Martin Melosi Interview, Part 2 of 2

DT: When we left off before, we were talking about the Gulf Coast Waste Disposal Authority. And it it seems like there are lots more (?) to talk about regarding how industry dealt with its waste in the Houston area. And I as hoping that you could talk about some of the history of the the land farms, and the deep well injection systems, and some of the industrial waste sites which later became Superfund sites. Perhaps you could tell us more about that.

MM: Yeah, I probably can give you kind of a kind of a general overview. One thing I think is rather important is that we we cant use the term industry generically like we can use the term cities generically eith either. So it depends on the industry itself, and where its located, and what options it has available.

So it's not it's not so simple, and I think one of the reasons why the problems have been difficult to resolve is that that you don't have a ca consistent set of of questions to deal with. I just got back from Rochester, New York two weeks ago and I, for the first time, got to visit the Love Canal site, which I wanted to see.

And, you know, it gave me a little better sense of what had happened there. You really have to kind of look at a place to see its relationship to to a particular industry and set of circumstances. But in saying that, the the role of industry overall in terms of dealing with waste is a is a kind of a complex one.

On one level, industries, for example, like refining, and like petrochemicals, and chemical industries, have a long history of recycling some of their materials. Recharging acids, finding ways to reuse certain kind of materials because this was economically viable to do it. And certainly that's always been that's always been the bottom line.

If you had a a very dear resource, something that was not well always available, trying to to glean everything you can out of it, or recycle it, or so forth, becomes essential. And there's a great history to be written about about the recycling or reuse of material within the industrial community. On the other hand, waste materials that are generated by a variety of industries end up in different places.

Now, certainly in the case of the the petrochemical industry and the the refining industry along the the Gulf Coast and near Houston, watercourse became an obvious source. So jumpdumping waste in the Ship Channel, things going into the into the the Gulf of Mexico via the the Galveston Bay, dumping waste into municipal sewer system, existing system, these are options that were available and utilized. Sometimes they're ground disposal, deep injection, and, you know, and plots of land that were used for for waste disposal, and so forth.

The the determination to do that has a lot to do with what could be done versus what should be done, be because in different points in time, it was legal to do certain kinds of dumping that now has become illegal.

And as a result, if cities could if industries could utilize marshland, swampland that was not considered to be arable, or use for their good purposes, then that was acceptable way of disposing of of the waste. And and we have to keep in mind, too, that historically, especially in the United States, that environment is not economic overhead.

It was not considered the part of the cost of doing business. And as a result then, getting rid of various kinds of waste, via smokestacks, via water, via land, often meant kind of the least important political line of resistance. Was there illegal dumping? Is there illegal dumping of waste materials? Of course. That that gets done it at different places at different times. Difficult to document.

So industrial practices and I hate to be so general, but it's kind of hard not to be very, very much in time, and in circumstance. And in recent years where we we see the the the layers of laws, the sensitivity to certain environmental concerns, the willingness and ability of companies to want to be identified as being green quote-unquote all these things kind of influence changes in behavior. That does that mean that the the waste generation is is ending? Not necessarily.

The Superfund issue is is interesting and curious on on a number of different levels, because the way in which Superfund operates is that those that are found responsible for cleaning up these wastes, potentially responsible parties, would be anyone that has any kind of control over the land or the waste site throughout the history of that of that of that waste material.

So even if if a company had dumped something illegally on on their land back in the 1940s, they are still potentially responsible for that for that cleanup.

So one of the immediate needs when the Superfund law went into went into place was, one, to identify sites. That is, how do we define a Superfund site? You know, what kind of a list do we create? What kind of a priority do we do we make of these things? And then secondly, is doing the the hard work of finding who is responsible.

And and then after finding who is responsible, trying to allocate the cost of that responsibility. And one of the reasons why Superfund has not been terribly successful is the inability to go from that second step to the third step after identifying who is responsible and then trying to make people, you know, live up to that responsibility. And what normally happens, of course, is this becomes a legal issue and gets wound up in in the courts.

And even a even a very, very wealthy company, a company that could essentially take out its checkbook and write a check to clean up a particular site, or to remediate it, may not want to do that, because they do not want to set a precedent that would lead for them to do this another time and another time and another time.

