Settler rats and imperial sewers: urban environmental justice from below

• In Event: Environmental (In)Justice: Imperial Hegemonies and their Neoliberal Legacies

English Abstract

Rats thrive in the interstices of human civilization, Jonathan Burt writes, profiting from our most problematic activities: war, imperialism, and human displacement. Rats came to America as settlers, and in time made homes beneath the nation’s cities, in modern sanitary sewer networks intended to promote public health. By the mid-20th century, advocates for what was later called environmental justice noted the concentration of rats in the poorest, most segregated, most disinvested neighborhoods, and attacked the infestations as a civil rights issue. But at the same time American development experts were helping export designs for similar water and sewerage networks abroad. This paper draws on the papers of Johns Hopkins engineer Abel Wolman, an international consultant to over 50 nations, to reveal the global circulation of Cold War-era sanitary engineering expertise, the rat habitats that expertise helped create, and the transnational environmental justice activism that resulted.

Author

• Josh Levy, Library of Congress