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Book Review
| Unlikely Environmentalists: Congress and Clean Water, 1945–1972. By Paul Charles Milazzo. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006. xii + 340 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $29.95.
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| While most accounts take it for granted that the mass environmental movement of the late 1960s drove the creation of the modern American environmental state, Paul Milazzo's superb new study insists that several disparate streams—often uncharted by historians—fed into the river of modern environmental policy making. These streams included the postwar celebration of economic growth (dirty water threatened production), traditional distributive politics (grants for waste treatment plants were the pork that eased passage of the first postwar anti-pollution water laws), and the vogue for "systems analysis," which grew out of the military industrial complex but inspired a holistic ecological approach to pollution that greatly enhanced regulatory ambitions. Thus some of the least likely actors, including the Army Corps of Engineers and Senator Robert Kerr (R-OK), founder of the Kerr-McGee Oil Company, were the Unlikely Environmentalists who more than environmental interest groups erected the system that still keeps America's water (reasonably) clean. |
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Milazzo's three clearly delineated sections build a logical and convincing case. In the first and most original, the author traces how the House Subcommittee on Rivers and Harbors and its mining-district chair, John Blatnik (D-MN), secured passage of the first meaningful legislation in 1956 by "discover[ing] water pollution in the process of doling out pork and promoting development" (p. 7). In the Senate, Edmund Muskie (D-ME) — who would later run for president with the nickname "Mr. Clean" but began as a friend to Maine's extractive industries—was a policy entrepreneur whose Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution used the economic-development perspective, widespread drought in the eastern United States in the mid-1960s, and effluent expertise generated by the U.S. Public Health Service to spearhead the 1965 Water Quality Act, which retained a federal system but mandated new enforceable standards for water quality. |
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The second section begins by reviewing the development of systems thinking and its progeny, ecology, which changed expert perspective on water from pollution control to environmental quality. The desire to manage the "total environment" informed passage of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which made every government agency an environmental regulator and also transferred regulatory oversight from technical pollution experts to the broader public. In a particularly fascinating account, Milazzo recounts how Muskie's preference for the older model of technical expertise clashed with the broader democratic vision of NEPA's primary author, Senator Henry Jackson (D-WA). |
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The efforts of unlikely environmentalists culminated with the passage of the 1972 Clean Water Act, which transferred authority from the states to the recently created Environmental Policy Agency. The Act imposed stringent pollution standards tethered to the available technology and was guided by the systems concept of the biological "integrity" of the water rather than by utilitarian standards such as "swimmable-fishable." The final section offers a model legislative history, though Milazzo strains a bit to minimize the role played by activist environmentalists and to demonstrate continuities with the developmental and systems approaches. That Senator John Tunney (D-CA) first proposed a national water quality standard that "bore the imprint of the military-industrial-complex" (p. 197) does not necessary reveal, as suggested, the absence of environmental pressure groups; after all, the activists had adopted systems thinking, too! |
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Unlikely Environmentalists is essential reading for environmental historians and students of American political development. (The author also deserves credit for making expert debate on topics such as stream dilution and land-based waste disposal read like fiction.) Milazzo clearly shows that we need to broaden our conception of pro-environmental actors. And by showing how Congress led before the public clamored for change, he succeeds in his broader task of "reinsert[ing] Congress into the post-1945 political history of the United States" (p. ix). Water policy was made during a unique postwar window when Americans' faith in scientific and state expertise peaked, and thus we need more studies before we can fully rejuvenate Congress's role in twentieth-century policy making. But by showing that Congress cleaned up the nation's water by "spending money like water" (p. 40) and thinking like Robert McNamara's Defense Department, Milazzo has fundamentally shifted our understanding of the origins of the environmental state. His account may even offer lessons to clean-energy advocates currently promoting a new environmental Keynesianism. |
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Derek Hoff is assistant professor of history at Kansas State University. He is currently revising a book manuscript titled "Are We Too Many?: The Population Debate and Policymaking in the Twentieth-Century United States." |
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