Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
My own interest, both as a historian and as a teacher in a graduate school
of business, is primarily in the third factor, the management of business's
environmental impacts.This is the point where the traditional concerns of
business historians for institutional structures, organizational reward sys-
tems, and management strategies must come into and be integrated with
environmental history.
I argue that the concept of industrial ecology represents a potentially
transforming new way of thinking about how to manage business, as well
as an innovative new way to approach the subject of doing business history.
Let me start with a little of my own history.
When I began my book on the history of pollution control, I thought it
would be easy to write because I figured there was no history. I knew fac-
tories polluted back in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, but,
like most people, I assumed that it wasn't really that bad and that nothing
much had been done about the problem until the passage of strict federal
pollution regulations in the 1970s.What I found, however, was that the his-
tory of pollution control was much more interesting and far more complex
and ambiguous than I had realized. I discovered that business had polluted
a great deal and that people had been struggling to deal with this pollution
since the very beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.
One way to get a sense of what this early pollution was like is to look at
pictures from the time. In an image of the McCormick Reaper Works in
the 1860s (figure 3), you can see smoke, the nineteenth century's primary
form of air pollution, pouring out of the smokestacks. This factory was
close to Lake Michigan; you can see the ships in the background. Undoubt-
edly it was producing water pollution as well. 6
Unfortunately, I've found that a lot of pictures from this time period pro-
vide highly sentimentalized views of industry that mask the reality of indus-
trial pollution. Figure 4 is fairly typical. It shows a nineteenth-century
chemical factory, the Analine and Chemical Works of Rumpff & Lutz. Like
many other images of factories, this picture was designed to function as a
form of company advertising. It comes from the cover of a piece of sheet
music commissioned by Rumpff and Lutz to commemorate their business.
Other companies put images of their factories on company calendars and
product labels. Needless to say, the purpose was to show the factory in a
positive light. Look at the bucolic way in which this chemical plant is
depicted. Although it was undoubtedly stinking up the entire area with its
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