B6
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KLMNO Book World ENVIRONMENT REVIEW BY SETH SHULMAN
Blowing smoke across the land W
THE POLLUTERS
The Making of Our Chemically Altered Environment By Benjamin Ross and Steven Amter Oxford Univ. 223 pp. $27.95
ith nearly 5 million barrels of BP’s crude having gushed into the Gulf of Mexico for months on end,
the summer of 2010 will long be remembered for environmental catastrophe. News of the oil spill came close on the heels of the Up- per Big Branch coal mine explo- sion that killed 29 miners in West Virginia — the nation’s worst min- ing disaster in some four decades. In both cases, most of us couldn’t help but wonder how things have gone so terribly wrong. How could corporate safeguards have failed so miserably? How could govern- ment regulators have been so feck- less? As such questions linger, along comes “The Polluters,” a re- markably timely, extensively re- searched and accessible book of- fering a fresh perspective as we search for answers. Most works on U.S. environ- mental history begin with the wa- tershed publication in 1962 of Ra- chel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” the federal Clean Water Act of 1963 or perhaps the crescendo of public engagement on the issue that cul- minated in the first Earth Day in 1970 and the formation that year of the Environmental Protection Agency. But Benjamin Ross and Steven Amter, two scientists with a small environmental consultan- cy in Washington and an expan- sive interest in the history of pol- lution, take a different approach. Intrigued and presumably frus- trated in their professional work by the gaps and limitations in cur- rent environmental regulation, the two spent the past decade delving into governmental and corporate archives to exhume the roots of today’s environmental regulatory framework. “The Polluters” documents with well-chosen detail how the chem- ical industry managed for decades —since before the 1930s adminis- tration of Herbert Hoover — to avoid and forestall federal envi- ronmental legislation despite the increasingly glaring need for it. We meet a rogues’ gallery of stri- dently laissez faire industry exec- utives aware of the pollution they are creating but allergic to federal oversight, along with craven and corrupt regulators unable or un- willing to protect the public.
disease.” Nonetheless, then-Secre- tary of Commerce Herbert Hoover explicitly reminded a news confer- ence that his department’s Bureau of Mines — the best hope for feder- al regulation at the time — had been “created as a service bureau for the mining industry,” accord- ing to press accounts from the pe- riod. Following Hoover’s lead, the government scientists looking into the health threat served the wishes of industry executives, even designing epidemiological studies to include only “active” miners, so that anyone who had gotten sick enough in the mines to keep them from work would be ex- cluded from the statistics. This book is too well researched and its tone too reasonable for it to be considered a polemic. For one thing, there is plenty of blame to go around. “The Polluters” makes much of the public’s and the media’s long-standing infatua- tion with the chemical industry’s products. “Modern chemistry rubs its Aladdin’s lamp, shakes up its test tubes, and presto!” So said The Washington Post in 1929, as quoted by the authors. Ultimately, “The Polluters” contends that only loud public outcry has ever man- aged to tip the balance in favor of the kinds of tough environmental laws we desperately need. Alas, as Ross and Amter chronicle, too of- ten the public has either been in the thrall of the latest chemical convenience or has let its out- raged calls for a cleaner environ- ment get squelched en route to Capitol Hill. It is, of course, an open question whether we will do the same in the face of the latest environmental insults. Thankfully, perhaps, this is not
SMOG OVER GLENDALE, CALIF., OBSCURES THE SAN GABRIEL MOUNTAINS; GEORGE STEINMETZ/CORBIS
The authors show how compa- nies blocked the discovery of envi- ronmental problems associated with their products and practices, and how research that might have found these problems was “starved of funds.” When alarming findings did emerge, such as the threat of lung disease from coal dust or the risk of cancer from vi- nyl chloride, the authors docu- ment how “well-paid advocates concoct[ed] grounds for doubt” and “studied” problems to death as a substitute for action. The authors dredge up this en-
raging, disheartening and ulti- mately illuminating history lesson
for a reason: The tactics, which they contend came into full bloom by 1950, set the stage for the envi- ronmental woes we face today. As they put it, “Sixty years later, these strategies are still in use, protect- ing polluters who spew out toxic chemicals and globe-warming gases.” Written before the BP spill and the West Virginia mining dis- aster, the book has a historical perspective that resonates power- fully in the face of such recent de- bacles.
Some parts of the story are wrenchingly familiar. Just as to- bacco executives twisted the sci- ence and strove to manufacture
uncertainty about the dangers of their products even when they were fully aware of them, so did the chemical industry undertake a similar campaign through its main lobbying arm, the Manufac- turing Chemists Association (now the Chemical Manufacturers As- sociation). The authors quote the minutes of a 1950 meeting of the industry group where, despite the growing evidence of illness and an acute case in Pennsylvania in which pollution from a zinc smelt- er had led to the deaths of 20 near- by residents, a plan was explicitly outlined “to prevent the devel- opment of public demand for
drastic and impractical air pollu- tion and smoke control legisla- tion.”
