Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1177/0096144205276991
JOURNAL
Stephenson OF
/ URBAN
URBANENVIRONMENTAL
HISTORY / September
HISTORY
2005 REVIEW
REVIEW ESSAY
tion. If this work is burdened with, what Porter calls, “the fashionable aca-
demic preoccupation with theory,” it is the root end of that theory that sepa-
rates Hall the academician from Mumford the public intellectual. 13
Launching theoretical critiques into ever-more-sophisticated flights may
breach new ground, but these otherworldly efforts seldom illuminate solutions
to the issues melding the past and present. “Most of our most serious environ-
mental problems start right here at home, and if we are to solve these problems,
we need an environmental ethic,” William Cronon contends, “that will tell us
as much about using nature as about not using it.”14 This, of course, is Lewis
Mumford’s essential gift; he wrote history for life’s sake not for the sake of
writing history. This dose of reality also infuses Mumford’s interpretation of
history with a certain timeless quality.
Mumford feared the megalopolis because it would bleed the ecological
health from its surrounding region with technological fixes until this unbal-
anced system collapsed under its own weight. It is the hoary appetite of the par-
asitic city that Cronon revealed in Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great
West, a work that set a standard for environmental historians.15 Los Angeles’s
endless desire to draw water from the hinterlands has also provided fodder for
historians and Hollywood. A more sordid tale than Roman Polanski’s China-
town is hardly thinkable, but Mike Davis’s account of the increasing frequency
of firestorms on the Malibu coast offers material for a sequel to Day of the Lo-
cust. The government subsidies underwriting the luxury housing located in
one of the earth’s most pyrotechnic environments could almost be passed of as
Southern California extravagance, except that a plan by the Olmsted brothers
offered a sustainable alternative. Davis recounts this episode in The Ecology of
Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster,16 while Greg Hise and Wil-
liam Deveraell devoted a monograph to the Olmsted vision in Eden by Design:
The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angles Region.17
Eden by Design joins a growing literature tallying the Olmsted revival initi-
ated two decades ago. As our understanding of the Olmsteds and Mumford is
enhanced, urban environmental history is clarifying past issues while enlight-
ening present decision making. This is the promise presented in Matthew
Gandy’s Concrete and Clay, but as he warns, combining “ecological ideas
with urban analysis is fraught with difficulty. If we want to incorporate the in-
dependent agency of nature into our analysis, we need to be sensitive to the
way in which biophysical processes are mediated through human cultures: ex-
planation in the physical and biological sciences is rooted in metaphors that
are social and cultural in origin, even if the phenomena under investigation
have an ontological status of their own” (p. 11).
Theorists will enjoy this semiotic extravaganza as Gandy delves into “radi-
cally reworking the relationship between nature and culture” to “produce more
progressive forms of urban society” (p. 5). This endeavor eschews “a crudely
materialist interpretation of urban process: the focus here is on the mutual con-
stitutive relations between nature as biophysical fabric and the symbolic
Stephenson / URBAN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 891
lining humanity’s close encounters with urban refuse. His real work, however,
is an ethnographic analysis of the environmental racism underlying garbage
disposal in one of nation’s “trashiest” cities. A surprising and complex inter-
play of subjects foments environmental injustice, revealing the depth of the
problem, even if the history is sparse. The usual suspects (industry and govern-
ment) turn up, but the author also implicates environmentalists and residents
living in the blighted communities.
In its rise to industrial dominance, the “hog butcher for the world” produced
one of its most polluted landscapes. With the most landfills per square mile in
the United States, Chicago is a living testament to an earlier age of environ-
mental disorder. Conflict between labor and management also runs through
the city’s history. Although the scope of conflict has changed since Haymarket
and the Republic Steel strike, the city remains a fulcrum for the nation pound-
ing out solutions to urban problems. Chicago’s Garbage Wars pits poor minor-
ities against entrenched elites, such as Fortune 500 giant Waste Management
Inc., “the most vilified waste hauler in history” (p. 8). A dialectical scheme,
however, cannot explain these battles. In our postmodern world, the elemental
issue of waste disposal is a contentious, complex problem we all create and, at
the same time, seek to avoid.
