Urban Pollution Through History: Horses, Cars, and Technology

Introduction to Tarr's Argument

Joel Tarr's article "Urban Pollution — Many Long Years Ago" is largely about the form of urban pollution that preceded that created by automobiles. This pollution was caused primarily by horses, which served as the dominant form of transportation from the end of the Middle Ages to the beginning of the 20th century. Tarr essentially establishes a comparison between the pollution caused by horses and that caused by automobiles, though he devotes the vast majority of the article to elaborating on the fact that horse-related pollution was considered as serious a problem in its time as automobile pollution was in the 1970s. If one examines the amount of space he devotes to horse pollution versus automobile pollution, one can infer that the former appears, in some respects, to have been worse than the latter.

To Tarr's credit, he presents a fairly comprehensive overview of the problems that the widespread use of horses caused in terms of polluting urban environments. A substantial portion of the article focuses on the literal pollution these horses produced through their daily excrement. In some of the more vivid passages, the author details just how much manure horses generated; in others, he describes the many ways in which the smell and sight of that manure blighted urban landscapes. He also traces the rise of street sweeping within cities as a key necessity driven by the widespread use of horses, and discusses the inadequacies of many of these early efforts.

Horse Pollution in Urban Environments

The pollution caused by horses was not merely a matter of bad sights and smells. The accumulation of manure on city streets was linked to disease — a key parallel between the urban pollution of earlier eras and the automobile pollution of the 1970s and today. Some of the most serious diseases of the period were connected to the filth of horse manure, and in certain instances those diseases were exacerbated by the enormous quantities of waste left on city streets.

It is worth noting that the essential point Tarr argues goes beyond a simple comparison of horses and cars. He provides extensive detail about horses in order to emphasize that whatever technology or means of production people rely upon, there will inherently be problems associated with it — and, more strikingly, that those problems will tend to resemble one another across eras. This theme is supported by the points of similarity he draws between horse pollution and automobile pollution. As previously noted, both forms of pollution are linked to poor health: horse pollution contributed to widespread disease, while automobile pollution is associated with long-term detrimental health effects (Tarr 49). The smog produced by cars and the sight of dead horses and manure are both forms of visual pollution. Both cars and horses also generate noise pollution — evident in modern traffic through honking horns and the rumble of large trucks and buses.

Parallels Between Horse and Automobile Pollution

Tarr is confident that whatever form of technology or means of production is adopted on a large scale will eventually cause problems. He moves from the past to the present — and gestures toward the future — to make this point. Cars, of course, were initially seen as far more sanitary and safer than horses, until people began driving them in large enough numbers that smog and traffic accidents became serious public health concerns. Tarr also alludes to nuclear power and the periods of both anticipation and disillusionment that accompanied it. The disillusionment arose when people recognized that this source of power carries consequences potentially more harmful than those of either horses or automobiles.

This pattern — enthusiasm followed by recognition of unforeseen harms — recurs across the history of technology. Tarr uses it to argue that no single innovation resolves the underlying tensions between human needs and environmental cost; it merely shifts the nature of the problem.