Beach Haven

Bibliography
​Ottinger, Gwen. 2013. Refining Expertise: How Responsible Engineers Subvert Environmental Justice Challenges. New York. London: New York University Press.

Review by Michael Beach
 
In one way, Gwen Ottinger could be thought to be writing a form of exposé about how emissions from an oil refinery in Louisiana exposed a community to hazardous fumes and the (likely? potential?) harmful health effects. She shares that story in this work. As important as that story is, the book has a larger point. Ottinger reviews how what started as a public relations failure shifted. As refinery ownership changed, so too did the communications strategy. The refinery began to involve local citizens through a series of meetings, placing gas detection monitors around the town, and making some operational concessions. Over time, residents began to accept engineering data and explanations, even when accidental over-emission events happened.

Gwen Ottinger explores the idea of identity and influence. She looks at how experts at first relied on that identity to make definitive statements and expect people to trust them. As the messaging began to include technical information and logic in lay terms, residents could follow the thinking and were more accepting. Residents also began to change identity from antagonistic victims to informed supporters. The refining companies also financed improvements in the town itself. To Ottinger’s point, this shift in identity by both refinery personnel and local citizen advocates did not mean there were no negative health effects or risks. She argues that a shift in identity created a new form of discourse. Shifting narratives helped shift identifying self-definitions by the actors involved. For example, over time the refinery became a ‘moral company’ at least in the perception of those involved. As residents became more participating and more accepting of information their diminishing challenges transformed them into ‘good citizens’ living in ‘nice communities’. Granted, there were some actual changes to how the plant was operated, but how much change was enacted really?

For Gwen Ottinger, one can question motives linked to narratives. For example, did the company change because it became moral? Did the challenges by citizens cause introspection on the part of refinery leaders? Were resident attitude changes justified by more participation or information, or did their attitudes change unjustifiably? The links among language, narrative, discourse, identity and power are co-productive. All affect and are affected by social interaction. This case-study sheds light on one way that technical knowledge in particular helps shape these relationships.
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​Bibliography
Aiken, Katherine G. 2019. "The Environmental Coneqences Were Calamitous: Smelter Smoke Controversies in Progressive Era America, 1899-1918." Technology and Culture, The International Quarterly of the Society for the History of Technology (Johns Hopkins University Press) 60 (1): 132-164.

Review by Michael Beach
 
In this article, Katherine Aiken looks at legal battles between smelter operation companies and community organizations that sued for damage created by toxic smoke. Most of these organizations represented farmers, but the author includes the “four-way interaction among farmers, industrialists, government, and technology” (Aiken 2019, 134). Aiken speaks to claims and settlements, but since this journal is about technology, as one could guess, the primary focus is on technological ways smelter owners approached reducing particulate output. Her intention with the article is to “survey major smelter smoke battles with an emphasis on the intersection of industrial growth, engineering solutions to challenges, and the role of farmers and the government” (Aiken 2019, 135).

The specific systems developed included baghouses, large buildings filled with filtering bags that captured much of the particulate matter. A weakness to this approach is it was expensive and did not stop gasses. Two related solutions were to extend the location of smoke exhaust. In one version, large underground tunnels would be used to move the smoke away from locations with people and farms to less concerning (more remote) locations. The other was to build ever taller smokestacks so the particulates were spread more widely, having less affect in any one location.

Perhaps the most exotic approach was something called ‘electrostatic precipitation’ in which emissions were passed through an electric field that caused some of the gases to break into other compounds that had other uses. This was costly in terms of electricity generation, but some of the cost was offset by revenues created from sale of the chemical byproducts.

