While reading THE POLLUTERS for Booklist recently I came across this quote from Henry Du Pont at the 1952 Second National Air Pollution Symposium:

It seems clear to me that our greatest promise in abating pollution lies in giving full reign to advancing technology. As Americans have found in every field, it is invention and development, not legislation or regulation that has proved our most reliable instrument of progress. The farm reaper was not invented because of legislation or land reform, yet it had a more profound effect upon agriculture than any law, before or since. Long before the Emancipation Proclamation, the work of inventors like Whitney and Howe had doomed human slavery. Child labor was not abolished just by statute, but by productive machinery that made such work unnecessary. I think it can be well demonstrated that all of our social gains have had a similar history; modern technology is the greatest reformer of modern times.

Just for the record, the cotton gin (credited to Eli Whitney) was patented in 1794 - more than 60 years before the Civil War which, as any elementary school kid knows, was fought TO END SLAVERY. (That state's rights argument always drives me nuts - the states were fighting for the right to CONTINUE SLAVERY.) As for child labor statutes, one has to wonder why it was ever acceptable for children to work in factories or mines or fields rather than go to school. How lucky we are that technology advanced enough so we did not suffer similar fates. I guess the bit where business owners hired children in the first place should just be ignored - they only did it because poor technology made them, after all.

Ugh.

I also think it's interesting how much Du Pont's words still echo today even in the wake of the Upper Big Branch Mine explosion and the BP disaster. Regulation is a bad bad thing, says Du Pont - as long as we trust men like him, they will make everything all right.

My review will be up in a month or so - I'll be sure to post it and more on the book then.