The Culture of Flushing: A Social and Legal History of Sewage (review)

This book offers a pertinent contribution to the often fraught debates on environmental quality versus economic stability that lie at the heart of human uses and abuses of water. Jamie Benidickson, a legal historian, provides an uncommonly wide-ranging treatment of the subjects of water quality and waste disposal in Britain, the United States, and Canada from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Switching deftly between urban centers in Britain and around the Great Lakes, Benidickson explores, through an analysis focused on the law, how a culture of flushing wastes into waterways emerged from the beginnings of industrialization. Central to the whole pessimistic story is the compromise of waterways for economic growth; time and time again—and with a depressing repetitiveness across the last two centuries—Benidickson charts the rising dominance of government's treatment of waterways as passive recipients of sewage, de-spite competing claims by interest groups concerned with riparian rights, navigation, fishing, and recreation. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that in conclusion Benidickson pleads for a thoroughgoing renegotiation of human relationships with waterways, one that fully acknowledges the high price already paid for underestimating environmental losses.

One of the book's key strengths is its questioning of the conventional story of the development of wastewater treatment over the last two centuries as broadly progressive—the gradual creation of "sanitary" cities being key to modernization in almost every biography of the city, and with more sustained focus in Stephen Halliday's The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Metropolis (1999) and Martin Melosi's The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (2000). By highlighting the plight of those interest groups who suffered as a result of the growth of urban sanitation—downstream residents, fishermen, conservancy groups, and surfers, to name but a few—Benidickson calls attention to the array of competing claims on urban waterways and the ways in which these were brought out through legal conflicts. The strength of his analysis lies not only in his focus on the law—still a relatively unexplored area of the history of water supply and waste disposal—but also in the sustained concentration on transatlantic exchanges. Focusing on case studies within a myriad of different cities—London, Birmingham, Manchester, and Edinburgh in Great Britain; Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Wisconsin towns in the United States; and Ottawa, Toronto, and Montreal in Canada—Benidickson greatly expands the range of comparative analysis largely absent in the existing literature on the subject.

It is a credit to the author that, on the whole, he manages to maintain the fine balance between sweeping scope and fine detail. However, there are points where the detail becomes somewhat repetitive; within the many sections dealing with legal case studies, although undoubtedly thoroughly researched, Benidickson tends to underscore the same point in each. Perhaps this is the aim of the study—to ram home the consistency of the abuse of water across time and space. But it may also exhibit an undue focus on the attitudes of the polluters, that is, those who were constantly trying to justify environmental exploitation and dodge legal requirements. Only toward the end of the book do the protesting voices of those who have recently looked toward a more sustainable vision of the relationship of humans and water come out in any strength, despite their undoubted presence in the more distant past. In addition, Benidickson's occasional references to wider cultural visions of water and waste, such as Aldous Huxley's poetic response to condoms washed up on a California beach in 1939 or Pete Seeger's musings on the 1899 Refuse Act in the protest culture of the 1960s, only served to whet this reader's appetite for a still more expansive study.