Cleaning up the Rivers
In December 1952, cold air trapped a layer of warm, smoky air close to the ground in London. For four days, a yellow-brown fog of coal soot blanketed the capital, so thick that people could not see their own feet. Buses stopped running because drivers could not see the road. Cattle at the Smithfield show were killed before they could suffer further. People died in their homes, in hospitals, and on the streets.
The British government’s initial response was to deny that the fog had killed anyone; a spokesman suggested that the excess deaths were caused by influenza. At least 4,000 people died in those four days, and researchers later estimated the total at closer to 12,000 once the delayed effects on the elderly and the already-sick were counted. The government finally acknowledged the connection in 1953, under sustained pressure from Members of Parliament whose constituents had died. The Clean Air Act followed in 1956, restricting the burning of coal in domestic hearths and requiring industrial smokestacks to be tall enough to disperse their emissions. Air quality in London improved measurably within years. The great smogs did not return.
The Thames had been in trouble for much longer. By the mid-nineteenth century, the river was an open sewer. The summer of 1858 was so bad that Members of Parliament abandoned their riverside building because the smell made work impossible. Victorian engineers built a sewer system, and things improved somewhat, but a century later the Thames through London was still functionally dead. Oxygen levels in the water were so low that fish could not survive; a survey in the 1950s found none at all in a long stretch of the river.
What changed was not public disgust—Londoners had been disgusted by the Thames for two hundred years. What changed was enforceable law. The overhaul of sewage treatment in the 1960s, driven by statutory requirements, reduced the organic load entering the river. Oxygen levels climbed, and by the early 1970s, fish were beginning to return to parts of the river that had been lifeless within living memory. In 1983, a salmon was caught in the Thames for the first time since the 1820s. That gap—one hundred and sixty years—tells you something about how long environmental damage persists and how long it takes to undo.
On June 22, 1969, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, caught fire. This sounds dramatic, but it was also the thirteenth time the river had caught fire since 1868. Oil, chemicals, and other industrial waste had been flowing into the Cuyahoga for decades, and fires were not unusual.
What made 1969 different was a photograph. Time magazine published images of the burning river, and the story reached an audience that had never heard of it before. Public outrage followed. That, combined with pressure from environmental advocates who had been working for years without much political traction, contributed directly to the passage of the US Clean Water Act in 1972 and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency.
The Cuyahoga itself is now a recreational river—people kayak on it. This is not because Cleveland’s industries suddenly became virtuous; it is because the Clean Water Act made pollution costly in a way that the previous century of moral condemnation had not.
On November 1, 1986, a fire broke out in a Sandoz chemical warehouse in Schweizerhalle, near Basel, Switzerland. Firefighters used water to fight the blaze, and the runoff entered the Rhine, carrying roughly thirty tonnes of pesticides, fungicides, and mercury compounds. The chemical plume moved downstream through Germany and into the Netherlands, killing eels and fish for hundreds of kilometers. In some stretches the river smelled of insecticide. The eel population, already stressed, was devastated. Drinking water intakes along the river had to be shut down.
The catastrophe made the politicians of every country along the Rhine’s banks understand, in a way that years of incrementally worsening data had not, that the river’s problems were shared problems and could only be solved by shared commitments. The Rhine Action Programme, signed by Germany, France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Switzerland, set binding targets for the reduction of pollutants. By the early 1990s, salmon had returned to the Rhine for the first time in decades. The river is now among the most intensively monitored and regulated waterways in the world.
From the 1930s through the 1960s, the Chisso chemical company discharged mercury-containing wastewater into Minamata Bay in Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan. The mercury accumulated in fish and shellfish, which the local population ate as a dietary staple. Cats, which ate fish scraps, suffered first and became an early warning that was ignored. Beginning in the 1950s, residents began experiencing severe neurological symptoms: loss of coordination, numbness, vision and hearing damage, convulsions. Children were born with profound disabilities.
Chisso denied responsibility for years, and the Japanese government was slow to act. Official recognition of the disease and its cause came only in 1968, more than a decade after the symptoms first appeared. By that point, tens of thousands of people had been exposed, and thousands were severely affected. The legal battles over compensation continued for decades.
Japan’s response to Minamata and related industrial poisoning cases produced some of the strictest environmental law in the world by the 1970s, including the Basic Environment Law and statutory rights that allowed victims to sue companies for health damage. The country that had allowed Minamata to happen became one of the first to enshrine victims’ right to a clean environment in statute.
The Great Smog, the Thames, the Cuyahoga, the Rhine, and Minamata are not stories about environmental virtue. No sudden wave of ecological consciousness swept through London in 1955 or Basel in 1987. What changed in each case was the legal and economic cost of pollution.
Industries and municipalities that had treated rivers and air as free dumps for a century changed their behavior when they faced fines, required upgrades, and liability for damages. The mechanisms differed: criminal penalties in some jurisdictions, civil liability in others, international treaty obligations in others. The result was the same. When it became costly enough, the behavior changed.
As in automotive safety, in the reduction of lead in gasoline, and the regulation of chlorofluorocarbons, industries insisted for years that regulation was impossible, that the costs would be ruinous, that voluntary action would be more effective. In each case, they were wrong on all three counts.
Markets do not price externalities without compulsion. Economists have known this for a long time, and the reasoning is simple. What is complicated is the politics of making industries pay for costs they have been externalizing for free. Every major environmental regulation in the twentieth century was fought by the industries it affected, using arguments about economic harm that turned out to be exaggerated and predictions of technological impossibility that turned out to be wrong. The same thing is happening now with attempts to regulate the harm caused by social media, AI, and large tech platforms’ surveillance of everyday life.
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- Nixon2011
- Rob Nixon: Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011, 9780674049307.
- Singer2023
- Jessie Singer: There Are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise of Injury and Disaster. Simon & Schuster, 2023, 9781982129668.