Social and financial forces were at odds with each other. They were also connected to each other. For example, Aiken shows how farmers’ claims were argued by the smelter companies to be exaggerated. Experts on both sides made their cases. Both groups had financial motivation. The technology was developed to lower the financial impact claims of farmers while minimizing cost to smelter operators. 
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Bibliography
Winner, Langdon. 1986. The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Review by Michael Beach
 
In this work, Langdon Winner considers a mix of nature and technology in the area of San Luis Obispo, CA where he grew up. In Diablo Canyon, as a child he had enjoyed the ocean and the occasional view of the whales as they migrated close to shore through the area. As an adult he visited again to take a tour of the construction site of a new nuclear power plant. Given his academic background reading “history, politics, and philosophy,” he found himself, “drawn, quite unexpectedly, to questions concerning technology” (Winner 1986, 166). Seeing the juxtaposition of the wild and the technical in close proximity in Diablo Canyon became a natural curiosity for him.

The first two sections include a review of some of the questions under examination in the field of the philosophy of science. While reviewing prominent publications along these lines, he progresses to consider how we tend to characterize newer forms of technology. For example, is the goal to ‘build a better mousetrap’? Winner considers decentralization of technological ‘progress’ and helps the reader sort through information about technology. How much of what we learn is factual and how much myth? How do we know the difference?

Langdon Winner finishes this book with a focus on exploring what we scholars of Science, Technology, and Society (STS) refer to as ‘boundary work’. In this case, what is ‘natural’ and what is not. He points out how some argue that when it comes to technological change, “this is the natural way; here is the path nature itself sets before us” (Winner 1986, 121). Still others contend, “what we are doing is horribly contrary to nature; we must repair our ways or stand condemned by the most severe tribunals” (Ibid.). Langdon walks through some of the major questions these two simple polarized perspectives unleash. What morals are in play here? How does one define what is ‘natural’ and what isn’t? Is ‘nature’ a pile of stock goods to be exploited? Is it something that requires taming through conquest? How much human intervention causes something to move between the boundary of natural and not natural? The ideas around many of these sorts of questions are considered by Winner.

From an STS perspective, Langdon Winner uses the use-case of how the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant contrasts with what was there before. He notes, for example, that prior to the power plant there were farms and orchards all along the coast, and they are still there. How natural is agriculture as compared to ‘wild’ vegetation? For me as a reader, the arguments are helpful if not clarifying. I think any time we intend to modify our world, such issues should be considered. At the same time, we can’t be so concerned about changing anything that we are unable to meet the needs of humanity. Power consumption is very real. Our modern Western civilization is dependent on it. Nuclear energy is less of a pollutant form, unless there is some sort of unintended accident in the future. Then it can do more damage than alternative methods. Nothing is free impact or free of risk. Winner asks for consideration while exploring limits and balancing benefits and impacts. 
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Bibliography
Steinberg, Ted. 2000. Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natrual Disaster in America. 2nd. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
 
Review by Michael Beach

In this work, Ted Steinberg looks at human action increases events that count as catastrophic through increasing where we live and work. He also speaks to how our modification of geography, flora, fauna, and climate also increases the number and severity of natural disasters.

In terms of impact to human life, Steinberg shows how the poor, elderly and minorities are impacted more than those who have more means. In some examples such as specific floods, he shows how land values are higher as distance from flood zones increases. As land value increases the purchase prices grow beyond the ability of lower income home buyers and renters. In lower cost flood zones where poor people can afford to live, the increase of insurance costs means they are less likely to carry flood coverage. If all people could afford to live at higher elevations, then fewer buildings would be built in flood-prone areas and losses would be less.

Other examples are shared throughout the book where human activity adds to both the frequency and impact of largescale disasters. Crowded cities give way to faster spreading pandemics. As with pandemics, closely compacted homes built from combustible materials have made large fires engulfing whole portions of cities. Floods along the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, the burning of Chicago, Hurricane Katrina, and the list goes on.

There are, of course, many ways to mitigate both the frequency and impact, but they all take two things; money and social will. At least in the case of modern construction there are improvements, but generally only where zoning rules require them for new construction or major renovation. That doesn’t protect existing structures, nor do such efforts guarantee complete survivability. These efforts still don’t address where people live based on their economic strata. In America, we are slow to want to preclude people from their freedom to live where they wish, or at least where they can afford to. There are no easy answers, and the answers we do have are partial at best. 
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Mavhunga, Clapperton Chakanetsa. 2018. The Mobile Workshop: The Tsetse Fly and African Knowledge Production. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press.

