TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 269 ning of higher-count yarns and the more extensive production of synthetic and blended fabrics. Some firms have exploited their assets to diversify into ancillary forms of manufacturing, such as cosmetics and brake linings, or into entirely different types of economic activi ties, such as warehousing and real estate management. Through a cooperatively negotiated process of specialization, diversification, and overseas investment, Japan’s textile industry has persisted and profited, although it has not in every respect thrived. Gary D. Allinson Dr. Allinson is the coeditor with Yasunori Sone of Political Dynamics in Contempo raryJapan (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), and the author of numerous books and essays on Japan’s modern history. The Road to Love Canal: Managing Industrial Waste before EPA. By Craig E. Colten and Peter N. Skinner. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1996. Pp. xiv+217; figures, tables, notes, index. $35.00 (hardcover) $14.95 (paper). Between roughly 1950 and 1980, over 1,500 chemical plants dumped an admitted total of 762 million tons of toxic waste into the nation’s ponds and lagoons and into its pits and landfills. In doing so, they created enormous health and environmental hazards. Only since the passage ofSuperfund legislation in 1980 (in the wake of the Love Canal disaster) have we begun to address them, and still only inadequately. Why was it that, prior to the 1972 National Environmental Protec tion Act, hazardous wastes were routinely disposed of in ways that failed to take into account the health and well-being of the public and the environment? Representatives of corporate polluters re spond that, before that time, industry was ignorant either of the po tential dangers posed by their waste disposal practices or of the tech nology needed to properly deal with them. Historian Joel Tarr has supported this view, writing that toxic waste management practices of the past accorded with the available knowledge. Craig E. Colton, senior program manager for a Washington, D.C., environmental consulting firm, and Peter N. Skinner, a member of the Environmental Protection Bureau of the New York State Attor ney General’s Office, decisively challenge this explanation in their well-researched and carefully reasoned study, The Road to Love Canal: Managing Industrial Waste before EPA. This is the first book-length study to support the conclusions drawn byjoe Pratt, in his 1980 arti cle on the pre-WorldWar II oil industry, and by Christopher Sellers, in his recent article on industrial hygiene and the early 20th-century understanding of pollution and toxicology; it effectively puts to rest the claims of toxic waste dumpers that they simply didn’t know any better. 270 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Examining the contemporary writings of experts in such fields as public health, toxicology, and hydrology over the first six decades of this century, as well as the recent court testimony of expert witnesses regarding past practices of industrial polluters, Colten and Skinner find that numerous national organizations in the fields of public safety and manufacturing existed and that they were providing and disseminating the information and guidance needed for the proper treatment ofwastes. Disposers ofindustrial waste did, in fact, possess sufficient knowledge of the potential dangers of chemical wastes to foster cautious practices. Some corporations acted on this knowl edge; others, eager to keep costs low and profits as high as possible, did not. Such negligence was not constant between 1900 and 1970, how ever. Believers in industrial and social progress will be dismayed by the authors’ revelations that industrial waste disposers actually dis played greater interest in public health issues and were more likely to seek improved methods of waste treatment at the beginning of the century, when common law reflected public health concerns and provided a legal deterrent to polluting practices. Heavy demands on the chemical industry during World War II and a loosening of tort law—which by the 1940s had rendered ineffective previous nuisance laws—encouraged corporations to choose the path of minimal treat ment at the lowest costs. The results are clear—thousands of Superfund sites around the country. The authors identify three industry practices that led di rectly to the creation of...