And so sometimes these battles seem a little perplexing because, although they may mean thirty million dollars, you'll say, well, why does Company X worry about thirty million dollars? That's not that big of a deal in the big picture of things. But in terms of setting legal precedent and so forth, there's always those concerns.

So what's happened is that lawyers get involved, expert witness, and I do expert witness work, we get paid, you know, pretty well to be engaged in these these cases. But what doesn't get happened is is remediation.

And there's mechanisms for doing it, but the mechanisms are have been generally tied to penalty rather than to efforts and cooperation that and, again, what companies I think are looking for, in my mind, is as much, not so much exoneration, but at least a recognition that that what they did did not make them holy or completely culpable forfor the acts them self.

And so Houston has a a large number of hotspots and a large number of of Superfund sites. The the Brio site near the the the Ship Channel area was a fairly fairly well-known case that got a lot of citizen involvement and activity in trying to to bring to an end what had been a a kind of a a classic case of of industrial dumping. And so th th this these things haven't changed here.

The the question I couldn't answer for you would be, how do the practices today compare with the past? That is, do we see more responsibility in the industry, and what percentage of change is there? Wh who are the good citizens? Who are not? All of that is is still either mired in courts or not available for us as historians to to determine.

But the reality is that we still haven't found any easy way for disposing of a whole variety of waste that are not going to influence us in a a a negative way, certainly in terms of health in particularly.

DT: Maybe you can help us understand why Houston hosts such a great concentration of, I think it's probably the greatest concentration in the country, Harris County area, of of Superfund sites. It is is it a technological problem of trying to deal with these combinations of solvents and heavy metals? Or or is it a political and legal problem that that Texas isn't willing to take responsibility for these things? What what do you think it is?

MM: Well, on the surface of it, it it's the the largest kind of petrochemical facility, you know, in the country. You know, it's it's kind of a no-brainer. The kind of industry that has made this city what it is is, highly concentrated in areas of petrochemicals and and in petroleum refining and and so forth and so on, which are heavily polluting and potentially polluting.

So because of that high concentration, that's made all the difference in the world. We can go across our border to Louisiana and go to, you know, so-called Cancer Alley, we can go to Long Beach, you know, in California, any place that has the high concentration of the kinds of industries we've had. In the past it could be steel mills, it could be smeltering in Georgia, it can be, you know, steel in in Pennsylvania, the industrial east, you know, Cleveland, Cincinnati, you name it.

So these these places are highly susceptible that are producing these sites. Now, part of the reason why these issues don't get addressed early on, some of them have historical roots. That is that what is illegal today sometimes was legal before. And there's also kind of the lack of will in terms of kind of political leadership.

Again, placing priorities on certain things and not on other. Here you have the classic dilemma between the desire for economic growth and the the apprehension about imposing stringent environmental law. And again, the tradeoffs had favored traditionally economic growth. Fettering industry seemed to be one way to lose jobs.

So if you look at, you know, U.S. Steel in Gary, Indiana, you have, you know, the same trajectory, the same history. You know, the people that were working in the plants exposed seriously to to all kinds of hazards. People living in the proximity of the plants, also. Those people living in the suburbs, they get some of the air pollution, but not maybe anything more than that.

So these these have been kind of classic dilemmas that have been made more complex by the inability of of the government to impose the kind of rigorous kind of of antipollution laws that would need to be enforced in order to mitigate against the pollution. So that's that's part of the part of the culture.

It's not only part of the Houston culture, it's part of a a national culture which has been evolving and changing over time. We tend to be a little slower in some areas than other parts of the of the world. And, you know, can you blame the public for that? Can you blame the average citizen?

If the average citizen is not well-informed, that that's a problem. If the average citizen chooses not to be well-informed, that's a problem. And in our society, I mean the the there's all kinds of clichés. You know, the the affluent American lifestyle, we have the level of expectation that is is so high that to ask for sacrifice seems to take away a birthright.

It's very, very, very difficult to do so. I taught environmental history in Denmark for a year, was teaching at the University of Southern Denmark. And among other things, we we would talk about comparisons between Denmark, a very little country, thirty million, and then the United States, and how they confronted environmental issues.

