pollution

Ever more numerous, ever more polluting, superyachts are a ‘Capitalo-scene’: in a space that is at once vast yet highly circumscribed, they embody the hidden face of contemporary capitalism, in all its planet-killing splendor.

How can we move away from energy-intensive growth? This question goes back a long way, and a group of historians has identified past attempts, all of which have failed, to create ecological societies. Could this provide a repertoire of ideas for the future?

How might societies move beyond car dependency? Dishabituation from cars will require promoting new modes of transport (bikes, trains, busses) and a “mobility license” offering increased flexibility

Cars are everywhere. Motorisation owes its success to a product that satisfies individual aspirations, combined with the consumption boom and the appetite for urban transport. But do cars put us on the road to emancipation or alienation?

Urban soil endures ubiquitous and serious pollution from past industrial activities. This pollution is invisible and undifferentiated, which invites us to amend theories of environmental justice.

In an unprecedented global history, François Jarrige and Thomas Le Roux explore the political and scientific origins of pollution, and show that its globalization during the industrial age was in no way inevitable.

The historian Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud puts forward one of the first overviews of the regulation of pollution in the nineteenth century. She shows that the relevant legislation, sustained by the belief in technological progress, served at first to protect industrial activity. Yet at the same time, the populace were trying to make their right to public health prevail.

How did physician-chemists go about putting public hygiene on the agenda during the nineteenth century? Constructing a panorama of their ambitions and projects, Gérard Jorland gives us a sweeping summa that favours the grand narrative at the expense of explaining social complexity.