Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Tuesday October 5, 2010
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THE POLLUTERS: The Making of Our Chemically Altered Environment
Benjamin Ross and Steven Amter
Oxford Univ
ISBN 978-0199739950
223 pages
$27.95
Reviewed by Seth Shulman
With nearly 5 million barrels of BP's crude having gushed into the Gulf of Mexico for months on end, the summer of 2010 will long be remembered for environmental catastrophe. News of the oil spill came close on the heels of the Upper Big Branch coal mine explosion that killed 29 miners in West Virginia -- the nation's worst mining disaster in some four decades. In both cases, most of us couldn't help but wonder how things could go so terribly wrong. How could corporate safeguards have failed so miserably? How could government regulators have been so feckless? As such questions linger, along comes "The Polluters," a remarkably timely, extensively researched and accessible book offering a fresh perspective as we search for answers.
Most works on U.S. environmental history begin with the watershed publication in 1962 of Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," the federal Clean Water Act of 1963 or perhaps the crescendo of public engagement on the issue that culminated in the first Earth Day in 1970 and the ensuing formation that year of the Environmental Protection Agency. But Benjamin Ross and Steven Amter, two scientists with a small environmental consultancy in Washington, D.C., and an expansive interest in the history of pollution, take a different approach. Intrigued and presumably frustrated in their professional work by the gaps and limitations in current environmental regulation, the two spent the past decade delving into governmental and corporate archives to exhume the roots of today's environmental regulatory framework.
"The Polluters" documents with well-chosen detail how the chemical industry managed for decades -- since the 1930s administration of Herbert Hoover, and even before -- to avoid and forestall the increasingly glaring need for federal environmental legislation. We meet a rogues' gallery of stridently laissez-faire industry executives aware of the pollution they are creating but allergic to federal oversight, along with craven and even corrupt regulators unable or unwilling to protect the public. The authors show how companies blocked the discovery of environmental problems associated with their products and practices, and how research that might have found these problems was "starved of funds." When alarming findings did emerge, such as about the threat of lung disease from coal dust, or the risk of cancer from vinyl chloride, the authors document how "well-paid advocates concoct(ed) grounds for doubt" and "studied" problems to death as a substitute for action.
The authors dredge up this enraging, disheartening and ultimately illuminating history lesson for a reason: The tactics, which they contend came into full bloom by 1950, set the stage for the ongoing environmental woes we face today. As they put it, "Sixty years later, these strategies are still in use, protecting polluters who spew out toxic chemicals and globe-warming gases." Written before either the BP spill or the West Virginia mining disaster, the book has a historical perspective that resonates powerfully in the face of such recent debacles.
Some parts of the story are wrenchingly familiar. Just as tobacco executives twisted the science and strove to manufacture uncertainty about the dangers of their products even when fully aware of them, so did the chemical industry undertake a similar campaign through its main lobbying arm, the Manufacturing Chemists Association (now the Chemical Manufacturers Association). The authors quote the minutes of a 1950 meeting of the industry group where, despite the growing evidence of illness and an acute case in Pennsylvania where pollution from a zinc smelter had led to 20 deaths of nearby residents, a plan was explicitly outlined "to prevent the development of public demand for drastic and impractical air pollution and smoke control legislation." If the tactics sound familiar, the tracing of the roots of this story as far back as the early 20th century will likely surprise many readers. "The Polluters" documents how the coal industry co-opted federal regulators at the Bureau of Mines in the 1920s to avoid regulation that would protect miners against the growing scourge of lung disease.
As early as 1924, the authors show, the scientific literature contained studies indicating that "coal dust itself must cause lung disease." Nonetheless, then Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover explicitly reminded a press conference that his department's Bureau of Mines -- the best hope for federal regulation at the time -- had been "created as a service bureau for the mining industry," according to press accounts from the period. Following Hoover's lead, the government scientists looking into the health threat served the wishes of industry executives, even designing epidemiological studies to include only "active" miners, so that anyone who had gotten sick enough in the mines to keep them from work would be excluded from the statistics.
