Municipal smoke-abatement and zoning laws targeted pollution spillovers a century before 1970.

Evidence

Although many individuals during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries no doubt considered pollution to be an indicator of progress, there were many dissenting voices. There were early municipal efforts to control urban pollution, with problems of noise pollution, waste disposal, and air pollution as matters of particular public concern; the zoning movement in urbanized areas was largely a response to such negative spillovers between incompatible uses of neighboring properties. The Smoke Prevention Association was founded in 1907, and by 1912, twenty-three of the twenty-eight largest cities in the United States had smoke abatement laws, though these regulations saw limited enforcement and, presumably, minimal compliance. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 249

Categorization

• XREF: Directly links to the Soundscape course: smoke-abatement and anti-noise municipal law is the regulatory antecedent to noise regulation, and zoning-as-pollution-response connects law and land/place. — connects to: Environmental law’s sudden 1970s eruption masked decades of slowly building public concern. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 264