"You will observe with Concern how long a useful Truth may be known and exist before it is generally receiv’d and practic’d on.”  -- Benjamin Franklin, commenting on preventable pollution in a letter to a friend.

12. Earth Day and Public Rights

To Benjamin Franklin it was a question of "public rights."

Should the tanneries and slaughterhouses be allowed to dump their wastes in the creek not two blocks from Market Street? "Many offensive and unwholesome smells do arise," Franklin said, "much to the great anoyance of the neighborhood."

The water pollution controversy that erupted in the summer of 1739 pitted Franklin and reform-minded people of Philadelphia against tanners, butchers and other tradesmen. Both factions, reformers and tradesmen, circulated pamphlets, wrote letters and demonstrated in parades. Tradesmen opposed an end to the waste dumping and accused Franklin of making a daring attack on their liberties. In response, Franklin said he was arguing for "public rights" and that he was making only "a modest attempt to deliver a great number ... from being poisoned by a few."

The Pennsylvania Assembly accepted petitions from both groups, declared Franklin's side the winner, but then allowed the tanneries to stay on. America's first environmental victory, like so many others, was symbolic. Franklin never gave up on the "small matters" that loomed so large in his Philadelphia environs, and in his 1789 will, he left money for the construction of a water system.

Similar public health controversies took place in most cities, and in the ensuing decades and centuries, Americans continued to fight private encroachments on public rights. They also fought child labor, the smoke nuisance, unsanitary plumbing, disease-ridden housing, chemical pollution, bad working conditions and a thousand other impositions that private people and laissez faire politics thought right to impose on the public.

Of course, the forces of social reform could not hold the forces of private indifference in balance. Small projects that tried to meet the need for clean drinking water in the expanding cities of the early 19th century fell far behind schedule, and the waves of immigration in the mid- and late-19th century contributed to the sense of crisis for the suddenly urbanizing nation. Americans turned to the European example, especially to the British public health and social reform politics, for inspiration in addressing their own problems.

The new science of bacteriology and the germ theory of disease greatly aided in the elimination of epidemic diseases, but it left an uneven legacy for clean water reformers because the immediate nature of the problem lessened.

Oil pollution was a major concern of the 1920s, and ineffective laws and symbolic victories began a slow, irregular process of cleanup in the 1930s and '40s.  Reformers would have preferred something more than symbolic victories, but in the long run, the string of symbolic victories tended to build institutional and popular support for environmental and public health causes that would mushroom in the 1960s.

As we begin to unfold our environmental history, and understand our traditions of reform, historians have found that the reformers were not wild eyed radicals bent on social destruction, but rather, the doctors, the editors, the leading citizens and quite often, the women's clubs of their towns. Women, especially during the 1890 to 1950s reform period, associated what they called "municipal housekeeping" with their own spotless kitchens. They believed in "home ecology" as much as they believed in natural ecology.

They believed in reform, not through naive optimism, but simply because it was part of their religious and cultural heritage. They believed because of the Bible and because of Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir and many others who reminded the advocates of private rights that they could not escape their social resonsibilities.

The few reforms they succeeded in imposing were purchased at the direct expense of private rights. At the time, few were decieved when the copper barons and oil tycoons protested. Charity flew in the face of the one law they understood -- the survival of the fittest, and the corresponding demise of the unfit.

Today, private rights advocates continue to insist that there is no need for reform. But in fact Americans are free to lead private lives because there are few immediate public nuisances. No one is exposed to cholera from drinking water. Child labor and slavery is illegal. People don't drop dead in the plume of a smokestack.

But public nuisances are very much alive in other nations. The children who labor for pennies today in Pakistan, Indonesia and Ghana are not much different from their counterparts in English factories a century and half ago. The slums of Africa and Latin America are breeding grounds for cholera today just like the slums of Dicken's London. And the upper classes, even continents away, are still vulnerable to the social evils the erupt from these factories and slums, breeding new diseases like ebola or Marburg hemorrhagic fever.

In short, we havnt come as far as we had hoped, and it is time to accept that we are all part of an onging social process. Some may take a dim view of the idea of the perfectability of mankind. But history takes a dim view of those who do nothing when the need for reform is clear.

On Earth Day, it is important to remember this tradition of reform that balances social responsibility against private rights. It is a tradition that is here for the long haul, that does not lay down in the face of difficulties, that will not surrender to circumstance nor be bent by the gravity of wealth and power.

It springs from a mature reflection that hope itself is the best hope for the public rights of human kind.

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