Inventing Pollution

Going as far back as the thirteenth century, Britons mined and burned coal. Britains supremacy in the nineteenth century depended in large part on its vast deposits of coal, which powered industry, warmed homes, and cooked food. As coal consumption skyrocketed, the air in Britains cities and towns filled with ever-greater and denser clouds of smoke. Yet, for much of the nineteenth century, few people in Britain even considered coal smoke to be pollution. Inventing Pollution examines the radically new understanding of pollution that emerged in the late nineteenth century, one that centered not on organic decay but on coal combustion. This change, as Peter Thorsheim argues, gave birth to the smoke-abatement movement and to new ways of thinking about the relationships among humanity, technology, and the environment. Even as coal production in Britain has plummeted in recent decades, it has surged in other countries. This reissue of Thorsheims far-reaching study includes a new preface that reveals the books relevance to the contentious national and international debateswhich arent going away anytime soonaround coal, air pollution more generally, and the grave threat of human-induced climate change.