American Scientist

THE CONTAMINATION OF THE EARTH: A History of Pollutions in the Industrial Age. François Jarrige and Thomas Le Roux. Translated by Janice Egan and Michael Egan. 459 pp. MIT Press, 2020. $39.95.

The value of this idiosyncratic book rests primarily on three things, the first two of which are at odds with each other. First, it attempts to be synoptic and global in covering its topic—an admirable ambition, but one very imperfectly realized here. Second, it contains a wealth of specific information about French pollution history, most of which was previously unavailable to those who don’t read French. Third, it focuses particularly on the role of chemical industries, which deserves more attention from historians than it has received.

The Contamination of the Earth: A History of Pollutions in the Industrial Age is a translation of a French edition published in 2017, authored by French historians who specialize in the environmental and social history of industrial France. Although one might harp on the fact that the book does not live up to its stated goal of providing a global view of modern pollution, I think it more appropriate to appreciate the authors’ attention to their home country. Most of what the book has to say about pollution history in Britain, Germany, and the United States has already been said in publications familiar to anglophone environmental historians. The attention given here to Russia, Japan, South Africa, Mexico, and other lands with significant pollution history is thin. But Jarrige and Le Roux—with the help of their translators, Janice Egan and Michael Egan—illuminate the history of French pollution more fully, and more insightfully, than anyone has done before in English.

The translation has rendered the French text into smooth English. The authors, and their translators, insist on using the awkward-sounding plural pollutions to emphasize the diversity of substances and processes involved. That usage has merit and deserves to catch on. Some references that perhaps needed no explanation in the French edition will probably be obscure to most readers of this one: for instance, the Leblanc process (for the manufacture of soda ash) and the Second Empire (which refers to the reign of Napoleon III, 1852–1870). Few readers outside the south of France are likely to know that Gardanne is a town of 20,000 people just north of Marseille. But with few exceptions, the translators have produced a readable, accessible text.

The authors’ research, reflected in 83 pages of endnotes (but no bibliography), emphasizes both French- and English-language secondary sources. This is not an archivally based book that brings fresh information to light. Instead it organizes masses of information, reveals broad patterns, and provides access to those who do not read French to the findings and insights of the estimable francophone literature on pollution history.

The structure of the book is broadly chronological. Part I treats early industrialization, 1700–1830, and is strong on the legal and regulatory responses to pollution in France and Britain. Part II covers the period from 1830 to 1914 and shows, among other things, how scientists, physicians, and the law worked to disarm critics of pollution, again mostly in France and Britain. Part III deals with what the authors call “The Toxic Age,” 1914–1973, a crescendo of contamination. It includes strong chapters on warfare, energy systems, and consumption as they relate to pollution. Nuclear contamination, oil spills, and air pollution from coal combustion come in for particular attention, as do the accumulation of plastic debris and the chemical wastes from mining and agriculture. Part III is less focused on northwestern Europe than are the earlier parts. The epilogue, which amounts to a full-scale chapter, brings the story up to 2017 and at last realizes the authors’ aim of a genuinely global approach to their subject.

Merits of the book include its attention to changing and contrasting legal regimes. By and large, the authors contend, polluters have managed to get rules that allow them to avoid serious consequences for the damage they do. They have done so in different ways in different countries, but their success usually has involved finding and supporting scientists and other experts who were seeking to refute claims of ecological or health impairment, or at least to muddy the waters so no clear judgments could result. The example treated in greatest detail here is the asbestos industry, which from the 1940s through the 1970s funded scientists and publications willing to deny, or at least cast doubt on, the fiber’s role in undermining human health. The authors excel at showing the degree to which such experts were, and are, creatures of their cultural and political contexts.

Jarrige and Le Roux recognize how important military industry has been to the history of pollution. Early chapters show how entwined certain industries, especially chemical and metallurgical ones, were with military procurement in the 18th and 19th centuries. Governments frequently exempted the relevant industries from whatever limits to pollution did exist. During the protracted warfare between France and Britain, 1793–1815, governments did their best to liberate iron, chemical, leather, and other industries from any constraints, on the grounds that acidified rivers and toxic air were a small price to pay for a better chance at victory. Indeed, the political atmosphere of these wartime decades helped to “normalize” industrial pollution in these countries. These broad patterns continued into the 20th century, as shown in detail in the chapter on warfare since 1914. Environmental histories and histories of industry sometimes fail to take proper note of military institutions and the pressures they impose, but that is not the case here. The authors note, for example, that with 1967’s Six-Day War, the Israel Defense Forces became exempt from many environmental regulations. On a global scale, peacetime operation and maintenance of military machinery accounted for 6–10 percent of air pollution during the Cold War.

The book also contains numerous details that I found educational and fascinating. I would not have guessed, for example, that in 1966 petroleum alone accounted for 53 percent of the total value of world trade, nor that today 10 percent of France’s electricity production goes to maintaining data storage centers, and especially not that, as of a few years ago, the energy consumed by one hour of humankind’s email traffic equals that of 4,000 round-trip airplane flights from Paris to New York.

As far as I can tell, the authors made very few errors. Most are trivial. The least so (that I noticed) is that they mistakenly place Henry Ford’s development of the Model T Ford and assembly-line methods of production in the 1920s. (Production of the Model T on a moving assembly line actually began in 1913, five years after the car’s debut.)

The final message of the book is gloomy. The authors adhere consistently to what environmental historians call declensionism, meaning narratives in which things are always getting worse—and not just in the bad old days. In their view, the environmentalism of the past 50 years has met with minimal success. They maintain that when environmental movements seeking to reduce pollution demand that “economic decisions should be constrained by the planet’s ecological rhythms,” those movements are “invariably marginalized and ignored.” The root cause of enduring pollution, and the failure of efforts to check it is, in a word, capitalism. “Entrepreneurs insist on small individual gestures and good practices without ever calling into question the global organization of the world and its productive and consumerist model,” complain Jarrige and Le Roux. “While pollutions accentuate inequalities and global injustices, their regulation requires a radical reshaping of power and expertise.”

I, however, would like to believe that replacing a fossil fuel–based energy regime with something more benign, and radically reducing industrial pollution in the process, can be achieved without the bloodshed and mayhem that the overthrow of capitalism might entail. Capitalism has proved durable, and the most successful efforts at countering it gave birth to the Soviet Union and Mao Zedong’s China, neither of which, as the authors recognize, did much of anything to check pollution. So if it is indeed true that large-scale reduction in industrial pollutions will require the abolition of capitalism, the odds appear sharply unfavorable—both because capitalism is hard to abolish, and because abolishing it would not guarantee a better result.