Tuesday 3 December 2019

The Polluters: The Making of our Chemically Altered Environment

Dr. Benjamin Ross has more than 30 years experience in the hydrogeological analysis of waste disposal sites and holds a Ph.D. degree from MIT. Co-author Steven Amter also has 30 years of experience in contaminant hydrogeology, including site assessments, "water, soil, and chemical investigations, monitoring well installation and aquifer pump testing." The book is the result of ten years of research, and is a volume that anyone interested in rounding out their understanding of today's climate issues would find very useful. Given the scope of the book, its readability and the credentials of the authors, it is certainly a must-read for anyone involved or interested in environmental health policy as well.
That pollution in today's environment is the “legacy of conscious choices made long ago,” is a more loaded introductory comment than it at first sounds. What's hooky about reading Pollution: The Making of our Chemically Altered Environment is the way the authors reveal those "decisions" which were, of course, criminal acts intended to dupe the public into embracing the chemical age. The authors have lifted back the veil of the chemical revolution that covered "developed" nations with pollution-spewing industries, revealing a tantalizing and vile backstory of slanted research, suppressed discoveries, the placing of industry-friendly "experts in positions of influence” and the subversion of science in the name of profits.
The book opens with an incident in 1948, when fluorine smog from a local zinc smelter smothered a valley town, killing 20 and sickening many more. It's a useful case of an occurrence suppressed and forgotten, with injured survivors and victim's families never properly compensated, investigations sidetracked, objections silenced. The Donora smog incident is a perfect example of a place that was written off by falling under the wheels of the machine of “authoritative science.” Authoritative science had its beginnings even earlier on, demonstrating its usefulness as a series of decisions that would have "enormous effects on public health- about leaded gasoline, black lung, ddt, air, and water pollution-were justified by this technique.”
The authors examine the “armaments” - political, economic and scientific- forged by the chemical industry and its allies, with lines like, "in struggle after struggle over the preceding decades, business interests had preserved for themselves the freedom to foul their surroundings.”
The book asks, "What is the basis of scientific authority? Is it value-free, or is it shaped by social and economic conditions?” There are a rich number of case-study examples and history in the book for us not to read in a cynical, defeatist light, but to situate us within a timeline we may wish to resist where it involves the plunder of natural resources in a methodical and destructive way. “Early struggles over environmental control offer a striking case study of the relationship between business and government. Politics, pollution and science came together in a way that foreshadowed the technological complexity of today's governance.”
The authors explore the common industry tactic of “spill, study and stall” used to buy time and deflect responsibility or control of pollution. They also discuss the introduction of friendly researchers to cherry-pick data, the designing of experiments that give the "desired" (by industry) result, and the offering of reassurance backed by nothing more than the “sheer force of assertion.”
As The Polluters clarifies so very well, from the early part of the 20th century, the industry wished to fend off government control and set up a system to do so. Those within the industry who were in charge of environmental control were paid staff specialists. “They often lacked the clout to overcome resistance from operating managers, whose incentives were driven by internal profit targets and outside competition. In the profit-driven marketplace, competition pushed down all to the level of the least scrupulous, who had at their disposal the apparatus created to fight off outside interference.” Nicely said.
Here Ross and Amter explain that after WW2 things became more serious because production had vastly increased and there was “an avalanche of new synthetic chemicals.” Struggles between conniving chemical industry hacks and public officials ensued, resulting only in some very flimsy US federal acts written to reassure the public while control remained in the hands of the polluters. The chemical industry battled against outside control and any mechanism of public oversight but, fortunately, the environmental movement never entirely disappear. However, in the 1950's the laws and institutions designed to downplay and deny chemical pollution did their task and at times outdid themselves. Only in 1962 did Rachel Carson's Silent Spring become a best-seller after being serialized in The New Yorker. Earth Day was launched in 1970 and in the decades that followed environmental legislation began to take power and it then became more and more common for there to be legislation against chemical companies where there was none before.
Today, the early mechanisms designed to silence objection and cover-up pollution, not to mention to make chemical companies seem like magicians with well-paid experts to back up their word, are still in place. The history of pollution, the industrialization of North America, the destruction of rivers and streams, and the attempts by victims of pollution to seek arbitration, has been happening for a long time. As The Polluters remind us, it is incumbent upon us all to heed history and intervene into the planned toxin timeline of pollution. With many interesting photos, 34 pages of notes, dozens of historic notes for each chapter and journalistic flair on the part of the authors, this is an extremely awesome book. The epilogue is optimistic, and the book in its entirety deeply documents the US pollution story. Acclaimed by Robert F Kennedy among others.

Ross, B., & Amter, S. (2012). The polluters: The making of our chemically altered environment. Oxford University Press.