Urban Environmental Problems

Earth, Wind, and Fire

Urban environmental problems

• 19th-century health problems

• Epidemics: Yellow fever; cholera; smallpox; typhoid fever; typhus

• Endemic diseases: scarlet fever; tuberculosis; diphtheria

• “Miasmas” and disease

• Filth, dirt, & poverty: sources of disease

• Poor’s physical, moral, productive condition

Sanitation and Garbage

• Dumping in lots, rivers, or the sea

Cleaning up water

• Purification of drinking water

• Sand or mechanical filtration

• Acceptance of Pasteur’s theory by 1900

• Chlorine (after 1908)

• Issues

• Water closets: need for water & sewers

• Water use skyrockets

• Creating water supplies
in other people’s back yards

Rise of urban pollution control

• Sewer-building programs by 1880s

• Sewers dump directly into streams

• By 1890s: demand for change

• Rise of citizen groups: middle-class women

• New profession: sanitary engineering

• Sewage treatment is expensive and lags

• Industrial pollution ignored

• Too expensive; economic power of industries

• Fish kills not a political issue

Urban air pollution

• Atmospheric inversion

• Location of cities near water for power and transportation

Energy transition and the air

• From renewable energy of muscle and wood

• Cheap, polluting bituminous coal

• Expensive, cleaner anthracite less used

• Railroads

• Factories

• Blots out sun; covers everything in soot

• Sickens people

• Trees die

• Foundations, viaducts, statues crumble

Fighting air pollution

• Civic & women’s groups attack smoke nuisance

• Smoke Abatement Leagues

• Passage of local smoke legislation

• Newspapers attack lenient judges

• Uphill fight

• Smoke = progress, prosperity