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Ancient Civilizations Air pollution was common in large towns long before the industrial revolution. The pollution came from dust, wood smoke, tanneries, animal manure and other things. Water pollution was less severe in some civilizations. Israeli and Hindu cities tended to have less water pollution due to strict religious codes about cleanliness. On the other hand, ancient Rome was notorious for sewage-filled streets. Timbering stripped the forests of Babylon, Greece, Phonecia (Lebanon) and Italy with the rise of civilization. The wood energy crisis led Greeks to use passive solar energy by orienting their cities and houses toward the sun. Romans made some use of solar energy but imported wood for timber and fuel from as far away as the Black Sea. Both Greeks and Romans kept sacred groves of trees from being timbered. Soil conservation was not widely practiced in the Mediterranian, but cultures in China, India and Peru understood the long term impact of soil erosion and tried to prevent it. Lead poisoning was common among upper class Romans who used lead-sweetened wine and grape pulp sweetened with "sugar of lead" as a condiment.

Babylonian sewer system.

Essential Reading:

Butti, Ken, and John Perlin, A golden thread : 2500 years of solar architecture and technology (Palo Alto : Cheshire Books; New York : Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1980)

Glacken, Clarence J, 1973, Traces on the Rhodian shore; nature and culture in Western thought from ancient times to the end of the eighteenth century (Berkeley: University of California Press).

Grove, Richard H, 1995. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropic Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press).

Hughes, J. Donald, 1994, Pan's Travail: Environmental Problems of the Ancient Greeks and Romans (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994 reprint).

Hughes, J. Donald, 1975 Ecology in Ancient Civilizations. (Albuquerque, N.M.: University of New Mexico Press, 1975).

Nriagu, J. Lead and Lead Poisoning in Antiquity. (New York: Wiley Interscience, 1983). .

Perlin, John: A forest journey : The role of wood in the development of civilization (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991)

Worster, Donald, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

Full Bibliography

 

Midde Ages and Renaissance Plague devastates Europe but leads to the beginnings of a public health system. Water pollution tends to be less of a problem for dispersed populations than it would later become. Timbering in the forests of England, France, Germany leaves large tracts totally denuded by around 1550 in England and the 1600s in Europe, forcing a switch to coal. Soil conservation was not widely practiced in the Mediterranian, but cultures in China, India and Peru understood the long term impact of soil erosion and used terracing, crop rotation and natural fertilizer to prevent it. Occupational diseases are investigated by Bernardo Razzimazi and begin to be recognized as public health problems.

Detail from Peter S. Bregel painting shows rich man standing near an outhouse which empties directly into the river.

Essential reading

Tuchman, Barbara, A Distant Mirror : the calamitous 14th century, New York : Alfred Knopf, 1978

Lansdown, R. and W.Yule, eds. Lead Toxicity: History and Environmental Impact. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.

Leff, S., and Vera Leff, From Witchcraft to World Health, New York: MacMillan, 1956

Sigerist, H. E. 1945. Civilization and Disease. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

 

 

Full Bibliography

The Era of Enlightenment Reason begins to be better appreciated as an antidote to superstition. Ben Franklin's fight against water pollution, James Lind's fight against scurvy, and the movement to clean up waterways, slums and prisons -- all begin with an enlightenment philosophy that values individual citizens and believes progress is possible. There were "other kinds of glory than that of victory in battle," as Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford) said. Thomas Malthus predicts that eventually, food and resources will run out as populations explode. . New technologies create new pollution, -- Town gas from coal drips tar into the rivers. Vulcanized rubber plants discharge noxious chemicals directly into the streams. Coal smoke chokes the air in big cities. Chemical factories operate without thought to people downwind.

Ben Franklin in his printing office

Essential Reading

Brimblecombe, Peter, 1988 The Big Smoke, London:, Routledge.

Cronon, William, 1985. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang.

Kolodny, A. 1984. The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press.

Markham, Adam, 1994 A Brief History of Pollution, New York: St. Martin's

McMahon, Michal, 1994 "Publick Service versus Mans Properties: Dock Creek and the Origins of Urban Technology in Eighteenth Century Philadelphia," in Judith A. McGaw, ed., Early American Technology: Making & Doing Things from the Colonial Era to 1850, Chapel Hill, N.C. University of N.C. Press.