For example, with terms of automobile emissions, the one way that the Danes have tried to reduce air pollution was to put a high tax on automobile purchasing. So if you buy a car in Denmark, the tax is probably a hundred percfifty percent of the value of the automobile. So what that does within a country where salaries and income are pretty level, given the the the nature of that society, most families, maybe in the middle class, can have one car at the most.

They're not likely to have any more than that. And so you reduce the number of cars on the road, you reduce the amount of air pollution. So rather than having aggressive antipollution laws that would tax or fine people, they have that as well. But what you do instead is reduce the supply. You do it on the supply side.

And, you know, would that kind of a policy work or have worked in the United States? Probably not. Given our historical political traditions, you don't have that kind of centralized authority that can dictate that kind of behavior, or a population that would accept it.

And one of the questions I always ask my Danish students is, if, let's take for example, that they drop the hundred and fifty percent tax on automobiles, would you buy a car?

Up went the hands. So, you know, it's it's, you can reinforce behaviors, but you can also use a government in a in a coercive way. In some societies, it can work better than others. That kind of that if you call it kind of political coercion or econor governmental coercion, is part of a whole general relationship between the people and their government.

And we have a ma more complex relationship and it might not work. But, again, citizen behavior plays a role. It might be be simply a indicator of of of what the society thinks in general. But if you're allocating responsibility, you know, people have responsibility, too. That doesn't take industry off the hook, or government off the hook, but it's important.

DT: Well, you talked so far about the government and industry, and and to an extent, the public as consumers. I was hoping that you could talk about how the public as as advocates, and and as sort of an expression of public interest, have been involved in trying to improve the the services for for water, or waste water, and solid waste, particularly in the Houston and and Texas area.

MM: Yeah. I think that the the question of an an environmental advocacy, again, a a a big issue. Certainly, we have currently, without going back in history, some sensitivity to some issues. I think that it becoming more more popular and and better understood. Some of these are divided often times by by groups and class.

In terms of class and race, the great strides were made in in the development of the environmental justice movement in recent years since the 80s brought to public attention, among other things, inner city issues like lead paint on the walls of of schools and in homes that could negatively affect small children, issues that were very, very much tied to to the central city.

Houston, interestingly enough, is the birthplace of probably some of the earliest environmental justice activities in the whole United States. The first piece of of what we might call environmental justice legislation was brought to the courts in the 1980s, early 1980s, here in Houston over the siting of a of a waste site in a in a a a historically black community in Northwood Manner.

That case was brought by Linda McKeever Bullard, the wife of Bob Bullard who was a professor of sociology at Texas Southern, and now considered one of the sort of the leading lights in in environmental justice. And what Linda did was to use civil rights law as a justification for prosecuting this case.

That is that people's civil rights were being violated because the site was the the toxic facility was in a black neighborhood, and and this was intentional, and and so on and so forth. The way in which the courts operate, there wasn't a precedent for looking at environmental impingements of this kind utilizing kind of a civil rights argument in the case, and it was not was not favorably rendered by the courts, at least in terms of of the of the plaintiffs.

But nonetheless, those issues, those issues peculiar to cities, peculiar to high high concentration of of minority and and and and working class or lower class people, have some important roots here in Houston, very, very very significant ones. So that's one level of kind of awareness and participation. That is the what begins as the kind of NIMBY approach, not in my backyard, that becomes a kind of grassroots reaction against an environmental environmental problem.

Another point of of interest in in in environmental awareness in Houston had to do with the the evolution and development of a recycling program for the city. Not an overall city plan, but a a more selective one, and a a kind of a corporate recycling program. And I was involved directly in those programs as a as a participant several years ago.

And the assumption was that a place like Houston, so expansive, so large, so affluent, would not take to recycling, and that it would be something that would not would not sell here. And it's interesting that the recycling program, although has been on shaky legs of late, and it never pays for itself, is something that was embraced by a number of neighborhoods.

And I think recycling is a really interesting window into public participation. Critics of recycling say it really doesn't do any good because you're not dealing with enough materials that can be returned to use, people are kind of intermittent in their in their practices, they still buy a lot of stuff that they that they waste.

