Effluent America: Cities, Industry, Energy, and the Environment (review)

With the publication of The Sanitary City (reviewed in Bull. Hist. Med., 2002, 76: 391-93), Martin Melosi established himself as this generation's leading synthesizer in urban environmental history. The result of more than ten years' effort, displaying a command of the secondary literature and an ability to assimilate masses of primary data, that monograph will stand with the work of Joel Tarr and a small number of others in the historiography of the sanitary infrastructure of American cities. Effluent America is a very different sort of book, more a celebration than a manifestation of the author's accomplishments. It is a collection of revised, previously published writings, including empirical essays, policy studies, and commissioned chapters. Because some of these articles were written as overviews and therefore incorporate material that Melosi had earlier developed in others, the book tends to be repetitive; and because the articles had very different purposes at the time they were written, they do not hold together well in this volume.

This is a good book nonetheless, an invitation to spend more time with Melosi's very readable corpus. In the introductory essay, new in this volume, Melosi describes the evolution of his own interest in urban history as an aspect of environmental history. The eleven other chapters are divided into three parts, each of which has its own introduction and guide to further reading. Particularly notable is "Down in the Dumps: Is There a Garbage Crisis in America?" (pp. 68-91). After masterfully summarizing the history of the various modes of garbage disposal used in this country, Melosi points out that the problems connected to municipal solid waste have always been with us. He thus concludes that there is no crisis, even while acknowledging that the current problem is not insignificant. Because significant problems have not been insurmountable in the past, he seems to claim, we can expect to come up with the necessary technologies and political will to deal with any new ones that may appear. I personally feel less sanguine.

Melosi takes the same approach in his discussion of "Community and the Growth of Houston" (pp. 190-205). He begins with an oft-quoted description of Houston as the "Soulless Los Angeles of the Gulf Coast" (p. 190), and then tries to demonstrate that—despite terrible sprawl, inadequate mass transit, and great demographic gaps—it is a collection of real communities that are interdependent. For Melosi, the prototypical southwestern metropolis is hardly soulless. He lives there; I have never visited. That I prefer subways to freeways may or may not be germane.

All this is not to say that Melosi is in favor of the waste that accompanies sprawl or excessive consumer packaging. Similarly, while he acknowledges the existence of environmental inequity and makes clear his opposition to it, the main thrust of his argument about it (in "Environmental Justice, Political Agenda Setting, and the Myths of History," pp. 238-62) is that the environmental justice movement is founded on historical myths, among which is the belief that the conservation movement of the Progressive Era had no interest in urban environmental problems. To refute this, Melosi demonstrates that clean streets, clean drinking water, and clean air were indeed part of the Progressive agenda. He fails, however, to demonstrate specific links between early twentieth-century efforts for urban sanitation and the movement for wilderness preservation. Moreover, the very fact that environmental justice activists have not recognized a continuity between their struggles and those of the Progressive Era should be the key issue to historians, because the failure to see continuity means that there is no continuity—regardless of whether the environmental justice movement really had historical antecedents sixty and more years before Love Canal.

The scope of Melosi's knowledge...