In 1895, Jane Addams held the position of garbage inspector in Chicago’s
Nineteenth Ward, where recent immigrants lived next to the city’s massive
dumps. Twenty years later, Mary McDowell, an associate of Addams, con-
vinced city leaders that the deplorable conditions spawned from festering gar-
bage could not be shrugged off as a Darwinian fact of urban life. The city
pushed for incinerators as a cleaner alternative initiated, what Pellow labels, a
“movement-policy cycle” (p. 24). The introduction of a polluting waste-man-
agement technology, such as an incinerator, produced a vocal community out-
cry. In response, government and/or industry developed a supposed cleaner
technology, such as a landfill, and the cycle returned. As levels of toxicity and
waste increased over time, the risks poor minority communities encountered
represented a threat not only to their health but to their civil rights.
Borne out of this unique African American legacy, the environmental-
justice movement took wings in the early 1980s to combat environmental rac-
ism, “the disproportionate impact of environmental hazards on communities
of color” (p. 64). In Chicago, Southside activist Hazel Johnson initiated this ef-
fort when she founded the People for Community Recovery in 1982. Besides
fighting the deleterious effects of living in a toxic-bound neighborhood, John-
son pushed the city government to provide public services taken for granted
elsewhere in Chicago. In 1994, Johnson, recognized as “the black mother of
the environmental movement” (p. 122), stood with President Clinton when he
signed Executive Order 12898. This new policy required all federal agencies
to work toward environmental justice, and it allowed inner-city residents to sue
polluters as a violation of their civil rights. The Bush administration’s lax en-
894 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / September 2005
forcement of Executive Order 12898 reveals that the policy is more symbolic
than rigorous. Yet it still offers a means to fight battles that can be won.
Pellow effectively delineates the issues and cyclical series of events that
gave rise to the environmental-justice movement. He follows the Mumfordian
view that the parasitic growth of the great city depletes civilization. The fact
that the great city’s refuse is literally dumped on poor, minority neighborhoods
is only one problem. Pellow argues that the “growth mania” (p. 154) driving
government blinds its many stakeholders from their contradictory behavior.
Public funds underwrite private development with massive infrastructure out-
lays, but the external costs of pollution and water-supply depletion barely fig-
ure into the equation. To pay the debt of this “hidden cost,” more progrowth
policies are pursued and the public sector falls further into ecological debt. At
the same time, the drive to privatize and streamline government for efficiency
pushes regulators to the edge of insignificance. In the post-Enron age, when in-
vestors demand government regulation, one cannot read Garbage Wars with-
out hoping regulators also move to protect the nation’s poorest citizens from
environmental destitution.
Pellow has written a new chapter in environmental urban history. Unfortu-
nately, a compelling analysis of recent events is offset by a lack of historical
heft. At a time when Louis Sullivan scraped the sky, Daniel Burnham planned
a monumental city, and the Columbian exposition attracted millions, the au-
thor fails to capture the dynamism and creative discord that created a dominant
industrial city. The productive powers of Chicago were unmatched, but this
came at an environmental cost Pellow barely acknowledges. The failure to
consult Nature’s Metropolis reveals the brevity of his approach. Explaining
the city’s refuse as a byproduct of a consumptive machine engineered to re-
make nature along the most strict lines of capital would better expose the
strains and limitations of the urban life Pellow probes. Also, a more thorough
study of Jane Addams and Chicago’s early reform movement would place the
Progressive origins of the environmental-justice movement in a better light. If
Pellow’s history is slight, he reveals the dilemma stemming from the fallacies
of a throwaway culture. The Garbage Wars are here to stay.