Nash, R. 1982.Wilderness and the American Mind. 3rd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press.

 

 

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Industrial Revolution Living conditions in urban areas horrify reform minded commissions in London in the 1840s and America in the 1850s and 60s. Progress is slow but the common interest in pure drinking water and sanitation is spurred by epidemics of typhoid and cholera. Smog episodes begin killing residents of large cities like London. Conservation of wilderness areas begins with the felling of an enormous tree, called the "Mother of the Forest" in 1851. The outrage over the act leads to calls for a national park system.

Woman looking through microscope is amazed at bacteria in water in a 19th century British cartoon. Water pollution carried disease, but no one knew exactly why until the 1880s. Some concerned reformers didn't wait for exact knowledge: John Snow, a London physician, traced a part of the cholera epidemic to a contaminated water pump in 1855.

Essential Reading

 

Marsh, G. P. 1869. Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Condition. rev. ed. New York: Scribner & Co.

Marx, Leo, 1964, The Machine in the Garden (NY: Oxford University Press).

Melosi, M. V., ed. 1980. Pollution and Reform in American Cities, 1870-1930. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Mumford, Lewis 1961 The City in History, NY: Harcourt, Brace & World

Thoreau, Henry David, 1854, Walden and other writings, NY: Bantam

 

 

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Progressive Era Reform was the common concern. Reform of working conditions, slum housing, food adulteration, sanitation, drinking water, polluting industries and more. Teddy Roosevelt and his forester Gifford Pinchot characterized the era with ideas about conserving large tracts of land and putting other forests to "wise use." John Muir opposes the "wise use" idea and fights for outright preservation of unspoiled wilderness. Social activists and reformers like Ellen Swallow Richards, Jane Addams, Florence Kelly and Alice Hamilton innovate and find limited success. New organizations like the womens clubs and the Sierra Club help champion natural preservation, conservation and municipal reform.

A young Teddy Roosevelt (c. 1880)

Essential Reading

Ackerknecht, Erwin H.1953, reprinted 1981. Rudolf Virchow: Doctor, Statesman, Anthropologist, ________________________.

Cohen, M. 1984. The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Also see Cohen's History of the Sierra Club, 1988, San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books.

Clements, K. A. 1979. Politics and the Park: San Francisco¹s Fight for Hetch Hetchy, 1908-1913. Pacific Historical Review. 48: 184-215.

Hays, Sameul P., 1959. Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Isenberg, Andrew, 2000, The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History 1750 -1920, Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press.

Jones, H. R. 1965. John Muir and the Sierra Club: The Battle for Yosemite. San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books.

Merchant, Carolyn, 1981. Earthcare: Women and the Environmental Movement. Environment 23:5 (June): 6-15, 38-40.

Mowry, G. E. 1958. The Era of Theodore Roosevelt, 1900-1912. New York: Harper.

Muir, John. 1991. Our National Parks. San Francisco CA: Sierra Club Books.

Tarr, Joel, 1996 The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Akron, Ohio: University of Akron Press.

Turner, Frederick Jackson, 1920. The Frontier in American history Huntington, N.Y. : R. E. Krieger Pub. Co., 1976, c1920

Twain, Mark, 1896, Life on the Mississippi, NY: Harper Brothers.

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Roarding Twenties and the Depression National Coast Anti Pollution League is formed by municipal officials from Atlantic City to Maine who are concerned about oil and sewage pollution detracting from tourism. Led by Gifford Pinchot, Teddy Roosevel'ts forrester, the league succeeds with an international oil dumping treaty passed by Congress in 1924. "Nothing but a murderer" is the way Harvard M.D. Alice Hamilton privately describes Charles Kettering of General Motors, the inventive genius behind leaded gasoline. Hamilton's fight to point out alternatives does not succeed and leaded gasoline becomes the standard fuel for most of the world. The Radium Girls are dying of radiation induced cancer and court delays seem outrageous to crusading journalist Walter Lippmann who works with Alice Hamilton to bring their case to the public. A settlement at least gives them medical care and compensation for their families. Civilian Conservation Corps is founded by FDR during the depression. Chemurgy movement is a Midwestern populist and scientific phenomena. Demands include replacement of petroleum with farm alcohol and other industrial uses for agricultural crops. Movement suffers when leaders die and new leaders with secret ties to the oil industry take over.

