Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
period of dynamic system building in a number of areas, including energy,
communications, transportation, and sanitation.
In the mid to late nineteenth century, when sanitary services became
essentially municipal responsibilities, the decision to choose between avail-
able technologies was informed by the prevailing environmental theory of
the day. Before the twentieth century, when the initial technologies of
sanitation were implemented, the miasmatic (or filth) theory of disease
strongly influenced choice. From the 1880s through the end of World
War II, choices were informed by bacteriological theory. Sometime after
the war, new theories of ecology broadened the perspective of sanitary
services beyond the health outlook.These health and environmental theo-
ries were sufficiently widespread to constitute environmental paradigms.
The “Age of Miasmas” began in the seventeenth-century, when Ameri-
can cities faced poor sanitary conditions and suffered the crippling effects
of epidemic diseases with only a vague understanding of their cause. By the
nineteenth century, a few larger cities had developed community-wide
water-supply systems with rudimentary distribution networks, but contin-
ued to regard waste disposal as an individual responsibility. The powerful
worldwide influence of the English “sanitary idea” in the middle of the
nineteenth century, however, linked filth with disease, and provided a
clearer rationale and newer strategies for improving sanitary services in
England and beyond. In his Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring
Population of Great Britain (1842), the English lawyer and sanitarian Sir
Edwin Chadwick took a bold stand on the need for an arterial system of
pressurized water that would combine house drainage, main drainage,
paving, and street cleaning into a single sanitary process. Although this
remarkable hydraulic system was never implemented, nineteenth-century
English sanitarians and engineers became the leaders in setting standards for
water and wastewater systems throughout Europe and North America.
English theories of sanitation helped to provide the environmental con-
text for augmenting new technical systems in the United States and else-
where.The development of North American water and wastewater systems
in the mid to late nineteenth century depended heavily on the expertise of
English civil engineers and English public health leaders, on the imple-
mentation or adaption of English sanitation technology, and on the absorp-
tion of English environmental values.
Rapid population growth and the proliferation of cities produced great poten-
tial breeding grounds for disease and increased the need for improved health and
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