This book is too well researched and its tone too reasonable to be considered a polemic. For one thing, there is plenty of blame to go around. "The Polluters" makes much of the public's and the media's longstanding infatuation with the chemical industry's products. "Modern chemistry rubs its Aladdin's lamp, shakes up its test tubes, and presto!" So said The Washington Post in 1929, as quoted by the authors. Ultimately, "The Polluters" contends that only loud public outcry has ever managed to tip the balance in favor of the kinds of tough environmental laws we desperately need. Alas, as Ross and Amter chronicle, too often the public has either been in the thrall of the latest chemical convenience, or has let its outraged calls for a cleaner environment get squelched en route to Capitol Hill. It is, of course, an open question, whether we will do the same in the face of the latest environmental insults.
Thankfully, perhaps, this is not an exhaustive history of environmental regulation. Owing to the combination of the book's brevity (171 pages of text) and broad purview (including fights over everything from pesticide regulation to smog in Los Angeles and elsewhere), the authors leave themselves open to the charge that they have cherrypicked the record to bolster their case. Still, this is little-known history that makes for fascinating reading. It places our past summer of environmental disaster and discontent into its proper perspective, reminding us that our nation's continuing fight for a clean environment has been a long and often dirty one.
Seth Shulman is a journalist and author, most recently, of "The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
Isabel Wilkerson
Random House
ISBN 978-0679444329
622 pages
$30
Reviewed by Paula J. Giddings
For African Americans, restriction of movement has long had profound meaning -- and never more so than after the end of slavery. The flight of 6 million Southern blacks to the North between 1915 and 1970 was, as Isabel Wilkerson writes in "The Warmth of Other Suns," "the first mass act of independence by a people who were in bondage in this country for far longer than they have been free."
Much has been written about the push and pull of oppression and opportunity that drove blacks north and how this mass movement changed the political, economic and social landscape of American cities. Blacks not only brought their muscle and creative talents to the North but also, as some highly touted studies contend, distinct and dysfunctional behaviors that created the intractable poverty and crime that turned cities into ghettoes.
Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose own family made the trek north, puts a different face on what is known as the Great Migration. Those who made the momentous decision to leave the "Old Country," as writer James Baldwin called the South, were as diverse and determined as those who passed through the way stations of Ellis Island.
"They took work the people already there considered beneath them," Wilkerson writes. "They tried to instill in their children the values of the Old Country while pressing them to succeed by the standards of the New World they were in." In other words, black migrants shared a common culture that was animated by the promise and possibility of the American dream.
The author tells the migration story through the portraits of three people whose sojourns began in the 1930s and '40s: George Swanson Starling, a Florida fruit-picker who found his way to Harlem; Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, a Louisianan and Morehouse College graduate who went to Los Angeles to establish his medical practice; and Ida Mae Gladney, a married-at-16 Mississippi sharecropper who settled in Chicago.
In some ways, all three found what they were looking for. Starling, who abandoned Florida to escape retribution after he organized fellow fruit-pickers, found work as a train attendant; he gleefully advised passengers of their right to sit in desegregated coaches and reveled in the wondrous Harlem life of the 1940s. The charming and ambitious Foster, a surgeon who began his career collecting urine samples door to door for an insurance company, built a lucrative practice that included such clients as the musician Ray Charles (who wrote a song about him). Gladney, whose family of five had been crammed into a cabin in Mississippi's backwoods, found work as a nurse's aide and became a blue-collar, churchgoing homeowner with enough space for her and her husband's multigenerational family.
However, personal triumph was accompanied by pain and tragedy -- the seeds of which were not brought from the South but awaited the migrants in the North. Foster's relentless climb up the social ladder, in part an effort to compensate for the racial humiliation he met in California, created psychological wounds that alienated him from his wife and family. Two of Starling's children became addicted to drugs in a deteriorating Harlem. And soon after the Gladneys moved into their home, whites fled the neighborhood, eventually relegating the area to urban blight and forcing Ida to live out her old age as "an eyewitness to a war playing out in the streets below her."
And yet, as becomes clear in this extraordinary and evocative work, the refusal to be captives in the South may have saved their lives -- and perhaps their souls. "If all of their dream does not come true," wrote the Chicago Defender, a newspaper that beckoned Southern blacks early in the migration, "enough will come to pass to justify their actions."
Paula J. Giddings is the Elizabeth A. Woodson 1922 professor of Afro-American studies at Smith College and the author of "Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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