Safety, risk and lifestyle in public health campaigns in the modern world
Public Health and Environmental Risk: Contesting Refuse Disposal in Britain 1920-1939
Timothy Cooper (Lecturer in History, Centre for Medical History, University of Exeter) and Sarah Bulmer (Ph.D. Politics, University of Exeter)
In the 2004 issue of Osiris, Gregg Mitman, Michelle Murphy and Christopher Sellars outlined the importance of medical knowledge, public health administration, and lay knowledge in the making of perceptions of environment and risk. They argued that environmental history should pay closer attention to medical history and the role of medical knowledge and its contestation in the making of environmental thought in the twentieth century. This perspective would redirect attention from histories or genealogies of ‘environment’ towards the co-production and contestation of environmental risk along lines that would include gender and class as central concerns.
This paper, which presents research from a Wellcome Trust Funded project, seeks to pick up these themes and investigate them in the context of refuse disposal in early twentieth-century Britain. Looking at a case study of Romford in the inter-war period, the paper investigates the contestation of new waste disposal technologies such as controlled-tipping in a local context. The period between the wars was one of crisis in metropolitan waste disposal, a crisis that was often best exemplified in suburban areas where metropolitan dumping clashed with new housing development based on promises of healthy living. Public cleansing experts were left in a quandary over how to convince a sceptical public that tipping could be carried out in a way that was healthy and did not leave the public exposed to environmental risks, such as smoke pollution or fly and rat infestations.
The example of Romford suggests that, at least for a period, experts were able to build a convincing narrative of environmental expertise and control around the concept of controlled-tipping (landfill) as the cheapest and healthiest way of dealing with crude refuse dumps which did not conflict with the metropolitan priority of providing cheap disposal. The process of rebuilding refuse disposal around controlled tipping was, however, far from straightforward and remained contested throughout. Adapting and revising Z. Gille’s concept of the waste regime, this paper argues that the practices of waste disposal must be seen as an ideological attempt to stabilize and naturalize contradictions between claims to produce and control clean, healthy environments and the material necessities of urban growth and industrial production in a specifically capitalist context.
‘Poison Water’ or Mine Waste Water: Uranium, Health, and the Traditional Owners of Kakadu National Park
Dr Michele Fulcher, Anthropologica Pty Ltd, Brisbane, Australia
The Mirarr People are the Traditional Owners of the land encompassing the Ranger and Jabiluka mineral (uranium) leases both of which are surrounded by world heritage listed Kakadu National Park. The fifty year history of uranium mining in the region is fraught with tension between the companies, government and Traditional Owners. Over this period a number of Australian government inquiries have occurred into various aspects of uranium in the park, one of the most significant being the 1975 Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry (the Fox Inquiry). This inquiry recommended, among other things, that mining begin at the Ranger site, that a service town be built and that the impacts of mining, both chemical and social, on the health of Indigenous people be strictly regulated and monitored. Over the 30 years since the Fox Inquiry, political debate has intensified over health risks and other inquiries have been held into the conduct of uranium mining at Ranger and the social impacts on the health of Traditional Owners. This paper addresses the cross-cultural conceptions of ‘poison water’, waste water, health and disease within a highly-charged political environment that comes of uranium mining within Kakadu National Park.