Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective

by Joel A. Tarr

Whether it comes by air, by land, or by water, pollution has long plagued the American city. And for just as long, the question of how to deal with urban wastes has taxed the minds of scientists, engineers, and public officials - and the pocketbooks of ordinary citizens. For more than twenty years, Joel A. Tarr has written about the issues of urban pollution. In this collection of his essays, Professor Tarr surveys what technology has done to, and for, the environment of the American city since 1850. In studies ranging from the horse to the railroad, from infrastructure development to industrial and domestic pollution, from the Hudson River to the smokestacks of Pittsburgh, his constant theme is the tension between the production of wastes and the attempts to dispose of them or control them with minimal costs. The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective stands alone in its scholarly depth and scope. These essays explore not only the technical solutions to waste disposal, but also the policy issues involved in the trade-offs among public health, environmental quality, and the difficulties and costs of pollution control, and all this against the broader background of changes in civic and professional values. Any reader concerned with the interactive history of technology, the environment, and the American city will find in The Search for the Ultimate Sink an informative and compelling account of pollution problems from the past and a serious guide to urban policies for the future.

Genres: Science

419 pages, Paperback

First published January 20, 2011

Reviews

[Ashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Search for the Ultimate Sink reprints many of the pieces Joel Tarr produced for academic and professional journals during the course of his long career. Some, but not all, of the pieces in this collection have been expanded and he shares authorship on several of the articles.

In The Search for the Ultimate Sink, Joel Tarr employs a systems approach to the urban environment to explore how cities adapted to new pressures.

The text, divided into five sections, begins by examining the concept of city as environment. Next, Tarr focuses on water pollution and the ways that adopting one technology, water delivery, led to adoption of others. He is particularly interested in the relationship between the replacement of privy vaults and cesspools with the water closet and how this created the eventual need for major, capital-intensive projects like municipal sewer systems.

The section on water quality also allows Tarr to discuss the relationship between public health professionals and the sanitary engineer—a profession that rose to prominence in the late 19th century. He uses debates around the separate and combined sewer systems, and the large personality of Colonel George Warring, to highlight the growing stature of the engineer and faith that technology can solve water quality and sewage problems. This portion of the text also emphasizes how technologies like sewers have unanticipated costs. In this case, that sewer outflows made river water unsafe for downstream communities. The technology required that legislation and the courts scramble to account for this kind of nuisance.

Next, Tarr discusses smoke pollution and the civic coalitions that rallied around reducing air pollution. Ultimately, Tarr emphasizes that all the reformers’ actions failed until new technologies and heating/energy sources (especially natural gas) received widespread adoption.

In the fourth portion of the book, Tarr turns to a discussion of transportation and land use. In addition to emphasizing the incredibly amount of pollution generated by horses, and the overly-optimistic attitude of automobile advocates, this section deals with transportation technologies that promised to link the urban center to bucolic suburbs. This catered to a generation that believed in the moral influence of parks and open spaces and the corrupting influence of the urban environment. However, the adoption of transportation technologies changed urban development patterns. This, in turn, changed the place and kind of pollution sources.

Finally, Tarr turns to a discussion of industrial wastes as hazards. He emphasizes that the Industrial hygiene movement did not really begin until the first third of the 20th century and, even then, focused mostly on hazards found inside factory walls. In part, this reflects the early bacteriological era’s concern about human/organic waste as disease carrier—industrial waste simply did not merit concern based on predominant understandings of disease.

[The University of Akron Press]

Search For The Ultimate Sink (Series on Technology and the Environment) by Joel A. Tarr (1996)