Purity And Danger: Historical Reflections On The Regulation Of Environmental Pollutants

摘要

For those who study current environmental problems, it is easy to assume that the history of those problems, however interesting, is not essential or even relevant to their solution. Yet as we debate how to respond to contemporary dilemmas, we might consider the knowledge and the vocabulary with which we conduct the argument. Debates over chemicals and their regulation are, at root, debates about the relationship between bodies and their environments. Embedded within these arguments are assumptions about the nature of both bodies and the spaces within which those bodies dwell: It is history that allows us to understand how we came to perceive health, disease, and environmental pollution in the ways that we do. So what are the contexts that gave rise to modern forms of environmental regulation in the United States? And what historical assumptions about bodies and disease do we reproduce in current discussions of regulation and chemical pollutants?