Moralizing The Environment

Download or read book Moralizing The Environment written by Philip Lowe and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-03-24 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1997. There was a time when pollution was equated with the urban and the industrial. But things have changed. What were previously mutually exclusive cat­egories of "agriculture" and "pollution" have been brought together in a new, morally charged atmosphere. Moralizing the environment is a study of how this shift came about. It examines the emergence of the farm pollution problem in Britain in the 1980s. It draws upon a study of the regulation of farm wastes - cattle slurry, silage effluent and the dirty water from farmyards - conducted between 1989 and 1995. Detailed surveys and ethnographic fieldwork were carried out in the south-west of England among dairy farmers, pol­lution inspectors, agricultural advisers and environmentalists. In trying to get to grips with farm pollution they were pursuing different notions not only of sound agricultural practice but also of nature, morality and the law. What ultimately was at stake was who could be trusted to safeguard the countryside.