Smelter Smoke in North America: The Politics of Transborder Pollution (review)

Smelter Smoke in North America: The Politics of Transborder Pollution. By John D. Wirth. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000. Pp. xx+264. $35.

The smelter industry has been one of the most significant contributors to air pollution, and historians of technology and environmental historians are now beginning to explore various dimensions of the social conflict arising in response to that pollution. Not only is John Wirth's Smelter Smoke in North America the first monograph on the subject, but he also adds a new dimension to the scholarship. Wirth analyzes the controversy on a continental scale by exploring the diplomatic aspects of two battles over smelter smoke, in which complainants lived across an international border from a smelter disgorging smoke.

Farmers in northeastern Washington, with the assistance of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), took their complaint against the lead smelter at Trail, British Columbia, through diplomatic channels during the 1920s and 1930s. A half-century later, environmental activists in Arizona leveraged national and international politics to force the closure of the United States's most polluting copper smelter, the Phelps Dodge facility at Douglas, Arizona, and to gain commitments from Mexico that it would regulate the smoke output from a new copper smelter just south of the border at Nacozari. Wirth shows how the latter international agreement presaged some of the environmental aspects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the 1993 treaty that formally linked Canada, the United States, and Mexico in a single market.

In the early twentieth century, long before NAFTA, the smelter industry acted continentally to shield its members from what the industry considered undue government regulation. Companies in the United States, led by the American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO), provided extensive technical assistance to both the Canadian government and Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company (COMINCO), the Canadian corporation that owned and operated the Trail smelter, as COMINCO and the Canadian government defended the smelter against the USDA's case. The American Smelting and Refining Company recognized that, if the U.S. government succeeded in imposing rigid restrictions on operations at the Trail smelter, similar regulation of domestic smelters owned by ASARCO and its competitors in the smelting fraternity would soon follow.

Although Wirth devotes most of his attention to legal, political, and diplomatic wrangling along the U.S. borders with Canada and Mexico, he attempts to provide a technical and scientific context for understanding those dealings, and in this regard he frustrates the reader at times with technical errors. For example, early in the book (pp. 13-14) he tells us that the Trail smelter "installed Cottrell converters that used an electrostatic process to capture flume dust." They were Cottrell electrostatic precipitators, and they were used to capture flue dust. Later (p. 187), when describing increases in ore produced by Mexican mines and treated at Mexican smelters between the 1970s and the 1980s, Wirth uses numbers that are off by a couple orders of magnitude or that confuse the units of measure.

Despite technical flaws, Smelter Smoke in North America is an important contribution for its explorations of issues from several historical perspectives. The first three chapters describe how the Trail smelter smoke controversy was viewed and the ensuing legal battle involving farmers, industry scientists, government scientists and bureaucrats, and academics on both sides of the border. The next three chapters offer a diversity of perspectives on the Douglas and Nacozari smelter smoke controversies, with particularly fascinating insights into the strategies of the environmental activists involved.

Wirth also shows that conflicting scientific claims about the environmental impact of smelter smoke were floated in both cases. This is not surprising in the more recent Arizona/Mexico case, because our late-twentieth-century experience makes us familiar with different sides in environmental litigation presenting conflicting expert testimony. But the Trail case illustrates that this problem surfaced long ago. There are many parallels between the histories of environmental...