Inventing Pollution: Coal, Smoke, and Culture in Britain since 1800 (review)

Here is a timely reminder of history's potential to inform policy debate as we back our way into an uncertain future. It is now generally recognized that burning fossil fuels produces greenhouse gases that undermine the ecological balance of our planet. We live at a crossroads when, in the absence of vision and effective leadership by national governments in response to this global crisis, progressive state regulatory frameworks are developing from California to South Australia that attempt to address climate change through pollution control. Peter Thorsheim's Inventing Pollution describes the beginnings of this still hesitant and ambivalent regulatory process in the world's first urban-industrial nation. The modern idea of pollution was invented, Thorsheim argues, in Britain during the course of the last two centuries and the trigger was coal smoke.

Thorsheim contends that the urban-industrial transformation of British society since 1800 created profound socio-economic and environmental dysfunctionalities, and that these "take-off" features of an evolving private marketplace society are now being replicated on a global scale. Cities highlight this unhappy sequence of events. Two hundred years ago, London was the only city in the world that had compromised collective social amenity to private capital accumulation, but today—with this equation seemingly tilted inexorably towards private capital over social wellbeing—half the world's population live in cities whose air is unfit to breathe.

In Britain, the dysfunctionalities of urban-industrial growth during the threshold period of capitalist development were made vivid by London's smog crisis of December 1952, when the city was blanketed with a murky cloud of smoke and fog that reduced visibility to near-zero and resulted in some 4,000 deaths from respiratory and circulatory complications. The resulting Beaver committee of inquiry tabled a wide-ranging report on air pollution in 1954 that paved the way for the trail-blazing 1956 Clean Air Act. This statute established hundreds of "smokeless zones," set in train the conversion of homes and businesses to smokeless energy, and implemented ambitious emission reduction targets for the nation.

These events form the core of Thorsheim's book, but they do not constitute a shallow celebratory history. Thorsheim contends that the Clean Air Act was in fact a Pyrrhic victory. First, it addressed only visible atmospheric pollution (and moreover, improvements in British air quality owed more to the 1965 discovery of North Sea natural gas, and the decimation of the British coal mining industry, than to pollution controls) and largely ignored the harmful effects of sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide emissions. Second, for all the air-quality improvements achieved in Britain since the 1950s, global consumption of fossil fuels today is many hundred times greater than it was at the start of the urban-industrial revolution in Britain.

Coal smoke triggered the smog catastrophe of 1952, but it was not an easy task to ban it. Coal consumption in Britain, which had peaked on the eve of the First World War, sustained the nation's industry, commerce, and transport systems and was also the foundation of household heating and cooking. Coal mining in its late-nineteenth-century heyday was the nation's largest source of employment. For both good and ill, coal consumption was part and parcel of British society. Nonetheless mounting concern about the ill effects of coal smoke during the late nineteenth century fundamentally redefined public understanding of pollution and urban waste management. Thorsheim's book is more about this process of constructing air pollution as a public issue than it is about the tangible effects of atmospheric pollution in British cities.

Thorsheim's arguments are provocative and compelling. It ultimately matters little that he hangs too much on the idea that coal smoke created modern public consciousness about pollution, and thus diverts attention from the muck, the smells, and community ill health that result from the contamination of urban land and water systems (in China today, for example, ninety...