as to huge increases in the discharge of human waste into the very watercourses from which municipalities drew their water supplies, and the wide variety of factors that complicated the development of sewerage and sewage treatment systems to protect those supplies. He concludes by exploring the legal and political processes by which authorities embraced values that rationalized protecting wild streams not yet contaminated by industrialization and urbanization, while consigning already polluted streams to the status of sewers, for which waste treatment was, until the mid-twentieth century, the exception not the rule, while waste prevention was a non-issue. |
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The great virtue of Benidickson's thematic approach is the way in which it conveys a sense of how sanitarians, engineers, the public, and the courts in all three countries had to grapple with the same sorts of problems and dropped the same balls in their struggles with water pollution. Benidickson may be faulted for not giving adequate attention to the success side of this story and for not attempting to analyze the differences that distinguished how these countries, with their different government institutions and national cultures, dealt with their water pollution problems (despite the fact that he shows that the British were much more willing to regulate water purity and develop systems for treating and recycling sewage than the Americans). These are minor criticisms, however, of a book that offers a sweeping overview of an important topic made very timely by news reports concerning the almost stupefying water pollution problems plaguing China today. This book puts those problems into a valuable historical perspective. |
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Christine Meisner Rosen is associate professor in the Haas School of Business and the Director of American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is working on a book on the history of the American response to industrial pollution between 1840 and 1930. |
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