Being environmentally conscious is not nearly as modern as we imagine. As a mode of thinking it goes back hundreds of years. Yet we typically imagine ourselves among the first to grasp the impact humanity has on the environment. Hence there is a fashion for green confessions and mea culpas.
But the notion of a contemporary ecological awakening leads to political impasse. It erases a long history of environmental destruction. Furthermore, by focusing on our present virtues, it overlooks the struggles from which our perspective arose.
In response, Happy Apocalypse plunges us into the heart of controversies that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries around factories, machines, vaccines and railways. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz demonstrates how risk was conceived, managed, distributed and erased to facilitate industrialization. He explores how clinical expertise around 1800 allowed vaccination to be presented as completely benign, how the polluter-pays principle emerged in the nineteenth century to legitimize the chemical industry, how safety norms were invented to secure industrial capital and how criticisms and objections were silenced or overcome to establish technological modernity.
Societies of the past did not inadvertently alter their environments on a massive scale. Nor did they disregard the consequences of their decisions. They seriously considered them, sometimes with dread. The history recounted in this book is not one of a sudden awakening but a process of modernising environmental disinhibition.
- 272 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Halftitle
- Titlepage
- Copyright
- Contents
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: Little Modern Disinhibitions
- 1 Inoculated with Risk
- 2 The Philanthropic Virus
- 3 The Ancien Régime and the Environment
- 4 The Birth of the Polluter Pays Principle
- 5 Lighting up France after Waterloo
- 6 The Mechanics of Fault
- Conclusion
- Afterword: History as a Smoke Detector
- Bibliography
- Notes
- Index
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Yes, you can access Happy Apocalypse by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, David Broder in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Politics & International Relations & Environment & Energy Policy. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.