The Changing Nature of Environmental History: An Interview with Joel A. Tarr

When Joel Tarr edited a special issue of this journal on the environmental history of Pennsylvania more than ten years ago, he was already one of the field’s most respected and influential thinkers. His research at the intersection of the history of cities, nature, and technology has influenced two generations of scholars, and a number of his former students have contributed essays to the present volume. During his more than forty years teaching at Carnegie Mellon University, Dr. Tarr has produced dozens of articles and essays as well as six monographs and edited volumes. In 2008 the Society for the History of Technology awarded him its highest award, the Leonardo da Vinci Medal, capping a career in which he won numerous other prizes for his scholarship and teaching. This degree of accomplishment is all the more remarkable considering that he earned his PhD in 1963, before urban history or environmental history even existed as distinct fields and the social history of technology was still in its infancy.

This is the third interview with Dr. Tarr published in a scholarly journal and as such seeks to avoid too much overlap with these other easily accessible sources. Noted oral historian Bruce Stave conducted the first interview, which appeared in the Journal of Urban History in 1983. This interview, subtitled “Urban History and Policy,” devoted significant time to exploring Tarr’s childhood in Jersey City, New Jersey, and his influences during college and graduate school at Northwestern University. At the time of the interview’s publication, he had begun moving away from the more traditional political framework of his first book, A Study in Boss Politics: William Lorimer of Chicago (1971) and toward the study of the urban environment, a transition he linked explicitly to his move to Pittsburgh in 1967. By 1983 he had published a number of important essays on urban environmental history including an influential edited issue on “Cities and Technology” in the 1979 Journal of Urban History that included his essay on “The Separate and Combined Sewer Question,” and articles on the smoke-control issue in Pittsburgh in the Journal of Social History and Technology and Social Change. Indeed, in the interview Stave joked that Tarr had become widely known for his study of history from the bottom up—“in the sense of sewers.”¹

Environmental historians Marc Cioc and Char Miller conducted a second interview, which appeared in the January 2011 issue of Environmental History. This article highlighted some of the enormous body of work Tarr had published in the intervening decades, including Technology and the Rise of the Networked City in Europe and America (1988), coedited with Gabriel Dupuy; The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (1996); Devastation and Renewal: An Environmental History of Pittsburgh and Its Region (2003); and The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (2007), coauthored with Clay McShane. Shorter than the Stave interview, the interview by Cioc and Miller nevertheless covered a wide variety of topics ranging from Tarr’s influences to his role in nurturing young scholars and his advocacy for merging history and public policy.²

The breadth of Tarr’s work combined with the relative brevity of the 2011 interview left considerable room for further discussion of those issues most relevant to the readers of Pennsylvania History, particularly the ways in which Tarr’s career highlights the importance of the Mid-Atlantic region for understanding broader relationships between humans and the rest of nature. I met with Dr. Tarr on August 4, 2011, in a conference room at the University Club in Pittsburgh, where Dr. Edward K. “Ted” Muller, his long-time friend and frequent collaborator, graciously agreed to join us. The interview below is an edited version of that conversation, which took place over the course of about three hours. So that this essay might be used as a roadmap of sorts to the development of the field of environmental history, I have included information about the scholars and works referenced in the discussion. A more complete listing...