faulker079

January's Environmental History  has a review by Leif Fredrickson of Michael Mix's  Leaded: The Poisoning of Idaho’s Silver Valley (OSU Press, 2016). From the review: The poisonous history of the Bunker Hill Company should be as well known to environmental historians as the Battle of Bunker Hill is to historians of the American Revolution. Located in the Silver Valley in northern Idaho, Bunker Hill mining and smelting operations polluted the surrounding area and poisoned residents and workers with lead for a century. In the 1970s, Bunker Hill’s operations wrought “the worst community lead exposure problem in the United States,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The silver lining to the Silver Valley disaster was that it fueled new and stronger national regulations for lead pollution. In Leaded , Mix seeks to unearth the “root causes” of mining and smelter pollution in the Silver Valley. He argues that pollution went unabated for most of the twe...

Following up last week's post on Michael Lobban's piece on the British Rivers Pollution Prevention Act, 1876 , the second work to be added to our digital library of historical environmental law is Clement Higgins's  A Treatise on the Law Relating to the Pollution & Obstruction of Watercourses ,  published in London by Stevens and Haynes in 1877 (a year after enactment of the water pollution legislation). (An 1882 advertisement for the work is here .) Just as the treatise on game law covered here last week emphasized the inherent conflict of interest between different social groups and the distributive effects of the law, Higgins writes in the Preface: It is to the interest of the public, and to the majority of riparian proprietors, to protect the purity of our rivers, whereas it is generally to the convenience of sanitary authorities and of manufacturers to pollute them. An attempt is made in this book to place before the protectors of our rivers the nature of their ri...

More on working-class environmentalism and the law (see, most recently, here ): Jacobin  recently ran a piece by Connor Kilpatrick claiming that "Postwar America’s greatest environmentalist was a labor leader". There's a lot here also about politics, religion, climate skepticism and more. Some excerpts: Today, the AFL-CIO lobbies Congress to pass the Keystone XL pipeline while noted NASA climate scientist James Hansen, one of the first to link global warming to fossil fuels, is repeatedly arrested for protesting such projects. And while in 2017, the idea that the interests between wonky environmentalists and jobs-focused trade unionists would diverge seems like common sense, it’s only because the bad guys won. But it wasn’t a preordained victory. For nearly a decade in the 1960s and ’70s, environmentalism seemed to be on the cusp of a popular reckoning against the powers of capital. And it found an ally in the labor movement which, for a few years, looked like it might b...

Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company’s Campbell Works, Youngstown, Ohio (c. 1960) Ohio Valley History  recently published Allen Dieterich-Ward's "'We’ve Got Jobs. Let’s Fight for Them': Coal, Clean Air, and the Politics of Antienvironmentalism" . From the introduction (notes omitted): Narrating the history of the environmental opposition has grown in importance over the past four decades as the rapid expansion of environmental laws gave way to a conservative antienvironmental movement determined to roll back policies seen as challenging older legal imperatives and in conflict with economic goals. Since the 1980s, first journalists and then historians have focused on the back and forth of environmental policymaking. The basic narrative is of an environmental backlash, which began in the mid-1970s in western states—the Sage Brush Rebellion that formed one of the conservative pillars in Reagan’s coalition. By the 1990s, protests over tightening federal land regulations ...