Who defines “pollution,” anyway?

“River Looks Bad to Two Parties,” Morning Oregonian, Aug. 5, 1936, p. 3.

The talk I gave last week—”River City Confidential: The Willamette River Pollution Story Revealed“—seemed to have gone well, based upon the feedback I’ve received thus far. I certainly had a great time, and I hope it was both entertaining and educational.

Based upon some of the questions I got at the end of my talk, I should have made clearer at the outset that I was following the lead of pollution abatement advocates themselves in identifying the City of Portland and the five (later seven) pulp and paper mills as the primary polluters in the Willamette watershed. From the 1920s through the 1960s, abatement advocates within and outside of the Oregon State Sanitary Authority were focused on alleviating oxygen-depleting, point-source pollution (from mills and sewage) and bacteria (from raw sewage), because these two sources were by far the most pressing concerns to the river’s health and public health.

I indicated in my presentation that abatement advocates were primarily focused on these two sources of pollution, but that they did not ignore entirely other types of pollution from other sources. From the 1920s, they were also able to measure turbidity, temperature, ph, and other biochemical aspects of water quality, and they worked to abate pollution from meat, vegetable, and flax processing, logging, mining, and other sources.

Regarding other kinds of pollution, it was not until the 1960s that scientists really began to focus on non-point sources of pollution generally. The earliest evidence I have found for specialists’ concern with radiological pollution was in the late 1950s. Dioxin was not a land pollution concern until the Agent Orange issue of the early 1970s, and was not definitively linked to water-borne pollution from pulp and paper mills until the mid 1980s.

In most (if not all) cases, the current complex types of pollution that came to define the Portland Harbor Superfund site did not concern pollution abatement advocates into (and often beyond) the 1960s because the effects of these pollutants were not known, and scientists quite often had not yet developed ways to measure either the pollution or the effects. This knowledge would really only begin to be uncovered in the last decade or so of the period of my talk (from the late 1960s).

From my research in primary and secondary sources,

River City Confidential: The Willamette River’s Pollution Story Revealed

Still from William Joyce Smith's 1940s film, Pollution in the Willamette, showing two men fishing at a raw sewage outfall in Portland Harbor, ca. Aug./Sep. 1940.

Come one, come all!

“River City Confidential: The Willamette River’s Pollution Story Revealed.”

March 21, 2012 7:00-8:30 pm.

EcoTrust Jean Vollum Natural Capital Center, Billy Frank Jr. Conference Center, 721 NW 9th Ave., Portland, OR, United States View on Google Maps

“James Hillegas shares insights from his upcoming book on the original Willamette River pollution cleanup, from the 1920s to the 1970s. Co-hosted by the Portland Harbor Community Advisory Group and Oregon Historical Society.”

http://www.portlandharborpartnership.com/news-and-events/?event=787

Speaking for the River Born at 6:51 p.m., March 4, 2012

Portland Mayor Joseph K. Carson, Jr. (center), and other Portland citizens demonstrating during the "Demand Clean Rivers" campaign, early Nov. 1938. Their efforts were in support of both the City of Portland's sewer funding mechanism and a citizen's initiative to create the Oregon State Sanitary Authority. Both measures passed two-to-one on November 8, 1938. (Oregon Historical Society Research Library, CN 0012453a.)

This Sunday evening, I finished my manuscript for the book that is tentatively titled Speaking for the River: Confronting Pollution in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. The book began life as a thirty-page graduate school seminar paper in 2008, grew into a hefty 140-page Master’s Thesis in 2009, and exists now as about 85,000 words of text. The book now has to go through review, and will likely be reduced and refined as a result of this process, but it’s been a long time in coming and it’s great to have finished this stage! More and positive news to follow, I do hope!