There is a the problem that even when there's good intentions about recycling materials, some of it gets dumped into landfills and not taken care of. So that really is kind of going through the motions. And I think that that's patently unfair because, on a number of levels, recycling is important as kind of reorienting our thinking about how we use resources, and how we conserve them, and how we use them efficiently, and what things we should waste and and or use, and what things we should throw away.

So there is a a a kind of a like cultural transformation that maybe will take time. But at the same time, it's an empowering kind of a a a participation as well. I think all of us today that worry about issues of global warming, and and related kind of kind of cosmic issues, always feel kind of vulnerable that we can't do anything.

You know, what what am I going to do? What difference would it make what I do to the larger picture? And I think weve had that dialogue, and we're having that dialogue on how we can participate in terms of our driving habits, and the kind of goods we use, and so forth. But recycling was one of those those issues that was was very, very much empowering.

And I think it also created a sensitivity to much broader issues in the environment than we might might imagine. So I always saw that as significant, and I was always pleased to see that Houston had done some experimentation, again, public/private ventures Browning-Ferris Incorporated was brought in to consult with the city about developing a recycling program, and in the early years of that program they were active in participating.

And then the city took over the program. We certainly see, within within cities like Houston and elsewhere, concern about green space. The need for more parkland, the desire to utilize and see made available a a a park land along the periphery of the city. These are the kind of the old instincts of of of Americans going back to the nineteenth century, the the National Park Movement, and so forth.

Those issues still raise questions about the degree to which humans should be actually utilizing precious resources. The national parks were set up not to preserve them, but to make those areas accessible to people. It isn't until 1964 with the Wilderness Act where we really change our attitude about rocks having rights and trees having standing.

Until that time, essentially, the Park Movement was a way of of of providing access of people into what was considered to be pristine areas, which they were not. But there is that I think that that urge within an urban area particular to want to see green space expanded.

And I and in Houston I think thats been part of the dialogue with the Park Department and the groups like the Park People and a local environmental activist that have focused on the development of a botanical gardens, reserving more land for for green space. I was talking to a colleague at the university who's been very active in restoring prairie lands around Houston, south of Houston toward Galveston, also the Katy area, Katy Prairie.

And so you have a a whole mixture of issues that sometimes don't seem very urban, but are important to people that live in cities, and that that want to have that kind of a balance between the advantages of urban life, and also opportunities that take them outside of that environment.

DT: Well, this is really helpful. I I was hoping that maybe you could help us maybe understand the same role of citizens, and particularly citizens as advocates, and with a a few examples. Maybe you could comment on on the McCarthy Road Landfill, or on Holmes Road Incinerator, or on you know, as far as examples of how the city should properly deal with solid waste or incinerated waste.

And maybe a third example would be how the city and the Army Corps of Engineers and the Harris County Flood Control District deals with runoff, and and and whether we channelize bios that try to leave them in a more natural state.

MM: Yeah. Big issues. And again, I can just kind of give some general comments. Disposal of of solid waste in Houston, not any different than any place else. That is, what options are there available? And and since at least 1945, the the dominant form of disposal in the United States was a sanitary landfill.

Until the into the 1980s, this was considered to be the the best way to dispose of waste, in a a a healthy way, and in in a successful way, that would be relatively inert in (?) on the environment. Well, they were not. They were a a gigantic step forward. The earliest one that set the pattern was built in Fresno, California in 1936 35-36.

And what they were trying to do is reduce kind of verminrats and animals getting into the into the waste and carrying disease out of there, reducing smells, and so forth. And tha those were major changes in attitude about the the the method of disposal, which was these great trenches, put waste in it, cover it with dirt, put more waste, and cover it with dirt again.

The problem is that those early landfills were not lined at the bottom, and there was no kind of monitoring devices for leaching of of of waste into the into the water system, or methane gas production, which could lead to explosions and fires.

As the the waste sites began to change and to reflect a much more heterogeneous kind of types of material, not only organic waste, but waste that came from from the household, solvents, and so forth, illegal dumping, waste from hospitals. But where municipal dumps became essentially municipal landfills became toxic sites.

And without the liners and so forth, you begin to see leaching taking place. And what was a a big step forward in terms of a technology proved to be less successful. And so as we move into the 1980s, and as land becomes more difficult to obtain, especially in the East Coast and in the Great Lakes, running out of landfill space, the potential environmental risks, made them less viable.

