Effluent America: Cities, Industry, Energy, and the Environment: 66 (History of the Urban Environment) - Softcover

Melosi, Martin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822957663 ISBN 13: 9780822957669

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001

Synopsis

What's the difference between an anthill and a city? Protection from weather and predators, living and working quarters, transportation networks, food storage capability - all these they hold in common. And while there are obvious differences between humans and ants, both exist in the same space and time dimension - in nature. This simple idea, imagining cities as part of the larger physical world, has driven the work of the historian Martin Melosi for twenty-five years Melosi is one of a handful of scholars who examine urban history from an ecological perspective, using the city to help define the place of nature in human life, Cities, he maintains, are places where humans live, work, play, consume goods, and make waste - just as humans have in caves, on farms, and in villages. To imagine the city as outside of nature limits what can be known about our past, and our future. Effluent America is a collection of essays spanning this innovative scholar's career and the growing field of urban environmental history. Garbage, wastewater, hazardous waste: these are the lenses through which Melosi views nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. In broad overviews and specific case studies, Effluent America treats the relationship between industrial expansion and urban growth from an ecological perspective. He charts the development of city services, the rationale for their implementation, and how they affected growth. He explores the environmental impacts of unprecedented methods of production, the influence of new forms of energy, and changing patterns of consumption during the Industrial Revolution and beyond. In so doing, he traces how one of the richest nations in the world became also the most wasteful, a juxtaposition of affluence and effluence. Other essays consider the important role of American cities in the history of the conservation and environmental movements. Melosi sketches the reforms and reformers, born out of such urban ""quality of life"" issues as pollution, sanitation, public health, and the need for greenspace. He also profiles the environmental justice movement, whose response to environmental problems is a question - Who bears the most risk? Urban environmental history is a window on the past, but it also directly informs issues of the present: public health, pollution, the role of government in delivering services, etc. Effluent America is an important volume for students of history and urban affairs, as well as for policymakers and all those concerned about the one world we inhabit.

About this title

Review:

"As a collection of essays that span more than two decades, the work helps identify the range of environmental issues in areas of urban and industrial life. . . . In bringing this well-documented, insightful material together with new introductory essays, Melosi has performed a true service to the study of the urban environment."
--Robert Gottlieb, Occidental College

"Environmental Historians and urban historians alike will find Effluent America a useful book to have on the shelf. The collection as a whole will challenge environmental historians in particular to think reatively about how to incorporate urban material culture, technical and administrative systems, and the progressive reform movement more effectively into their research and curriculum."
--H-Net Reviews

About the Author:

Martin V. Melosi is the author or editor of Pollution Reform in American Cities; Garbage in the Cities; Coping with Abundance (on energy sources and their environmental implications through history); The Sanitary City (on the development and implementation of sanitary services); and many other publications. He is Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Houston.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0822957663
• ISBN 13: 9780822957669
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 344