Urban environmental issues

Earth, Wind, and Fire

“Medical Geography”:
Health of the Country

• Ignorant of causes of disease, migrants sought “healthy” land

• Higher lands, watered but well drained

• Healthy air: Breezy and not heavily forested

• Clean waters, not pooled or stagnant

• Fear of sickly “miasmas” and “emanations” from soils, waters, forests, cleared land

• Climate

• Not too hot or cold, not too humid, not too wet or dry

The Organic City

• Pigs and cows of the poor

• Consumed garbage and sewage

• Animal power

• 1895: Horses produced 2.5 million pounds of manure and 60,000 gallons of urine daily

• Urban horses lived about 3 years and were left where they died

Urban environmental health

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

• Endemic diseases: Scarlet fever; tuberculosis; diphtheria

• Source? Miasmas, filth, dirt, poverty

U.S. deaths from disease, 1907

Garbage

• Dumping in lots, rivers, or the sea; no organized garbage collection

• New York’s White Coats begin collecting manure and garbage, 1895

Cleaning up water

• Providing pure drinking water

• Urban water systems beginning 1840s

• By 1900, 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

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