And so people began to talking about alternatives, and the alternatives were incinerators which had their own problems, more recycling, and we see that EPA will put a, you know, twenty-five percent, and then thirty-five percent recycling rate on as a guidepost for the country over the last several years. (misc.)

MM: So there were there were some alternatives, and the question is, what is viable, what isn't. Cities like Houston began to think about moving its waste sites away from population centers. But then there's the dilemma, where do you put them.

There was a not much inclination to put them in the middle class suburbs, put them in areas where people had kind of political leverage and would scream and yell, and so what happened is, in most cases, landfills were sited either in vacant areas that quickly changed as a city grew, or in areas of least political resistance, which put them into often times in minority neighborhoods.

And Bob Bullards early work, particularly when he was at Texas Southern, kind of showed that if you looked at virtually every incinerator and landfill in the city, they were in a black neighborhood. And so here you get the a a political decision based upon a a technical decision based upon an economic decision.

You know, we we have to have the the facility. how can we do it cheaply? where can we put it? And so in these cases, you you see these sites migrating to areas that did not have much political clout.

As our sensitivity to the environmental risk factors kind of increased with these sites, and as grassroots activity begins to grow, and these grassroots groups begin to network within the city and beyond the city, then these sites become kind of pariah.

And a couple things have happened. One is, the sites get closed. And several of the sites in Houston have been closed over the years. There are very, very stringent federal laws on how to close landfills. The problem is, even if you follow those laws, you can't go back and redo the weak parts of the landfill. So if you didn't have a liner to begin with, you can't put it in underneath the garbage anymore.

Doesn't work. You can put in methane monitoring systems, you can put in leachate monitoring systems, you can cover the landfill, you can do all those things, and some of those things are done, but what what you have are lingering and potential problems that are not going to go away.

And that will lead to lawsuits, that will lead to trying to find ways to create leachate barriers, you know, outside of outside of the the landfill sites themselves. So these are, again, a decision that's made relatively early without foreknowledge or trying to find kind of politically easy ways of doing things have kind of longer-term reactions.

And and we now understand these problems a lot a lot better. And as government understands them better, the popular advocacy groups, and the grassroots groups, also understand them better. And what we've seen happening in the last several years on almost on every environmental issue is that the the level of education and expertise that are drawn to public advocacy groups makes them formidable in the in the in the public dialogue.

And when you have opportunities through hearings, the changes that took place with environmental impact statements and NEPA, all of those things have provided access to the public. I mean it it the game is sometimes rigged. I I understand that. I don't want to be to to be so naïve as to say that that everything is open.

But there are more opportunities for for a dialogue, let alone change. In the case of flooding, you do have, again, the same problem of, can you correct what was done in the past. Can you de-canalize what you've already canalized? Or do you seek other technologies, other approaches, a development of warning systems?

You know, what what do you retrofit on the existing system to to mitigate against those problems? And the the additional complicating issue, and I've written about this, too, is that the nature of pollution changes. And in the case of water, non-point pollution, well contamination, are issues that were not even important before, you know, the 1970s certainly.

Storm waterstorm drain (?) combined sewer overflows, those kinds of things that are really kind of the bread and butter of the engineering communities decision making about trying to improve municipal services are issues that are relatively new, at least new to us and our our sensitivity to them. But non-point pollution creates some real problems.

You can't simply build a new waste treatment plant and stick it, you know, close to the bayou and assume that its going to attract all the all the pollutants that you have to deal with. And some of these issues have now been regionalized, and therefore, cities have to cooperate with counties, and have to cooperate with with, you know, with MUDs and and and and so forth.

And the jurisdictional complexities create problems for decision making. Collective action is is more difficult. So even if even if the role, for sake of argument of the of the court change in terms of its strategies, even if you get more public advocacy of these issues, even if you get a a flood control moving up on theon the priority list, you're still having to react to historical realities what you have in terms of urban growth in the existing technologies.

And again, I I would emphasize over and over again, this is why history is so valuable. It is not valuable necessarily for telling us how to proceed into the future, but to understand the complexities of the past. You can't set policy unless you really understand all of the elements that go into the decision making.

