Smoke and Mirrors : The Politics and Culture of Air Pollution

by Dupuis, E. Melanie

• ISBN13: 9780814719619
• ISBN10: 0814719619
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-06-01
• Publisher: New York University Press

Summary

Who gets to breathe clean air? Who benefits from the cheaper products produced with dirty air? The answers, as the contributors toSmoke and Mirrorstell us, are sometimes as gray as the air itself.From the coal factory chimneys in Manchester in the late nineteenth century to the smog hanging over Los Angeles in the late twentieth century, air pollution has long been one of the greatest threats to our environment. In this important collection of original essays, the leading environmental scientists and social scientists examine the politics of air pollution policies and help us to understand the ways these policies have led to, idiosyncratic, effective, ineffective, and even disastrous choices about what we choose to put into and take out of the air. Offering historical, contemporary and cross-national perspectives, this volume provides a refreshing new approach to understanding how air pollution policies have evolved over time.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Introduction	1	(14)
E. Melanie DuPuis
The Emergence of Air Pollution as a Problem
1 Perceptions and Effects of Late Victorian Air Pollution	15	(12)
Peter Brimblecombe
2 "The Invisible Evil": Noxious Vapor and Public Health in Manchester during the Age of Industry	27	(24)
Harold L. Platt
3 Public Perceptions of Smoke Pollution in Victorian Manchester	51	(26)
Stephen Mosley
4 Uplands Downwind: Acidity and Ecological Change in the Southeast Lancashire Moorlands	77	(23)
Matthew Osborn
5 The "Smoky City" between the Wars	100	(19)
Angela Gugliotta
6 The Merits of the Precautionary Principle: Controlling Automobile Exhausts in Germany and the United States before 1945	119	(35)
Frank Uekoetter
7 Interpreting the London Fog Disaster of 1952	154	(16)
Peter Thorsheim
8 Localizing Smog: Transgressions in the Therapeutic Landscape	170	(33)
Joshua Dunsby
Air Pollution Policy Today
9 A Fine Balance: Automobile Pollution Control Strategies in California	203	(20)
Sudhir Chella Rajan
10 Who Owns the Air? Clean Air Act Implementation as a Negotiation of Common Property Rights	223	(18)
E. Melanie DuPuis
11 Air Pollution in Spain: A "Peripheral" Nation Transforms	241	(20)
Alexander Farrell
12 Clearing the Air and Breathing Freely: The Health Politics of Air Pollution and Asthma	261	(27)
Phil Brown, Stephen Zavestoski, Brian Mayer, Theo Luebke, Joshua Mandelbaum, and Sabrina McCormick
13 Invisible People, Invisible Places: Connecting Air Pollution and Pesticide Drift in California	288	(17)
Jill Harrison
14 Notes from the Field: Air Pollution Engineering as Cultural Experience	305	(19)
Roger K. Raufer
15 The Social and Political Construction of Air Pollution: Air Pollution Policies for Mexico City, 1979-1996	324	(13)
José Luis Lezama
Afterword	337	(6)
Joel A. Tarr
Contributors	343	(6)
Index	349