12.2 CITIES, INDUSTRY, AND POLLUTION
    IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
    1900 - 1990

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    2. Industrial Capitalism
    • Second half of 19th century; follows market revolution of 1820s, '30s.
    • Structural split between capital and labor; production and reproduction; workplace and homeplace; amorality and morality.
    • Depletion and pollution. Natural resources as inputs to factories; outputs as commodities and pollution (externalities). 
    • Air, noise, garbage, water pollution; toxics; occupational safety and health. 
    3. Water Pollution
    • Pre-sewer era: 1800-1880. Privy and cesspool waste cleaned out by municipal and private scavengers.
    • 1880s: Many cities install sewer systems but wastes and raw sewage were flushed into oceans, lakes, and rivers.
    • Municipal waterworks supply clean water: reservoirs and aquaducts, Philadelphia, 1801; New York, 1835; Boston: Quabbin reservoir; S. F.: Hetch Hetchy; L.A.: Owens Valley.
    4. Urban Epidemics
    • Air related infections: tuberculosis, bronchitis, diphtheria, pneumonia, black lung.
    • Water related infections: cholera (polluted water); typhoid fever (flies, feces, water pollution), yellow fever (mosquito).
    5. Yellow Fever
    • "Yellow fever pawing its way into U.S. cities, finding a fertile breeding ground in garbage strewn streets."
    • Transmitted by mosquito, Aedes aegypti.
    6. Alice Hamilton, 1869-1970
    • Physician, public health activist, worked in Hull House, Chicago.
    • Pioneered field of industrial health and safety.
    • Industrial Poisons in the U.S. (1925); Industrial Toxicology (1934).
    • Typhoid fever from flies; phossy jaw in match factories; carbon monoxide in steel mills.
    7. Adam Rome
    • Penn State University.
    • The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (2001).
    • In Major Problems: "Suburbs and Pollution."
    8. From City to Suburb
    • Polluted cities push people into suburbs after World War II.
    • Automobile allows commuting via roads and freeways.
    • Suburbs create safe, sanitary environments.
    • Single family housing starts balloon after W.W. II.
    • Interstate Highway system created by Eisenhower's Federal-Aid Highway Act, 1956.
    9. Suburban Housing Expansion
    • Automobile suburb fosters privately-owned single-family homes.
    • Large lots, green lawns.
    • Suburban houses designed by Andrew Jackson Downing and Frank Lloyd Wright.
    • Single story ranch homes with carports and garages.
    10. The Sanitary City
    • Water as ecological input, garbage as output.
    • Public waterworks increased from over 10,000 in 1932 to over 14,000 in 1940.
    • Regional water districts are formed to deliver service to customers.
    • Public works Administration (PWA) during the New Deal years financed 2500 water projects.
    • Water filtration, control of chlorination, and aeration.
    11. Sewer Systems
    • Between 1933 and 1939, the Public Works Administration (PWA) funded 65% of the nation's new sewage disposal plants.
    • Filtration through sand and gravel beds, sludge digestion, chemical precipitation, and the used of septic tanks and contact beds.
    • By 1945, 63 percent of the U.S. population lived in communities with sewage treatment plants.
    12. Pollution and Industry
    • Between WW I and WW II, pollution expands from sewage and domestic wastes to include industrial effluents.
    • Pollution ranges from mineral matter in coal and iron industries, acids, and salts from mines and oil wells, lead from slag, benzene, toluene and naphtha from oil distilleries, sulphites from pulp mills, grease and oils from manufacturing, arsenic from paints, animal refuse from meat-packing plants, etc.
    13. New Chemicals
    • After W.W. II, new chemicals enter waste stream.
    • Fish kills; ecologically dead lakes.
    • Petroleum distillates, detergents, and pesticides produced burning rivers, foaming streams, and dying lakes.
    14. Post WW II, Pollution Control
    • Water pollution Control Act of 1948 provides loans to local interstate agencies, municipalities and states.
    • Grants for municipal sewage treatment plants.
    • Interconnected problems of inputs and outputs to urban water supplies.
    15. Suburbs and Race
    • Race was a decisive factor in the evolution of American cities and suburbs.
    • "Racial prejudice and a pervasive fondness for grass and solidude made private and detached houses affordable and desirable to the middle class" Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier (1985).
    • Minority workers kept in inner cities by wage and housing discrimination and lack of mass transit systems.
    16. Andrew Hurley
    • University of Missouri, St. Louis.
    • Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary Indiana, 1945-1980, (1995).
    17. Gary, Indiana
    • By end of World War II, Gary is one of the most polluted cities: 1. Air; 2. Water; 3. Land pollution.
    18. Gary, Indiana
    • 1980: Few waste sites in white residential areas of Miller, Glen Park, and Aetna; most located in black population areas; blacks are 80% of total population.
    19. Questions for Discussion
    • Is human health the primary motivation behind environmental clean-ups? Should it be?
    • What role does the automobile play in the preservation and pollution of wilderness?