THE POLLUTERS

The Making of Our Chemically Altered Environment

By Benjamin Ross

and Steven Amter

Oxford Univ. 223 pp. $27.95

With nearly 5 million barrels of BP’s crude having gushed into the Gulf of Mexico for months on end, the summer of 2010 will long be remembered for environmental catastrophe. News of the oil spill came close on the heels of the Upper Big Branch coal mine explosion that killed 29 miners in West Virginia — the nation’s worst mining disaster in some four decades. In both cases, most of us couldn’t help but wonder how things have gone so terribly wrong. How could corporate safeguards have failed so miserably? How could government regulators have been so feckless? As such questions linger, along comes “The Polluters,” a remarkably timely, extensively researched and accessible book offering a fresh perspective as we search for answers.

Most works on U.S. environmental history begin with the watershed publication in 1962 of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” the federal Clean Water Act of 1963 or perhaps the crescendo of public engagement on the issue that culminated in the first Earth Day in 1970 and the formation that year of the Environmental Protection Agency. But Benjamin Ross and Steven Amter, two scientists with a small environmental consultancy in Washington and an expansive interest in the history of pollution, take a different approach. Intrigued and presumably frustrated in their professional work by the gaps and limitations in current environmental regulation, the two spent the past decade delving into governmental and corporate archives to exhume the roots of today’s environmental regulatory framework.

“The Polluters” documents with well-chosen detail how the chemical industry managed for decades — since before the 1930s administration of Herbert Hoover — to avoid and forestall federal environmental legislation despite the increasingly glaring need for it. We meet a rogues’ gallery of stridently laissez faire industry executives aware of the pollution they are creating but allergic to federal oversight, along with craven and corrupt regulators unable or unwilling to protect the public.

The authors show how companies blocked the discovery of environmental problems associated with their products and practices, and how research that might have found these problems was “starved of funds.” When alarming findings did emerge, such as the threat of lung disease from coal dust or the risk of cancer from vinyl chloride, the authors document how “well-paid advocates concoct[ed] grounds for doubt” and “studied” problems to death as a substitute for action.