A review of The Culture of Flushing: a Social and Legal History of Sewage by Jamie Benidickson.

When is the last time you sat on the toilet and wondered where the vestiges of your most private deeds would end up? For the most part, we don’t tend to think about waste removal unless it directly impacts us, as in the case of the Walkerton, Ontario water contamination incident of 2000.

According to Jamie Benidickson, author of The Culture of Flushing: a Social and Legal History of Sewage and professor of Environmental Law and Legal History at the University of Ottawa, today, waste in fresh water amounts to 1500 km³ per day globally. Since each liter of waste contaminates eight liters of water, this amounts to 12,000 km³ per day, roughly the volume of Lake Superior.

In his latest book, Benidickson attempts to expose the views, practices, values, and direct consequences of perceptions of water over the past couple hundred years in Canada, Britain, and the United States. In the first two chapters, he describes the unsuccessful attempts of various actors – mainly municipalities and companies with navigation, riparian, or fishing interests – to limit water pollution. Industrialization, he explains, both directly and indirectly influenced the rules of water contamination.

The replacement of household wells by municipal water supplies had deep, sudden results for water use and waste removal. Benidickson suggests this development marked an important shift in values - people abandoned their individualistic outlooks to foster the growth of a community interest in safe water. Accompanying municipal water supply systems was an “emerging vision of social and community advancement” that also resulted in the challenge of removing wastewater.

Benidickson’s story is not one of steady progress. On the contrary, it is one of slow advancements, usually made in the name of money, self-interest, or disease control. Environmental arguments had either not entered general consciousness or were dismissed.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, for instance, Benidickson illustrates how environmental concerns played a background role in the evolution of aquatic pollution policy. He explains that municipal governments’ focus on generous volumes of water at a low cost hindered the development of sewage treatment facilities. Water treatment policies tended to be driven by self-interest; for example, Chicago’s controversial diversion of untreated sewage from Lake Michigan by way of a new canal was motivated by its desire to avoid contaminating its own water supply. Massive breakouts of typhoid and other diseases, coupled with the fact that cities like St. Louis, MO were receiving sludge from their upstream neighbours (like Chicago), meant that “civic preferences and local priorities held firm against regional, national, and even international concerns.”

In his quest to explore the history of sewage law, Benidickson continuously unravels the values and assumptions that shaped and continue to shape environmental behaviour. For example, in the early nineteenth century, water treatment progressed slowly, since emphasis was being put on methodical cost-benefit analyses and water purification, rather than sewage treatment. At the root of all this, argues Benidickson, were “emerging and re-emerging assumptions about the acceptability of pollution.”

Similarly, Benidickson highlights that in the early 1900s, the general assumption was that rivers were natural sewers. Britain continued dumping its sewage into the ocean until the 1990s, and its decision to stop was not based on environmental concern, according to Benidickson, but on maintaining good relations with its neighbours.

Unfortunately, he dedicates only one chapter of The Culture of Flushing to recent times. In this chapter, he illustrates how policymakers and early environmentalists, such as Surfers Against Sewage, finally broke water in the areas of sewage treatment and wastewater removal. In his concluding chapter, he describes the legacy of flushing: traces of antibiotics, hormones, cancer drugs, antidepressants, and personal-care products are now found in surface and groundwater supplies, leading to the degradation of human and aquatic health.

Benidickson consistently provides his readers with substance, order, and context in a whirlpool of elements that shape water pollution, from economic incentives, to municipal interests, Canadian-American relations, and, unfortunately all-too-rare environmental convictions.

As Graeme Wynn points out in the Foreword, it is too easy to call attention to the advances made in sewage treatment. While Benidickson’s main interest lies in water rights, he evidently has a talent for synthesizing a slew of historical factors, providing for a rich and complex understanding of aquatic social and legal history in Canada, Britain, and the United States.

This well-written piece is a must-read – though not recommended for toilet reading – for those interested in water quality, environmental or international law, legal history, and global health. It is particularly interesting for its dissection of the attitudes, assumptions, practices, and values that determine Western environmental conduct and law.

One of its shortcomings, though, is that it leaves us high and dry. “For badly underestimating environmental losses there is a high price to pay,” Benidickson warns in his conclusion. He pinpoints a fundamental problem in the way we view our relationship with water, but offers little insight in the way of solutions.

As Benidickson intimates, our attitudes toward flushing need to change. Environmental necessities, as he says, should be a point of departure in the renegotiation of our relationship with waterways. Maybe in his next book, he will elaborate on how our values, assumptions, and above all, practices must also evolve if we are to flush out the forthcoming sludge.

The Culture of Flushing: a Social and Legal History of Sewage
By Jamie Benidickson
Paperback: 432 pages, $29.95, 2007
Publisher: UBC Press