And that you can't simply I've talked to people in the public and the solid waste industry, and they said we're waiting for that ultimate black box. We're waiting for something that's going, technology that's going to solve everything.

Well, unfortunately, it isn't simply technology. Technology can be an answer, it can also be a cause. And so you have to think about the larger kind of human and technical, economic and political issues that have to be understood before you can kind of move forward in in and create a policy.

Ignorance of the past, to me, is is a terrible mistake. And so, you know, I that's why I feel, as an historian especially interested in environmental issues, that we provide a service. We don't provide answers, we provide questions. I think that's what we're we're really good at. (misc.)

DT: So far we've talked about the investments, and advocacy, and political discussions that have gone on about trying to provide services to cities to take care of waste from the angle of government, industry, and and the public. And I was hoping that you could tell us now about some of the public health concerns that all these discussions grew out of.

MM: Yeah. That is a a central issue. When we when we talk about urban environment and pollution, and we're talking about one set of issues that certainly bring in that (?) of the government people and industry. But really, it's it's public health concerns, and certainly epidemics early on in the United States, that really began to kind of galvanize an interest in environmental problems.

I would argue, and I have argued, that if you look at the evolution of the city services we've been talking about, they emerged because of sensitivity to public health issues.

And in some rather ironic ways, if I can take a couple seconds to talk about it, the earliest water supply systems, wastewater systems, solid waste systems, that were citywide in the United States, emerged before about 1880.

Many of them 18 late 1830s to 1870s. At that time, the way in which people believed disease was transmitted, first they believed disease was transmitted because you were unworthy and you were poor, and God was punishing you.

But the scientific argument was that they were caused by miasmas, which means that decaying material gave off smells that was unhealthy. And it was the decaying material and the smells that caused disease.

So this miasmatic theory, which really grew up in England and and became pretty well entrenched in the 1840s, led people to believe that if you get rid of waste and get it away from people, you would solve the problems of disease. So this is exactly what people started to do. It was called environmental sanitation.

And if you did remove these wastes, coincidentally, you were moving those mosquitoes and moving those disease vectors away, and in fact, diseases, communicable diseases, epidemics began to to decline. The reality was you weren't dealing with the cause of disease at all, which is bacteria, or the transmission of bacteria through through rats or, you know, mosquitoes, or flies, or whatever.

So what I've always said is that you that a a good technology, these water supply systems, came from bad science. They were done for the wrong reasons, but they ended up having a positive effect.

We see this in England in the 18 1830s and 40s, a very famous case ofof Broad Street in London that was an area that was known for having a tremendously healthy water supply, a well that was was so good that people from the surrounding neighborhoods would come to drink there. And then all of a sudden a tremendous outbreak of cholera took place.

And they couldn't figure out why that was the case until a Dr. Snow, who really becomes one of the most important early public health physicians, tracked the the disease to the water supply itself. And it it was they had to go look into the well and see where the water was coming that got to the well, and was getting contaminated on its way into into the well itself. They the story went that he broke the pump handle pump.

In reality, they removed the pump handle and kept them from using the water, and the disease stopped. The problem stopped. So this was a a a a great step forward. But in the 1880s and 1890s when Louis Pasteur and and and Koch in Germany began to explore disease under the microscope, they discovered that there were germs or bacteria that really were transmitting disease.

And so we move into the area of the the bacteriological revolution where we began to understand really what the causes of disease were. And so these waterborne diseases, certainly cholera and and all the other, and diseases like Yellow Fever, now could be understood. The techniques changed how to deal with them.

You inoculate people, immunize people, you isolate populations, you do water testing, all those things that will help you to to figure out where the pollution resides, and this created a a a real different attitude toward the promotion of health.

And what happens is that water supply systems that were essentially coming from source to the customer were now finding intermediary steps of filtration andand treatment. Chlorine, chloramine get dropped into the water supply to disinfect the water in order to make it safe for people to use.

And so the change in in public health knowledge changed the quality of those services and reduced epidemics. Some diseases began to, especially waterborne diseases, began to fall of very, very sharply by the early early twentieth century. So health had issues had were a driving force in creating these these services.

One interesting sidelight here is that during this period up until the 20s, 30s, even the 40s, it was believed that industrial waste, toxics, phenols that were dumped into the river, were not necessarily a bad thing. They would disinfect the river. They would kill the biological factors and improve things. A really odd view.

