Working Environments: An Ecological Approach to Industrial Health and Safety

Abstract

Working Environments: An Ecological Approach to Industrial Health and Safety ARTHUR F. MCEVOY One of the many changes that environmentalism has brought to modern historiography is an emphasis on context and contingency. For historians, ecology offers both an object and a method of study. As a subject, it encompasses not only natural objects—plants, animals, the planet itself—but the many different ways in which human and natural systems interact with each other. As a mode of analysis, or what William Cronon called a “habit of thought,” environmental his­ tory describes change in terms of that interaction, paying attention to the simultaneous and reciprocal influences that work between the natural and the social orders.1 In both of its guises, ecology highlights the dynamic interrelatedness of things and undermines our efforts to order them neatly. It focuses our attention on the complex interac­ tions between subjects and contexts, on the systemic effects of obscure relationships and unforeseen events. A penchant for interdisciplinarity is one manifestation of this ten­ dency, as environmental historians harvest other disciplines for ideas and methods to help them highlight interactions between the natural and the cultural. “More than most of the other ‘new’ histories,” Cro­ non recently observed, “environmental history erodes the boundaries among traditional historical subfields . . . and suggests new ways of building bridges among them.”2 Ecologically inclined historians in other areas, meanwhile, have lately infused their work with the same kind of attention to context and interdependence that has distinDr . McEvoy is professor of law and history at the University of Wisconsin— Madison. Research for this article was supported in part by the American Bar Founda­ tion, National Endowment for the Humanities grant FT-34785, and National Science Foundation grant SES-9223512. Able research assistance was provided by Greg Lind and Ricki Shine; and helpful comments by Robert Friedel, Chris Sellers, Peter Siegelman, and the Technology and Culture referees. 'William Cronon, “The Uses of Environmental History,” EnvironmentalHistory Review 17 (1993): 1-22, esp. 12-16. 2Ibid., p. 5.© 1995 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/95/3602-0012$01.00 S145 S146 Arthur F. McEvoy guished environmental historiography for some years now.3 Inevita­ bly, new methods and new points of view bring into focus new objects of study that earlier works passed by. In technological history, as in a number of other subfields, environ­ mentalism has reinforced the tendency of recent scholarship to unset­ tle the systematicity and teleology that characterized earlier work. In David Landes’s landmark study The Unbound Prometheus, for example, technological innovation proceeds according to its own logic, in ratio­ nal response to impersonal market forces.4 The same is true of Pro­ metheus'?, U.S. counterpart, Nathan Rosenberg’s Technology and Ameri­ can Economic Growth.5 Innovation in these works tends to be linear, orderly, and bloodless. More recent treatments, in contrast, have em­ phasized the roles of context and contingency in technological change. Joel Mokyr has criticized the “Whiggishness” of the literature in the field and emphasized the social and cultural environments from which innovations emerge. Following Eric Jones, Mokyr empha­ sizes the accidental or improbable character of technological prog­ ress; following StephenJay Gould, he highlights its spasmodic charac­ ter.6 A recent dissertation by Ken Alder epitomizes the field’s new direction in its analysis of how the Revolutionary-era French military experimented with and then discarded interchangeable-parts manu­ facture in artillery. Here, technology did not determine its own his­ tory but took second seat to political, social, and professional consid­ erations.7 A particularly significant locus ofcontingency in the history of tech­ nology is industrial health and safety. Like pollution, occupational 3For recent surveys of environmental historiography, see Donald Worster, ed., The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modem Environmental History (Cambridge, 1988), and “A Round Table: Environmental History,"Journal ofAmerican History 76 (1990): 1087— 1147. Recent environmental symposia published in other subfields include Christine Meisner Rosen and Joel A. Tarr, eds., “The Environment and the City,” Journal of Urban History 20 (1994): 299-434. 4 David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Develop­ ment in Western Europefrom 1750 to the Present (Cambridge, 1969). “Nathan...