The Polluters: The Making of Our Chemically Altered EnvironmentRossBenjaminBy AmterSteven New York. : Oxford University Press. , 2010. 223 pp. ISBN: ISBN: 978-0-19-973995-0. , $27.95.
Authors: Gregory J. Howard
Journal: Environmental Health Perspectives (2011)

Histories of environmental pollution usually begin with the Donora smog, which in 1948 first opened the nation's eyes to the consequences of pollution, or emphasize the dramatic progress made since the watershed publication of Silent Spring in 1962.Ross and Amter's ambitious new book, The Polluters, attempts to tell a deeper history, one dating back to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.Most important, the authors trace in well-documented detail the development of tactics used by early polluters-tactics later adopted and codified by the modern chemical industry.Corporate malfeasance is an easy target, but, despite its title, much of the book is concerned not with the polluters but with their enablers.The most interesting among these are the highly intelligent, often well-meaning scientists and engineers who simply thought they knew best how to manage pollution and who, like their employers, wanted to do their jobs without interference.Many intriguing characters emerge in these pages; unfortunately, in their sprint through over a century of history, Ross and Amter are rarely able to flesh them out.Perhaps the most influential of the enabler-scientists was Robert Kehoe.As a newly minted physician, Kehoe was tasked with investigating deaths in General Motors' pilot tetraethyl lead plant, the "House of Butterflies," named for the hallucinations common to its workers; his success there led him in 1930 to found the Kettering Laboratory, named after GM's own director of research.With nearly unlimited funds from his industrial supporters-and with the promise of corporate review of publications-Kehoe, arguing from patently flawed studies that lead is a normal part of the human environment, pioneered the argument that synthetic chemicals such as tetraethyl lead should be banned only if an "actual hazard" could be shown; conveniently, he was one of the few with the means to do so.This requirement has driven pollution regulation ever since.An entirely different approach had been offered a generation before by the eminent 19th-century physicist Lord Kelvin, who headed a Royal Commission investigating a 1900 outbreak of arsenic poisoning among Manchester beer drinkers.With few data on low-dose effects of arsenic, Kelvin took an approach we would today label "precautionary": "In the absence of fuller knowledge than is at present available, we are not prepared to allow that it would be right to declare any quantity of arsenic, however small, as admissible in beer or in any food."The British government instituted Kelvin's strict limits, which soon became standard throughout Europe, but American growers argued that meeting this "world tolerance" would bankrupt them.This put the American government, hobbled by the need to demonstrate an "actual hazard" before acting, in an awkward position.The Agriculture Department quietly began testing fruit destined for export, but not for domestic consumption; at the same time, the nascent