Alice Hamilton (Library of Congress)

Essential Reading

Goldmark, J. 1953. Impatient Crusader: Florence Kelly's Life Story. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.

Kovarik, W., 1996, Henry Ford, Charles Kettering and the Fuel of the Future, paper to the Society of Automotive Historians, Dearborn, Mich., reprinted in Automotive History, spring 1998.

Kovarik, W. 1994. Charles F. Kettering and the Development of Tetraethyl Lead in the Context of Alternative Technologies. Proceedings of the Society of Automotive Engineers, Paper 943924, Baltimore, Maryland. (24 October).

Rosner, D. and Markowitz, G. 1989. Dying for Work: Workers Safety and Health in Twentieth Century America. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press.

Sicherman, Barbara. 1984. Alice Hamilton: A Life in Letters. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Full Bibliography

World War II and the Fifties A full marriage designed to outlast the war. This was the relationship between American auto, chemical and oil companies and Germany's I.G. Farben exposed by Sen. Harry Truman in 1942. American development of synthetic rubber was blocked and leaded gasoline technology was handed over to the Nazis during the pre-war honeymoon. (Stephenson, 1976). The lesson of history? Only the government can secure the long-term public interest. Private industry can not. Midwestern corn, not oil industry sythetics, helped roll allies to victory over the Nazis. Synthetic rubber and chemicals from renewable resources proved vital to winning WWII. (Bernton, 1982) Sand County Almanac by forrester Aldo Leopold, published in 1948 just after his death, expresses the an expanding sense of human responsibility, not only for each other but also for the earth. . Deadly smog episodesin Donora Penn. (1948), London (1952, 1956), New York (1953), and Los Angeles (1954) create the perception that an air pollution crisis is underway. In 1955 the first international air pollution conference is held. Increasing C02 buildup is one surprising conclusion of Scripps Oceanographic Institute scientists working on International Geophysical Year projects 1957.

LONDON FOG of 1956 was so thick that walking bus escorts were needed at 10 a.m.

Essential Reading

Borkin, Joseph, 1978. The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben. New York : Free Press (Borkin was the deputy attorney general under Thurmond Arnold in charge of prosecuting the oil and chemical companies for treasonous connections to the Nazis at the opening of WWII. )

Bernton, Hal, 1982, and William Kovarik and Scott Sklar, The Forbidden Fuel: Power Alcohol in the 20th Century, New York: Griffin.

Stevenson, William, 1976, A Man Called Intrepid, New York : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Leopold, Aldo, 1948 A Sand County Almanac

 

 

 

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The Sixties (1960-1970) Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring strikes a deep chord in the rapidly growing concern about the environment when published in 1962. General Motors and Standard Oil (Exxon) sell off the Ethyl Corp., the child of their partnership in leaded gasoline, in 1962. Senate hearings in 1965 reveal decades of falsified lead industry research. A burning river ends the decade as a dramatic symbol of an environment on the brink. On June 22, 1969, oil and chemicals in the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio catch fire. Flames top five stories. UNESCO conference on Man and His Environment takes place in San Francisco in 1969, sparking hope for international cooperation on environmental issues. The tragedy of the commons strikes a nerve. The Garrett Harden essay argues that just as unrestricted grazing could turn a common pature into a wasteland, unregulated industry could do the same to the planet.

Rachel Carson (Yale University library)

Essential Reading

Carson, Rachel, 1962. Silent Spring. NY: Houghton Mifflin.

Ellul, Jacques, The Technological Society, NY: Alfred Knopf. (Originally 1954 La technique ou l'enjeu du siecle, Max Leclerc, et Cie, Paris).