Review by Michael Beach

Among many threads, Mavhunga makes a point around ‘thingamication’. He shares examples throughout the book on colonial (and later) white perspective on African people as objects of study, control, labor, and information.

One striking example was the use of fences in building corridors through tsetse infested areas. Local labor was used alongside a thing called a bulldozer to clear forest where the land was too steep for the machine. They were also used to put in fencing, then funneled through those fences and ‘de-flying’ stations while moving along the fenced paths (182). The roads themselves were also a product of African labor, mostly built to allow for traffic between white-owned farms as well as for Africans to get from their homes to work in mines or on farms. These same Africans were able to move through traditional paths in ways that avoided infested areas during infested times before the belief that roads and fences were necessary.

Another particularly difficult approach from the perspective of Mavhunga was government creation of villages as a prophylactic. This effort removed people from their ancestral homes to gather them in new communities in between white-owned farms. Clearing and building up these small towns forced elimination of tsetse habitat (as well as habitat for nature in general), lowering the threat to sparse white-owned farms. The towns became a form of human shield. This approach lead to overcrowding of people in the buffer zones, and over burdening of the soils around the new towns (153). Mavhunga gives examples of eventual movement patterns adopted by officials that were not all that different than those previously employed by locals, but instead of preventative movement efforts these were about damage control (161).
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I’ll share one more human-as-object example. When authorities added chemical efforts to ‘mechanized phytocides’ (141) Africans again became a tool for the effort. While pilots sprayed less effectually from the thing called an airplane, African workers called ‘spray boys’ were given backpack pneumatic sprayers to go directly into the infestation. This put them as risk both from the fly and from the chemical poisons. Mavhunga offers a great deal of insight over several chapters about which chemicals were used during various periods and the effect on the fly, the plants, the environment, wildlife, and humans who both applied the poison and lived on the affected land. Decision makers only backed off aggressive use of chemicals when whites in the area began to complain after the shift from organic to synthetic pesticides (152).

​EMPERORS OF THE DEEP
By William McKeever
Harper One, 2019, 311 pages
Review by Michael Beach
 
This work is subtitled Sharks – The ocean’s most mysterious, most misunderstood, and most important guardians. The author’s major claim is closely associated with that subtitle noting his intent as “an urgent call to protect them, a celebration of sharks as remarkable apex predators, supersensory navigators, and humankind’s greatest ally in nature” (p. 10).
 
Among many examples and justifications, McKeever notes how ecosystem culling by sharks makes marine life stronger and more abundant. For example, in the presence of an apex predator, prey behavior adjusts in ways that ensures the most healthy and adaptive survive to pass on genetic characteristics.
 
The author notes how he makes his arguments in order to “raise awareness about the massacre of sharks around the world” (p. 295). His hope is to appeal to policy makers, fisheries, and sea food consumers to take actions that would curtail bad behavior by people who exacerbate the human and environmental impact of bad practices related to sharks.
 
McKeever shares specific examples that clarify the points he makes. From sports fishing tournaments, to human enslavement on industrial fishing boats, impact by and to humans supplement the argument to the impact to sharks and the larger maritime ecosystem. At times he also seems to praise more radical groups. Such an approach may make it difficult for the policy makers he is hoping to sway. Along with his nod to Greenpeace or scientific organizations such as the South Africa Conservancy, he often points to ‘illegal’ fishing activities without reviewing what regulatory efforts have come about to define what fishing is legal or not. Sharing good efforts in this area as examples could persuade countries less involved to consider similar approaches.
 
For those like me who are interested in areas of science, technology and society there are plenty of examples of how science, technology, policy, economics, and cultural perspective ultimately influence each other around shark-related environmental concerns. McKeever gives both hopeful and discouraging examples from various parts of the world.