But pollution was understood to be biological pollution. And it isn't until certainly a little before World War II, and certainly after World War II, that we have a more ecological view of the world that influences how we thought we think about disease. But the the the question of epidemic disease and urban development go hand-in-hand.

That is, when you brought huge populations of people together, no matter where they are in the world, including Houston and other places, this elevated the potential for for risk. And it was only through, again, these services, and then ultimately an understanding of how disease is transmitted that that things improved.

The the one interesting institutional change that takes place is that sanitarians and public health officials began to rise in importance and stature in the cities as they began to be seen as the people that could best help reduce the problems of of epidemic. And along with them, the engineering community develops a new sub-discipline called sanitary engineering, which later becomes environmental engineering.

And those engineers are trained in public health. And so you have technical people with public health backgrounds, you have sanitarians, and you have public health officials, along with them some physicians that are helping to see the cause of disease. Now, by the time that the bacteriological theory becomes popular, we begin to see a change in attitude.

So if if you understand that disease comes from germs, then what better way to deal with it but to deal with people as individuals. Inoculate them. Immunize them. Therefore, public health seems to be nothing but a technical response. Engineers can do that. Engineers can build water supplies.

Engineers can be build sewer lines. Engineers can can build sanitary landfills. Doctors need to deal with people one-to-one to improve their health. Public health as a field begins to diminish in its significance in the United States after World War II. Private medicine and and the MD begins to increase in importance.

Using medications, you now, penicillin, immunization, all these all these things. And you see this tremendous imbalance in the way in which health is dealt with in this country. And one of the really curious things about the the modern era is, and I'm talking about nowhere and now, is the the the new consideration of public health.

What the environmental movement, environmental sensitivity helped us to do is to realize that in order to have a thoroughly healthy society, you need both. You need private care, and you need a concern about public health. And that's been been emerging again as a as an important part of our dialogue. (misc.)

DT: We've we've talked a little bit about how you've viewed environmental history here in Houston, andand more broadly, looking at governmental responses, industrial, public citizens, and and then the public health concerns that underlie all those efforts.

I was hoping that we could return now to talk about your own career as a aci academician, and how it's it's very unlike what I think was more common in the past where a professor would be involved in research and teaching. But now, it seems like you've found other tools and different audiences to educate people. I was hoping you could talk about those efforts.

MM: Sure. I I I have to give a pitch for what's happened to the very quickly with the history profession. You know, until late in the nineteenth century, historians were actually public people. Thucydides, when he was writing about the Peloponnesian War, was paid for by the Athenians to write this history.

And so he had someone that wanted to get out there and then and to tell their story. And later his history retreated into the academy. And I think in the last twenty years ago so, we've kind of moved back out into the public once again. And I think part of it has to do with your inclinations. I mean some my colleagues, that that's not their interest.

They want to mind the past and understand as much as they can. In my case, the two things that that drive me are, one, is the expertise that you develop. You can't spend all the time teaching and doing research in these environmental areas without developing a tremendous amount of information and understanding of these questions.

And I'm and it gives you a certain expertise. You have to be careful that you don't oversell what you know, but at the same time, I think it its provides there's a basic reservoir of ideas. The other is the importance of history, as I mentioned, as a tool. The the knowledge of the past is a is a powerful tool for understanding the present and the future.

Now, my case, aside from teaching and research, I've been it's led me out to do a lot of things. Some that are kind of closely related. I've done a lot of consulting with museums, where I've worked with the Smithsonian on several occasions, and other museums, to build and construct exhibits that deal with some of these kinds of issues.

Thats been very common. I've worked with neighborhoods to write their own histories of what they do and what's important to them to get them to think about some of these issues that are meaningful in their own in their own lives. I've consulted with government.

I've worked with local groups, either advocacy groups, or government groups, or even private industry, talking about some of these issues, how they might influence policy making.

I've even done some of this on the international level as well. So sharing expertise. I've worked very closely with engineers with the American Public Works Association, and related institutions, about training engineers in in environmental history, giving them that kind of insight, talking with them about about local project development and so forth. And also, I've done, in recent years, quite a bit of work as an expert witness.

