Happy Apocalypse
A History of Technological Risk
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
How risk, disasters and pollution were managed and made acceptable during the Industrial Revolution
Being environmentally conscious is not nearly as modern as we imagine. As a mode of thinking it goes back hundreds of years. Yet we typically imagine ourselves among the first to grasp the impact humanity has on the environment. Hence there is a fashion for green confessions and mea culpas.
But the notion of a contemporary ecological awakening leads to political impasse. It erases a long history of environmental destruction. Furthermore, by focusing on our present virtues, it overlooks the struggles from which our perspective arose.
In response, Happy Apocalypse plunges us into the heart of controversies that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries around factories, machines, vaccines and railways. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz demonstrates how risk was conceived, managed, distributed and erased to facilitate industrialization. He explores how clinical expertise around 1800 allowed vaccination to be presented as completely benign, how the polluter-pays principle emerged in the nineteenth century to legitimize the chemical industry, how safety norms were invented to secure industrial capital and how criticisms and objections were silenced or overcome to establish technological modernity.
Societies of the past did not inadvertently alter their environments on a massive scale. Nor did they disregard the consequences of their decisions. They seriously considered them, sometimes with dread. The history recounted in this book is not one of a sudden awakening but a process of modernising environmental disinhibition.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Casting light on how humanity sleepwalked its way into the climate crisis, this meticulous study (originally published in France in 2012) examines how harmful technologies overcame initial public resistance on their way to widespread acceptance in early 19th-century France. Fressoz (coauthor of The Shock of the Anthropocene), a historian at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris, discusses how the medical establishment silenced criticism of crude smallpox inoculations, which sometimes led to full-blown infection, by insisting ordinary people lacked the requisite knowledge to make responsible decisions about their own health. Elsewhere, Fressoz describes how the concept of product safety standards was developed to provide legal sanction for a certain level of risk involved in utilizing gas as fuel, and contends that industrialists won acceptance of their polluting practices by pushing back against the prevailing understanding that an individual's health was dependent on a hygienic environment. The illuminating history makes clear that complacency regarding industrial pollution was far from inevitable, but some readers may struggle to make sense of the jargon-filled prose ("Police forces and parlements fit into a mode of veridiction that had not yet been transformed by the epistemology of the crucial experiment and fact-finding"). Still, this will reward those who stick it out.
