Theodore Steinberg

The secret history of natural disaster

Abstract This paper explores the failure of historians to properly engage the study of natural hazards. It argues that by focusing mainly on individual calamities, historians have overlooked the larger social and economic forces that have shaped the response to natural disaster over the last century. Two important trends, real estate capitalism and the entry of the state into the political economy of hazards after World War II, are singled out as crucial for understanding US societys response to natural disaster. As a result of these historical forces, risk became a commodity, with harmful environmental consequences.

Big Is Ugly: Corporate Enclosure and the Global Water Supply

“Just Say No to H2O” sounds like the kind of advice one gives to someone suffering from polydipsia, a horrible psychiatric disorder that causes its victims to drink water from any available source—the ocean, the toilet—at an uncontrollable rate. In fact, as Robert Glennon points out in Water Follies: Groundwater Pumping and the Fate of America’s Fresh Waters (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2002), the slogan is part of a campaign by the Coca-Cola Company and the Olive Garden restaurant chain to put an end to what they call “tap water incidence” and sell customers on the virtues of the Dasani brand of bottled water marketed by Coke. The logic behind the soft-drink giant’s move into the bottled water business was nicely summed up by a former principal of Perrier, that most venerable of water bottlers, who is quoted by Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke in Blue Gold: The Battle Against Corporate Theft of the World’s Water (Toronto: Stoddart, 2002): “It struck me . . . that all you had to do is take water out of the ground and then sell it for more than the price of wine, milk, or for that matter, oil” (p. 142). In 1973, when the bottled water industry was just getting off the ground, E. F. Schumacher, the visionary economist and entrepreneur, published his iconoclastic book Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Really Mattered. He wrote: “The cultivation and expansion of needs is the antithesis of wisdom. It is also the antithesis of freedom and peace. Every increase of needs tends to increase one’s dependence on outside forces over which one cannot have control, and therefore increases existential fear” (pp. 26–27). It was the creation of new needs by big business that Schumacher presumably had in mind. As he argued, the pursuit of wealth through a model of industrial organization founded on the credo that big-

Honest (and Honest to God) Dirt

CHRISTOPH BERNHARDT and GENEVIÈVE MASSARD-GUILBAUD, eds., The Modern Demon: Pollution in Urban and Industrial European Societies. Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires, 2002, pp. 465, illustrations, notes, €29.00 paper. STEPHEN MOSLEY, The Chimney of the World: A History of Smoke Pollution in Victorian and Edwardian Manchester. Cambridge, UK: White Horse Press, 2001, pp. 271, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.

California Earthquakes: Science, Risk, & the Politics of Hazard Mitigation

All members of EERI will find this book a valuable and interesting read. It covers the highlights of last century, with summary discussions before and after. In it you will find succinct accounts of the contributions of such giants as Bayley Willis, H. O. Wood, Alfred E. Alquist, and the recently deceased Karl V. Steinbrugge. In the later decades much reliance is given to the activities of EERI, the Seismological Society of America, and the California Seismic Safety Commission. Author Geschwind synthesizes in an absorbing way most available archives (including EERI Oral Histories) and brings out by case histories the interaction between science and government.

Lake Erie Rehabilitated: Controlling Cultural Eutrophication, 1960s-1990s (review)

Can algae make history? Of course. But only when the algae bloom in question occurs in a body of water the size of Lake Erie, transforming it into a literal dead sea, do the imaginations of the historically minded become piqued. In Lake Erie Rehabilitated, William McGucken tackles the algae question in that great lake. Beginning in the 1960s, increased amounts of phosT E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E

The Trans-Alaska Pipeline Controversy: Technology, Conservation, and the Frontier

The Trans-Alaska Pipeline was the object of perhaps the most passionately fought conservation battle in the U.S. Although numerous authors documented the pipeline construction during its construction, there is, surprisingly, no previous scholarly treatment of this event written by an historian. Coates is an environmental historian who views the most interesting aspect of the controversy to be [open quote]its relationship to earlier engineering projects and technological innovations in Alaska and the debates that accompanied them.[close quotes] Thus, he describes how the conservationist and environmental ideas arose during numerous earlier major Alaskan projects and controversies, including the Alaska Highway (1938-41), Canol Pipeline (1943-45), exploration of Naval Petroleum Reserve Number Four (Pet 4, 1944-1953), DEWline (1953-57), oil development in the Kenai National Moose Range (1957-58), statehood (1958), the creation of the Arctic Wildlife Refuge (1960), Project Chariot (1958-63), and Rampart Dam (1959-67). The history starts with the acquisition of Alaska in 1867 and finishes about the time of the Valdez oil spill in 1989.