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Book Review
| Jamie Benidickson, The Culture of Flushing: A Social and Legal History of Sewage, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007. Pp. 432. $85.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0774812917); $29.95 paper (ISBN 978-0774812924).
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| An offspring of the environmental movement of the 1960s, the field of environmental history has given rise to a distinct style of activist historical scholarship. More than mainstream historians, authors within this tradition look to the history of environmental phenomena with a clear eye to its relevance to contemporary policy debates. In keeping with this model Jamie Benidickson's The Culture of Flushing straddles a scholarly and reformist mission. In lively language and rich detail the book recounts the processes through which England, the United States, and Canada all transformed their rivers, lakes, and oceans into receptacles for waste. The practice of dumping waste into water has become a routine and seemingly preordained feature of modern life. Benidickson seeks to pierce the veneer of inevitability that currently protects flushing from critical scrutiny through analysis of the historical processes through which this environmentally harmful practice became entrenched. |
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In this connection the book assigns a significant measure of blame to the decision to abandon the age-old privy system in favor of the water closet. The transition was the product of a set of interrelated public policies starting with the establishment of municipal water systems and continuing with the passage of legislative mandates requiring the installation of water-based plumbing. The implications of the disposal of untreated sewage into major water bodies appeared to catch policy makers on both sides of the Atlantic off guard. Around midcentury the evident environmental consequences of sewage dumping invigorated calls for a return to land-based disposal practices. For a short while the future of flushing was called into question. But in the final analysis these alternatives proved unequal to the task of displacing flushing as the preferred solution. |
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The book covers territory largely familiar from the already extensive literature on the history of sewage and urban pollution in England and the United States. The Canadian side of this story has received much less attention, and should be of particular interest to readers both in and out of Canada. In addition, the book makes a distinctive contribution in at least two key respects. |
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By simultaneously tracking the history of sewage across three different countries, Benidickson seeks to show how and why flushing diffused across the globe. Though differences among the countries receive an occasional reference, the broad similarity across the English, American, and Canadian cases stands at the heart of the story. Benidickson's explanation for this convergence points in large part to the three countries' shared common law tradition. A pertinent question the book does not address is the degree of overlap between the history of water pollution within and outside the common law world. In a number of places, the text hints at the possibility that developments in countries such as France and Germany followed a somewhat different course. Most intriguing in this connection is a brief mention of the early twentieth-century reform efforts of a francophone Canadian legislator by the name of Napoléon Belcourt. Belcourt invoked both Roman law and examples of stringent regulation of water pollution in France in his vigorous, but ultimately unsuccessful campaign to establish national controls on water pollution in Canada (177). Yet the reader is offered no further discussion of whether and how the policies put in place in continental Europe differed from those that took hold under Anglo-American law. Greater attention to this question would have better clarified the common law's specific contribution to the cluster of ideas accounting for the culture of flushing. |
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Beyond its cross-national focus, Benidickson's book departs from other historical works in this area in its somewhat skeptical attitude towards the benefits of nineteenth-century sanitary reform. Martin Melosi's The Sanitary City (2000) perhaps best illustrates this point. In his monumental work Melosi highlights the contribution of nineteenth-century sanitation to the prevention of communicable diseases and improved quality of life in the city, even as he recognizes that these improvements came at the cost of adverse environmental consequences. In Benidickson's account it is those environmental consequences that take center stage, with little, if any, discussion of associated gains. Benidickson blames "the convenience of flushing" (126) for the rejection of the land-based conservancy model, but stops short of arguing that the model in fact offered a viable alternative to water-based disposal. Neither is Benidickson willing to offer any policy prescriptions as to the proper solutions to problems of water pollution today (332). The reluctance to extract implementable lessons from the history it recounts diminishes in some respects from the book's ability to speak more directly to contemporary water pollution debates. Where the book succeeds admirably is in bringing its readers face-to-face with the consequences of environmental choices, both present and past. |
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| Noga Morag-Levine
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| Michigan State University College of Law |
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