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187 Policy decisions on air pollution problems were local and regional matters in both Germany and the United States until far into the twentieth century. As a result, it should come as no surprise that the national styles of regulation described here imply an enormous amount of regional variation . A multitude of factors accounts for sudden advances or delays, for rapid progress or stagnation. Many of these conditions are of little interest in a study of national paths toward air pollution control. For example, the peculiar development of air pollution control in New York City was due simply to the city’s proximity to the nation’s only large anthracite deposits. However, such particular paths of development do deserve closer attention in this context if they provide a glimpse into the future. From this perspective, two regions that could hardly be more different come into focus during the postwar years: the Ruhr Basin in Germany and Los Angeles in the United States. The Ruhr Basin, situated in the northwest, close to the Dutch border, had been Germany’s industrial heartland since the mid-nineteenth century and thus subject to the pollution problems that typically went along with coal mining, steel making, and industrial chemistry. In contrast, Los Angeles had been mostly free from air pollution troubles until World War II, when a new kind of pollution—later identified as photochemical smog—came to plague the city. The one thing both regions had in common was that their pollution problems became notorious in the rest of their respective countries : mentions of Los Angeles or the Ruhr almost automatically brought to mind notions of an exceptional pollution load. And in both countries, time would show that these situations were not all that exceptional. Rather, common problems were merely more evident in Los Angeles and the Ruhr than elsewhere. 6 forerunners and Pioneers 188 forerunners and Pioneers Still, these exceptional regions had the chance to become pioneers in air pollution control, blazing a path that other regions could follow—or choose to ignore. Such forerunners can become pioneers, but this requires an attentive audience willing to learn and look ahead. In this regard, Los Angeles and the Ruhr provide an interesting contrast, for only the latter region became an engine of change driving the entire country. Had it not been for the Ruhr Basin and the reform efforts it inspired in the postwar years, the reorientation of German air pollution control would surely have been delayed for a number of years or even decades. While German state governments were following the shining example of North Rhine–Westphalia, however, American policy makers followed events in Los Angeles merely out of curiosity, not because they found them relevant to their own local decisions. Americans thus missed a historic opportunity. Los Angeles was probably the best chance the United States would have to reflect critically on whether cooperative air pollution control was really the approach for the future. The Strange Career of the Ruhr Basin There is probably no region of Germany whose name is so closely associated with noxious fumes as the industrial region of North Rhine–Westphalia. Much as Pittsburgh is enshrined in American collective memory as the “smoky city,” the name “Ruhr” evokes images of soot and dirt. And with good reason: a wealth of striking quotes documents that the Ruhr region had been, since the nineteenth century, dealing with a pollution load that was extreme even by contemporary standards. Here, for example, is a passage from a 1911 issue of the journal Gesundheit: “The traveler who arrives for the first time in the centers of our industry, e.g., on the route BochumGelsenkirchen -Oberhausen, notices with some anxiety how much the appearance of the entire area, the vegetation, the houses, and the people is altered by chimney soot, and how oppressively the latter settles on the lung.”1 Around the same time, factory inspector Klocke in Bochum reported similar experiences in the journal Stahl und Eisen: “Someone passing through the industrial region on his way from Berlin will clearly notice how the train suddenly enters a cloud of haze near Hamm and remains in it until Düsseldorf and beyond, on account of which many a traveler must have asked himself how people can possibly live in such air.”2 “Especially between Ruhr and Emscher one hardly expects to catch another glimpse of fresh, happily thriving plant life,” declared Gelsenkirchen’s former mayor Karl von Wedelstaedt in April 1930.3 And as...

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