Technology and the Environment

During the 1960s, inland bodies of water in North America and Europe experienced a dangerous transformation. Nutrients were dumped into the lakes, causing chain reactions which severely impacted on lake environments. The excessive increase into inland waters through human activity, known as cultural eutrofication, emerged as a dominant problem. Massive algae blooms drifted in overnourished lakes, depleting oxygen, damaging fish stocks, and transforming the water's ecosystem. In Lake Erie Rehabilitated, historian William McGucken presents a comprehensive account of the most notorious international incident of cultural eutrophication---Lake Erie. With the assistance of the International Joint Commission, Canada and the United States diagnosed phosphorous as the primary cause of the problem and, in a unique cooperative effort, reduced input to the lake from municipal and industrial wastewater plants and agricultural lands. Public pressure and government regulation encouraged the reluctant detergent industry to produce alternative detergents and, finally, reduced the input of phosphorous to targeted levels. Lake Erie is now rehabilitated, but its history over the last three decades demonstrates the importance of maintaining an environmental balance. Meticulously researched and documented, this book will appeal to environmentalists, historians, and readers who seek to understand the Great Lakes ecosystem, environmental issues, and environmental regulation.

Today, pollution control regulations define how complex technological systems interact with natural ecosystems and competing human uses of the environment. Redefining Efficiency examines the evolution of this industrial ecology in the United States by tracing numerous pollution concerns associated with the production, transportation, and refining of petroleum over the course of the twentieth century. In doing so, this book demonstrates that a pollution control ethic based on the efficient use of resources emerged early in the century and met with enough success to undermine the first calls for strict government-enforced regulations. Redefining Efficiency also chronicles the failure of this efficiency-based pollution control ethic and its replacement by another. This second ethic required society first to define its environmental objectives and then to institute policies to achieve those objectives. The resulting regulations, by restructuring the economics of pollution control, have since redefined the notion of industrial efficiency.