In Inventing the Charles River, Karl Haglund, another activist-scholar, mas-
terfully traces the evolution of Boston’s riverine “Central Park.” Project man-
ager for the Charles River Basin, Haglund helped facilitate the Charles River
Basin Master Plan: The Second Century (2002). Only partially funded, this ef-
fort seeks to renew and, where possible, enhance the historic fabric of the
river’s sinuous system of parklands. Inventing the Charles River places
Boston’s latest river vision in a continuum of plans and schemes dating back to
1844. Haglund’s straightforward prose and stellar display of historical prints
and plans (over 300) reveal how humans have recast nature to create a land-
mark cultural landscape, “against which the visual character of the city is mea-
sured and remembered” (p. xvi). An organic logic permeates this work as the
author traces the origins and outcomes of plans springing from an evolving ur-
Stephenson / URBAN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 895
ban culture. In the end, uncovering the experiments Boston championed to in-
vent the Charles River not only brings form to a cluttered history but also re-
veals the state of our current standing with nature.
The scope of this book extends beyond the Charles River, investigating the
generative Commonwealth landscape that birthed the professions of land-
scape architecture and city planning. Weaving such seminal plans as Frederick
Law Olmsted Sr.’s “Emerald Necklace” and Charles Elliot Jr.’s Report to the
Metropolitan Park Commission into the history of the Charles River is some-
times tenuous, but Haglund never reaches too far. He is entranced by the dy-
namic culture of late-nineteenth-century Boston, placing the works of
Olmsted and Eliot in tandem with the writing of Henry James and the art of
Winslow Homer. This period marked the high point in a “culture of refine-
ment” (p. 211), when Cambridge and Boston elites united to secure the poten-
tial of urban-industrial life in a healthy civic landscape. Haglund mines this era
not to expose paternalistic pretensions but to gain an understanding of the dy-
namics that transformed the Charles River into a cherished public place. Re-
gaining a history tangled in decades of conflict is crucial to the author’s en-
deavor. Without historical ties to the past, the bevy of competitive interests
plying to shape the river’s future stand to lose a remarkable inheritance. The
author is an advocate, but of the gentlest type, as he plies history with a
pragmatic and telling touch.
The Charles River’s nine-mile course between Boston Harbor and
Watertown is a remnant thread of an estuary that ran with tidal ebbs and flows
until a century ago. By the 1920s, the river was dammed and realigned and the
salt marshes and mudflats were filled to create a pastoral “Water Park.”
Haglund traces the roots of his effort to the transcendental ideals of Emerson
and Thomas Cole, but it took a half century for the concept to coalesce in, a
product of the period and a remarkable talent, Charles Eliot Jr. (1859-1897).
The flurry of work Eliot produced in his short career is this book’s center-
piece. Given that Eliot’s father, Harvard President Charles Elliot Sr., penned
his only biography in 1901, Haglund’s Eliot exposé is an important contribu-
tion. In 1887, after serving as an Olmsted apprentice, Eliot Jr. opened his land-
scape architecture practice at an opportune time. Boston’s explosive growth
had pushed long-standing park discussions to the forefront. The fetid condi-
tion of the Charles River exemplified the failing sanitary conditions the city
had sought to rectify since forming the Boston Park Commission in 1875. In
addition, the need to secure the city’s water supply, the singular belief that
parks were essential to civic life, and the dramatic success of Edward
Bellamy’s Looking Backward provided an emergent clientele for the young
park planner.
In 1892, Eliot and journalist Sylvester Baxter concluded a successful three-
year campaign that produced the nation’s first metropolitan park commission.
Charles Francis Adams headed the august body, and Eliot served as consulting
landscape architect. Haglund’s deft hand and a brilliant series of maps and
896 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / September 2005
—Bruce Stephenson
Rollins College
12. Mumford quoted in Donald Miller, Lewis Mumford: A Life (New York, 1989), 3.
13. Ray Porter, “Inner Cities,” New Republic, vol. 222, January 10, 2000, 45.
14. William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Cronon,
ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York, 1995), 85.
15. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1990).
16. Mike Davis, The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York, 1998).
17. Greg Hise and William Deveraell, Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los
Angeles Region (Berkeley, CA, 2000).
18. Charles E. Beveridge and Paul Rocheleau, Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing the American Land-
scape (New York, 1995), 35.
19. New York Times, June 29, 2003.
20. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1978; New York, 1996), 282.
21. John Nolen, New Towns for Old (Boston, 1927), 110.
22. Mumford, “Next Twenty Years in City Planning,” 58
23. Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York, 1938), 220.