Happy Apocalypse: A History of Technological Risk

Casting light on how humanity sleepwalked its way into the climate crisis, this meticulous study (originally published in France in 2012) examines how harmful technologies overcame initial public resistance on their way to widespread acceptance in early 19th-century France. Fressoz (coauthor of The Shock of the Anthropocene), a historian at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris, discusses how the medical establishment silenced criticism of crude smallpox inoculations, which sometimes led to full-blown infection, by insisting ordinary people lacked the requisite knowledge to make responsible decisions about their own health. Elsewhere, Fressoz describes how the concept of product safety standards was developed to provide legal sanction for a certain level of risk involved in utilizing gas as fuel, and contends that industrialists won acceptance of their polluting practices by pushing back against the prevailing understanding that an individual’s health was dependent on a hygienic environment. The illuminating history makes clear that complacency regarding industrial pollution was far from inevitable, but some readers may struggle to make sense of the jargon-filled prose (“Police forces and parlements fit into a mode of veridiction that had not yet been transformed by the epistemology of the crucial experiment and fact-finding”). Still, this will reward those who stick it out. (June)