Das unendliche Meer der Lufte: Lufttverschmutzung, Industrialisierung und Risikodebatten im 19. Jahrhundert.

By Franz-Josef Bruggemeier (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 1996. 344pp.).

Franz-Josef Bruggemeier has produced a valuable contribution to the still small body of literature on societal responses to the unprecedented rise of environmental pollution in nineteenth-century Europe. This study of the German case examines the medical, social, and legal conflicts that were by-products of the emissions that glass and iron foundries and chemical factories spewed out. The book has several great strengths. First, Bruggemeier looks closely at controversies over environmental change in three regions: an idyllic Bavarian burg, Bamberg, at the very beginning of German industrialization; the Prussian-controlled Ruhr valley as it was transformed into the German Pittsburgh in the mid-to-late 1800s; an isolated but highly-polluted comer of Saxony, Freiberg, during the later decades of the century. Intervening chapters draw on evidence from other areas, and Bruggemeier makes general conclusions throughout, but the case-studies ground the work and make for particularly interesting reading.

Second, he analyzes contemporary debates about the risks from many angles, a method that effectively broadens the scholarly appeal of the book beyond students of environmental movements to historians of society, law, and medicine. A large cast of characters steps onto the stage: farmers, merchants, local residents, capitalists, workers, bureaucrats, jurists, biologists, physicians, and city-planners. Where the evidence allows, as in the Bamberg and Freiberg cases, Bruggemeier offers a fascinating discussion of popular complaints - registered mainly as petitions and lawsuits - about the impact of pollution on agricultural production, non-industrial services, health, and the quality of life.

Third, Bruggemeier contextualizes the various questions raised by the environmental debates. He places his review of the medical debates, for example, firmly within their scientific setting. Thus, the medical disputes about the likely biological effects of a proposed glassworks in Barnberg in 1802 are situated within the era's crisis of medical knowledge. The discoveries of Lavoisier and Priestley had undermined but not swept away pre-oxygen theories such as phlogiston and miasma as explanations of what made air breathable or not. In Germany, moreover, speculative and deductive natural philosophy had influential supporters who questioned the inductive mathematical-analytical scientific paradigm. By the later 1800s, the experimental method had won the day, a victory that did not end contention among experts, however, but shifted conflicts about the biological consequences of pollution onto empirical and statistical grounds.

As this last point suggests, Bruggemeier traces elements of continuity and change in the scientific, legal, and popular arguments. He also addresses the related question of what was "modern" and what not about contemporaries' reactions to the dramatic degradation of their environment. There existed, he argues, a more sophisticated understanding of the deleterious effects of pollution than historians have assumed. Some observers claimed that emissions caused the destruction of forests and other vegetation, a decline in fertility of animal stock, and an increase in human respiratory illnesses and infant mortality. Yet these arguments were often based on false assumptions about how emissions actually caused these problems. And some experts offered bizarre defenses of air pollution, asserting, for example, that smoke and sulphur reduced the incidence of contagious diseases by decreasing air's "putridness."

There was also little consideration of the effects on nature in general as opposed to concern about consequences that affected the neighbors of and workers in foundries. Conflicts were not only localized, but revolved around competing claims to the right to use nature - advocates of traditional methods, customary usage, and communal rights confronted supporters of industrial techniques, new kinds of exploitation, and the laws of the market. Still, some commentators mourned the loss of pristine nature, suggesting, Bruggemeier argues, that neither Western Philosophy per se nor the Scientific Revolution had destroyed all Europeans' ability to appreciate nature as more than just something to conquer.

Though he does not explicitly address relations between society and the state, Bruggemeier provides yet more evidence that Germans did not always roll over at the state's command, waiting for officials to decide what was best for them. Certainly, Ministers of Commerce and Finance were eager to do just that. They did not act in the abstract, however, but under the tug and pull of contentious social pressures. On the one side, farmers, innkeepers, wealthy residents, and, to a lesser extent, workers used available, though shrinking, legal means to drag factory-owners into court or asked the police to withhold permits to construct new factories and forges. On the other side, industrialists and liberal politicians demanded that officials accept the only plausible conclusion of a cost-benefit analysis of murky air: industry was clearly worth it.

In this battle to win the state's favor, the Bambergers of 1800 fared better than the Ruhr residents of 1900. In Bamberg, the mere application of a merchant-capitalist to build a glassworks generated better organized and more determined resistance than did the tons of soot that came to coat the Ruhr valley. As industrialization progressed, resistance to environmental deterioration increased but not at the same pace as the rapid rise in pollution, according to Bruggemeier. Rather than a sign of psychological adjustment, this relative decline, he argues, indicated resignation and an inability to stand against the counter-resistance of pro-industrial officials. Centralization of decision-making removed from local hands the power to control industrial expansion; revision of trade regulations made it ever more difficult to file claims based on customary rights. Officials and judges argued that the injured parties - whether farmers with dead fruit trees or workers suffering from respiratory illness - should adjust their productive techniques, work patterns, and domestic habits to fit industrial conditions. As the factory-system and its assumptions became "natural" and traditional rights and usage fell into disuse or were suppressed, one can imagine that it grew difficult for those who sustained particular damages to frame a general argument against emissions. Though the Bund Heimatschutz was founded in the Imperial era to protect the German "home town" from industrial encroachment, it aimed to preserve (or invent) the rustic rather than to conserve the wild, much less to help clean up the city. Urban opponents of emissions did have their advocates among jurists, doctors, scientists, and even the police and won some concessions such as denials of permits to factories in non-industrial areas, financial settlements, and minor technical innovations that aimed to reduce or at least disperse emissions. The book is clearly written and argued, though some issues are discussed in overly great detail and some points that have already been well-made are, nonetheless, repeated several times. It includes an excellent bibliography but, as is too often the case in German academic books, contains no index.

Donna Harsch Carnegie Mellon University