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Technology and Culture 43.4 (2002) 800-801



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Effluent America: Cities, Industry, Energy, and the Environment. By Martin V. Melosi. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001. Pp. xiii+325. $50/$19.95.

Together with Joel Tarr and William Cronon, Martin Melosi is among the most innovative urban-environmental historians of his generation. Exceptionally productive, he has written eight books, including the recent and highly praised Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (2000). Melosi has also authored countless articles, thirty of which are cited in the notes to the genial autobiographical note that prefaces Effluent America. This piece charts an intriguing academic journey from aspirant diplomatic historian, undertaking doctoral research on postwar investigations into the Pearl Harbor debacle, to pioneering chronicler of solutions and nonsolutions to urban garbage problems.

The typical Melosi article is characterized by compression of large volumes of information into a readable and only rarely oversimplified format. Abstruse technical detail is rendered accessible to nonspecialists and major themes are invariably underwritten by a determination to probe both the uniqueness of the past and linkages between past and present. The typical time span is between the early nineteenth and early twenty-first centuries. Indeed, several pieces originally written in the 1980s and included here in sections devoted to "pollution in industrial America," "urban growth and community services," and "urban environmental reform" have been updated to take account of developments during the last twenty years. The most compelling essays—on solid waste dumping, historiographical paradoxes of the environmental justice movement, and case studies of Melosi's adopted hometown, Houston—demonstrate the extent to which infrastructural change has been historically determined by earlier phases of political, fiscal, and technological interaction. Choice or a failure to choose decisively repeatedly loom large. In this respect, there are similarities with the kinds of argument to be found in Tarr's The Search for the Ultimate [End Page 800] Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (1996) or, by analogy, with Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken."

This book can be recommended to urban-environmental scholars who would otherwise need to search far and wide for these seminal contributions to the literature and to graduate students in search of orientation in a rapidly expanding and intellectually demanding field. Reservations should, however, be expressed with regard to the author's attitude toward theory. Thus, in the otherwise excellent "Down in the Dumps: Is There a Garbage Crisis in America?" Melosi turns a blind eye to Mary Douglas's writings on pollution and taboo, and fails to test the relevance of Christopher Hamlin's contention, canvassed in a classic article on nineteenth-century Edinburgh, that "nontechnical" factors can sometimes be more influential than "technical" ones in determining how a specific community categorizes and then reacts to what is later identified as an environmental crisis.

In this respect, Melosi's interpretation of infrastructural change might well benefit from closer scrutiny of the noninfrastructural domain. There are other omissions. Jurgen Habermas's writings on new social movements are excluded from a densely detailed account of similarities and dissimilarities between organizations involved in the environmental justice movement. Thomas Hughes's work is briefly mentioned in a paper on "Cities, Technical Systems and the Environment," but the pros and cons of social constructionism, human and nonhuman actors, and what many would now consider to be the playful excesses of Bruno Latour and Michel Callon are notable for their absence. (Here silence may be intended to speak louder than words.) Heavily committed to "thinking about cities within the borders of urban ecology" (p. 119) and to variants of and modulations on the larger ecological paradigm, Melosi also champions systems analysis and economic path-dependence theory—indeed, the latter lies at the heart of The Sanitary City.

Urban-environmental history has reached a point at which transnational comparisons have become both feasible and heuristically desirable. That Melosi is aware of that fact is evidenced by useful literature updates that precede each section and contain key citations from the French, German, and Scandinavian literatures.

 



Bill Luckin

Mr. Luckin...

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