Futures after Progress: Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore

Review

by Amol Saghar
published on 30 April 2025

Chloe Ahmann’s debut book, "Futures After Progress," is a well-researched and a unique publication in that, instead of focusing only on humans and human activities, this book takes into account non-human facets too. The present ethnographic study offers a delightful journey into the heart of South Baltimore’s environment and ecology. The book is recommended for anthropologists, sociologists as well environmental and social historians.

Chloe Ahmann’s Futures After Progress offers a delightful journey into South Baltimore’s environment and ecology. South Baltimore, due to frequent factory fires, chemical explosions, and aerial pollutants, has transformed into one of the most polluted places in the United States. Ahmann, using rigorous fieldwork with archival and non-archival sources, weaves a fascinating story of the important role that the environment has played in shaping Baltimore’s socioeconomic and political history. By focusing on late industrial South Baltimore, the author has attempted to examine the central role of speculation in American urban history.

Covering over 200 years of history, this study delineates not just the making of a city but also the critical role it played in enabling futures in other parts of the US. From being a quarantine zone under precautionary public-health regimes to being a source of military supply for real as well as speculative warfare, and finally, being a site where the largest trash incinerator in the US was built, South Baltimore has played many different roles during its long history. The trash incinerator, interestingly, has been advertised as a “climate solution” and is popularly referred to as the Fairfield Renewable Energy Project. Ahmann’s book is recommended for ethnographers, anthropologists, sociologists as well environmental and social historians. Additionally, the book may also be of interest to university-level students and researchers who are keen to understand the urban history of the US. The intended readers of the book range from subject specialists to university-level students and general history enthusiasts.

Futures After Progress contains two parts that discuss at length environmental issues, socio-economic aspects, and geopolitics in the specific context of South Baltimore. The book identifies two of Baltimore's omnipresent themes that pose health risks and interfere with daily activities: soot and dust. Ahmann stresses the fact that South Baltimore's population has contributed significantly to the creation of a toxic environment here. In addition to concretization and rapid (and unplanned) industrialization, efforts by cities, states, nations, and corporations to master the future through ever more conjectural modes of governance have played a significant role in shaving years off locals’ lives. The book informs us that, while industrial progress in South Baltimore has long lost its steam, the city has recently transformed into a battleground between environmental activists, younger and older generations of the city, industrial enthusiasts, and the White-Black racial conflicts. The competing political futures of all these communities, and those beyond Baltimore, are at stake. Through an in-depth discussion of the debates centered on the incinerator and historical analysis, this ethnographic study sheds light on the diverse ways in which people, living in such an unhealthy environment and marked by doubts, relate to the future. Ahmann succinctly highlights the fact that speculation has become a mode of life in South Baltimore.

Chloe Ahmann is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University. She, given that this is her debut book, has done a commendable job. Ahmann, writing from Curtis Bay, a residential-commercial-industrial neighborhood in South Baltimore, constructs a coherent and meticulous ethnography of what it means to be born, grow up, and die, in a heavily contaminated post-industrial urban environment. That, in addition to closely scrutinizing the archival records, especially those dealing with environment and ecology, the author has done extensive fieldwork and has interviewed, thoroughly, a range of people residing in South Baltimore about the prevailing environmental conditions, which is well-reflected in the present study. Apart from discussing at length the harmful effects of industrialization, borne unevenly by racialized groups and extending across generations, Ahmann has analyzed the diverse ways in which the deteriorating environment of South Baltimore has permeated all kinds of relationships, including chemical and ethical as well as structural and personal. Moreover, by examining the efforts by the local population to realize a secure and healthy future, she can demonstrate the diverse ways in which people in the US have politicized “impure” environments.

Because the book has been written in a lucid manner and for more than one type of audience, it will be of interest to general readers, anthropologists, and specialists in social and environmental history.

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