If the tactics sound familiar, the
tracing of the roots of this story as far back as the early 20th century will probably surprise many read- ers. “The Polluters” documents how the coal industry co-opted federal regulators at the Bureau of Mines in the 1920s to avoid rules that would protect miners against the growing scourge of lung dis- ease. As early as 1924, the authors
show, the scientific literature con- tained studies indicating that “coal dust itself must cause lung
an exhaustive history of environ- mental regulation. The book’s brevity (171 pages of text) and broad purview (including fights over issues from pesticide reg- ulation to smog in Los Angeles and elsewhere) leave the authors open to the charge that they have cherrypicked the record to bolster their case. Still, this is little-known history that makes for fascinating reading. It places our past sum- mer of environmental disaster and discontent into its proper per- spective, reminding us that our nation’s continuing fight for a clean environment has been a long and often dirty one.
bookworld@washpost.com
Seth Shulman is a journalist and the author, most recently, of “The
Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell’s Secret.”
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2010
CULTURE REVIEW BY ELLEN MCCARTHY Naughtiness makes us all feel nice
HOW TO BECOME A SCANDAL Adventures in Bad Behavior By Laura Kipnis
Metropolitan. 209 pp. $24 I
n a recent blog post, Robert Wright, author of “The Evolu- tion of God,” tells of his re- turn from a weeklong silent meditation retreat. He came back to the working world centered, mindful and teeming with goodwill toward all. Then he turned on his computer, saw a headline about Par- is Hilton’s cocaine bust and froze. It was a debased desire luring him to wallow in her misery, he knew, and so Wright resisted — until he saw the word “video.” He clicked. How could he not? Scandal-watching has become our most vibrant national pastime. Whole industries have grown up in the past decade to help us cre- ate, document and dissect the transgressions of the possibly rich and quasi-famous. While the rest of the magazine world has strug-
“SCANDAL PROTAGONISTS”: Eliot Spitzer, Linda Tripp, left, and Lisa Nowak
gled, US Weekly and its ilk have flourished, elevating relative un- knowns — hey, Kardashians! — to their cover spreads on the rare oc- casions when our real stars were being tediously well-behaved. The grip of this celebrity-defa-
mation vortex on Wright and the rest of society is a little scary and hugely fascinating. Did you hear that Snooki got locked up for drunkenly annoying people at the beach? Of course you did. Now: Can you explain why any of us care? That’s not, unfortunately, some- thing Laura Kipnis sheds much light on in her new book, “How to Become a Scandal.” Kipnis dis- misses the type of flaps that make TMZ and Access Hollywood spin as “insipid, mass-produced, mind- numbing product.” The author is more demanding in her definition of scandal: “I want shattered lives, downfall, disgrace and ruin, the rage of the community directed at its transgressors.” She seeks not to explore the way our bottomless ap- petite for disgraced public figures is shaping society, but to provide an almost-academic “theory of scandal.” It is, as she sees it, intel- lectually “virgin terrain.” To guide her inquiry, Kipnis, a
cultural critic and professor at Northwestern University best known for her 2003 book, “Against Love: A Polemic,” uses the stories of four “scandal protagonists” that particularly captured her interest. She recounts the tales of Lisa No- wak, the NASA astronaut who drove
through the night — supposedly wearing a diaper to avoid potty breaks — to confront her romantic rival with a can of pepper spray; Linda Tripp, arguably the most vil- ified character of the Clinton-Le- winsky affair; and James Frey, an author who pulled the wool over Oprah’s eyes with a riveting account of addiction recovery that turned out to be as much fiction as fact. Least notorious today is Sol Wach- tler, a married New York state chief justice who brought his career to a spectacular halt by masquerading as a series of elaborate characters, including a seedy detective, to threaten his socialite ex-girlfriend. Kipnis expertly rebuilds the ten- sion of each case, unraveling the details of her subjects’ downfalls so methodically that I held my breath, willing these people to avoid catastrophes that have long since passed. And she treats her subjects with great humanity and an empathetic there-but-for-the- grace-of-God-go-I reverence. Kip- nis knows that, for all of us, the edge is a little too close for com- fort. She traces the psychological undoing of her chosen protago- nists using police records, news re- ports and after-the-fact explana- tions from the subjects them- selves. For all their delusion, Kipnis makes clear that these were people who did what they some- how thought they had to do. A teasing highlight of the book comes in a parenthetical aside, when Kipnis notes that psychol- ogists have found that schaden-
freude is always most potent in “areas of what they call ‘self-rel- evance.’ ” We delight in others’ misfortune most blithely when it could’ve happened to us? Wow. I wish there’d been more on that. In one of several distracting de- cisions, Kipnis opens with a lengthy anecdote of a married, sanctimonious governor caught with a high-priced hooker. Page 5 even has a picture of Eliot Spitzer, yet the author never uses his name. Is she protecting him while making pointed examples of the others? Later the book bogs down in philosophical discussions about the nature of ugliness and a dis- section of misleading facial ex- pressions. (This is in the Linda Tripp chapter.) The book is most effective as a collection of well-told parables, but in the end fails to of- fer any illuminating revelations about a world habitually riveted by the humiliation of others. So, a confession: I almost always choose the longest supermarket line. More time to check out what other people have in their baskets and to make my way through this week’s People magazine (which I don’t buy, just devour from cover to cover). Maybe soon Kipnis or someone else will tell me and Robert Wright —and the rest of America — about the spell that we’re under.
mccarthye@washpost.com
Ellen McCarthy is a writer in The Washington Post’s Style section.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: ANDREW HARRER/BLOOMBERG NEWS; NASA; JOHN GILLIS/ASSOCIATED PRESS
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