The Odd Path of Early Environmentalism

"Whatever Happened to Industrial Waste?: Reform, Compromise, and Science in Nineteenth Century Southern New England" by John T. Cumbler, in Journal of Social History (Fall 1995), Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pa. 15213.

A century before the birth of the modern environmental movement, New England reformers waged a now largely forgotten war to regulate air and water pollution. The course of their crusade, writes Cumbler, a historian at the University of Louisville, had lasting consequences for American environmentalism.

After the Civil War, environmentally minded doctors and other professionals from privileged Yankee families in Massachusetts and Connecticut persuaded state and local governments to establish boards of health to investigate pollution. The reformers embraced an environmental theory of disease which held that foul air and brown, discolored water were a threat to physical and mental health. Polluted waters were thought to emit a "miasma" of noxious gasses. "The agency of foul and putrid air...in causing disease, is a very recent discovery, yet nothing is better established," declared an 1872 Massachusetts report. An 1875 state board of health report in Connecticut warned that pollution "brutalizes and dwarfs the intellect, corrupts the morals, breeds intemperance and sensuality, and is ever recruiting the ranks of the vile and the dangerous."

The activists won some important early victories. In 1878, the Massachusetts legislature passed "An Act Relative to the Pollution of Rivers, Streams, and Ponds" limiting the dumping of sewage and industrial waste. But Massachusetts industrialists quickly struck back by, for example, persuading the government to appoint members more sympathetic to their views to the board of health.

A more important cause of the environmentalists’ undoing was the new germ theory of disease developed by Louis Pasteur and other European scientists during the 1870s and ’80s. The discovery that germs are the main source of disease focused attention on sewage and reduced the pressure to regulate industrial pollutants. Indeed, the effluent from New England’s wool and paper mills, tanneries, iron works, and other manufacturing works took on a whole new character. In the late 1880s, the Connecticut Board of Health concluded that "inorganic chemicals [are] harmless, or positively beneficial in counteracting the organic matter [sewage]."

All was not lost. Over the following decades, efforts were made in many states to bring sewage dumping under control. Perhaps the most important impact of germ theory, however, was the displacement of the reformers’ broad view by a new and more narrowly technical view of the impact of environmental degradation.