So that my expertise in toxic waste, or solid waste, or water, or what have you, has made its way into the into the courts. And so I act as an expert. Or I'll do research, develop different sets of data, do reports that find their way into into discussion of lawsuits. The early ones I've done deal with Superfund, and then I've branched out into other areas that mostly deal with pollution issues or or solid waste.

So there is there are all these touch points. And I've also been a talking head in media, and also helped to develop some media projects that get information out to people. So I've consulted on on some of the projects where I've been a talking head.

And in fact, in our program, in our Center for Public History, one of our goals is to probably produce more media, produce more documentary work that will speak to some of these these kinds of questions.

And so the touch points are many. I mean I I I meet with people all over the place. I was at the Institute of Medicine in Washington recently working on questions of water and sustainability, how we develop new policies, in in that realm. And so the the the the contact points are are many.

And with a computer, and with e-mail has, like everybody, changed my life. So any one day I'm talking to people from three or four different countries. There's once in a while theres a a local student from Houston that says, hi, I'm a doing a history fair project, can you help me understand, you know, something on the environment.

So you you become a a public resource. And I do think that part of my obligation, as a scholar, as a representative of the University of Houston, as a member of of this community, is to do that. That's something we should do. And a lot of us do it. I don't think the public understands how many of their university professors, in particular, do do this kind of public service. It's a great deal of their time.

DT: Well, you've just been talking about how you branched out to communicate and pass on information about environmental history to a lot of different (?), I mean from, like you said, as an expert witness, or as a media consultant, or as a advisor to a a kid who's doing a history project.

I was wondering if you could see if you could boil down some of the messages that that no doubt you've got in your mind that you would want to pass on to, not just people currently, but towards the future. mean why this is important to you, why it should matter to other people, and and certainly matter to the folks in the future.

MM: Well, I think why it should matter to us is, you know, is becoming self-evident. As we begin to talk more about issues of global warming, as we begin to talk about issues of resource depletion the all the array of issues, energy shortages and so forth, it is that essential relationship with our physical environment that we need to appreciate and have to think about when we do almost anything as an educator. Learning and education is absolutely the heart of everything, as far as Im concerned.

It doesn't mean that everybody has to go out and get an environmental studies degree, or an environmental engineering degree, but it is the need to to be kept informed and want to be informed. Not to shy away from trying to understand what these issues are. Being curious, being intellectually curious is something that you would really hope people would do.

Books are not the only place one can do that. I mean one thing about our modern world is we have so many options to do that. And people, you know, they they shy away from these issues sometimes because they they don't want to think about them. They would rather, you know, they work hard and they want to come home and and and forget about the the ugly side of life.

Or they they don't they feel bombarded, or they feel helpless that they that they can't learn. So I think it's, I think the first thing that all of us have to do, and this includes myself, is be true to yourself. One of the really difficult things about being an environmental historian is people expect you to live a green life every moment of the day.

And the first time that happened is my first environmental significant environmental book was published in 1980. And the first question that a reporter asked me is, was this printed on recycled paper? And in those days, very few books were. And I had to say no.

Or if I'm giving a talk on waste disposal, we had small kids, and they said, do you use paper diapers, or do you use cloth diapers? And what kind of a car do you drive? And do you recycle?

And these are questions that you're asked regularly. But I think that what it boils down to is having to be true to yourself, and what kind of a an example you lead for yourself, let alone for someone else. We certainly try to pass on to our children, and and we have grandchildren, their's as well, but it's it's this awareness that's that you have to initiate.

It it does come down to personal responsibility, I'm I'm afraid, and and not everybody's go are going to have the same passion. But it you know, a well-informed citizenry is at the very heart of what this country's ideals are about, and and it it gets very, very sad when when we we don't live up to those.

So, you know, rather than try to shake your finger at somebody and tell them how they should think, what I would say is think, you know. Think about it. Think about what it means to you. And and if you're if you're inclined to act, great. If you're not, you can live your own life in a way that is more consistent with the need to be compatible with our environment.

DT: Well, is is there anything you'd like to add?

MM: I think that's a good point to end on.

DT: All right. Well, we'll end there. Thanks very much.

MM: Thanks.[End of Reel 2422] [End of Interview with Marty Melosi]