Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
ketplace. Equally important, they are parts of a broader socio-environmental
system—intimately bound up in networks of relationships and mutual
interactions with all parts of the natural world and society. To fully under-
stand the history of industry's impact on the natural world, we will thus
have to do a lot more than study the history of the management of indus-
trial pollution and waste.We will have to examine all aspects of the interface
between our business system and the natural environment, including the
history of advertising and the rise of modernity's culture of consumption.
My hope is that this sort of broad historical inquiry will give managers
and policy makers the perspective that will help them understand the lim-
its of the old, conventional end-of-pipe approaches to pollution control. I
also hope that this kind of environmental business history will help man-
agers and policy makers to better understand the advantages of making the
transition to new, more effective, more systematic ways of mitigating indus-
try's harmful environmental impacts based on the concept of industrial
ecology.
NOTES
1. Matthew Josephson,
The Robber Barons:The Great American Capitalists
(Harcourt
Brace, 1934) is classic of the Robber Baron tradition. For the debate between the
Robber Baron and Industrial Statesmen schools, see Peter D.A. Jones, ed.,
The Rob-
ber Barons Revisited
(Heath, 1968). For more on J. D. Rockefeller, see Ida M.Tarbell,
History of the Standard Oil Company
(McClure Phillips, 1925);Allan Nevins,
Study in
Power: John D. Rockefeller, Industrialist and Philanthropist
(Scribner, 1953). An excel-
lent review article that discusses business history before and after Chandler is
Richard R. John,“Elaborations, Revisions, Dissents:Alfred D. Chandler Jr's
The Vis-
ible Hand
after Twenty Years,”
Business History Review
71 (1997), summer, 151-200.
See also Jeffrey K. Stine and Joel A.Tarr,“At the Intersection of Histories:Technol-
ogy and the Environment,”
Technology and Culture
38 (1997), July, 618-625.
2. For examples of this kind of thinking, see the articles by Donald Worster, Alfred
Crosby, Richard White, Carolyn Merchant, William Cronon, and Stephen J. Pyne
in “A Roundtable: Environmental History,”
Journal of American History
76 (1990),
1087-1147. See also Marcy Darnovsk,“Stories Less Told: Histories of US Environ-
mentalism,”
Socialist Review
22 (1992), October-November, 26-28; Richard White,
“American Environmental History:The Development of a New Field,”
Pacific His-
torical Review
54 (1985), August, 330. For evidence that things are changing, see the
essays in
Out of the Woods: Essays in Environmental History,
ed. C. Miller and H. Roth-
man (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997). See also
Uncommon Ground: Rethinking
the Human Place in Nature,
ed.W. Cronon (Norton, 1996).