Lear, Linda, 1997, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature NY : H. Holt, 1997

Marx, Leo, 1964, The machine in the garden; technology and the pastoral ideal in America NY, Oxford University Press

Wadsworth, Ginger 1992 Rachel Carson, voice for the earth Minneapolis, MN: Lerner Publications,

 

 

Full Bibliography

 

The Seventies 1970-1980 A decade of awakening and cleanup begins with the birth of the Environmental Protection Agency and ends with the Appropriate Community Technology demonstration on the Washington mall. Air pollution is cut back dramatically through use of catalytic converters on new cars that use only unleaded gasoline. But the predicted "pollution free car" proves to be chimerical. Water pollution is greatly decreased through a massive sewage treatment expansion program. Rivers which were once sewers now begin a gradual return from the grave. Still, the "national pollution discharge elimination system" does not actually eliminate discharges. Toxic chemicals become more troubling. Corporations like Allied (manufacturer of Kepone) seem to have deliberately endangered employees and the public for minor increments of profit. Love Canal and other incidents lead to new regulations in the 1980s. Nuclear power safety is increasingly suspect after the Three Mile Island accident. Enery crisis in oil supply leads to reversals of some restrictions on refinery and oil pollution.

Greenpeace captures the world's attention with its dramatic tactics in protecting whales (Photo by Rex Weyler, Greenpeace, 1977)

Essential Reading

Abbey, Edward, 1975, The Monkey Wrench Gang, NY: J.B. Lippincott. (fiction).

Brown, Michael and John May, 1991 The Greenpeace Story New York: Dorling Kindersley

Dillard, Annie, 1974, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, NY: Harper & Row.

To Save a Whale, photographs (Chronicle Books, 1978; Heinemann, UK, 1978; Kubler Verlag, Germany, Rettet die Wale, 1979).

Song of the Whale (Doubleday, 1986): The discoveries of whale researcher Dr. Paul Spong and a history of the Greenpeace campaign to stop international whaling,

Blood of the Land (Everest House, 1982; Random House, Vintage paperback, 1983; New Society Publishers, 1992): A history of native American cultures and their 500-year clash with European cultures, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1982. An updated edition, published by New Society in 1992, remains in print.

Hayes, Dennis, 1977, Rays of Hope: The Transition to a Post Petroleum World, Worldwatch / W.W.Norton.

Ward, Barbara and Rene Dubois, 1972: Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet, New York: Norton. This was the book that summarized the UN Conference on the Environment of Stockhold, 1972.

Full Bibliography

 

1980-1990 Disasters show the tenuous and fragile side of industrial technology. Among them are the Bhopal mass poisoning in India; the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster in Ukraine; and the Challenger shuttle and Exxon Valdez oil spills in the U.S. Ozone depletion from fluorocarbons is finally taken seriously, even by conservatives like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher of Britain, who join others in signing the Montreal Protocol in 1987. More good news: Legislation for cleaning up toxic waste passes Congress. But by the year 2002, the Superfund will be broke. Environmental reform gathers momentum, but environmentalists mourn the loss of the Rainbow Warrior, a Greenpeace ship bombed by French secret service agents in New Zealand in 1985. Warnings about global climate change become more convincing as evidence mounts.

Essential Reading

Daly, Herman E., 1980, Economics, Ecology, Ethics: Essays toward a steady-state economy NY: W.H.Freeman & Co.

Fowler, John, 1986, Energy and the Environment, NY: McGraw Hill.

McKibben, Bill 1989, The End of Nature New York: Random House

Reisner, Mark. 1986. Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. New York: Viking.

Rose, Chris 1990 The Dirty Man of Europe: The Great British Pollution Scandal London: Simon and Schuster

Schell, Jonathan, 1982, The fate of the earth New York : Knopf

Seed, John, 1988, Thinking Like a Mountain: Towards a Council of All Beings, Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publishers.

Short, C. Brant (Calvin Brant),1989 Ronald Reagan and the public lands : America's conservation debate, 1979-1984 College Station : Texas A&M University Press

Udall, Stuart. 1988.The Quiet Crisis and the Next Generation. Salt Lake City: Gibbs-Smith.

Teich, Albert, Ed., Technology and the Future. 1986, NY St. Martin's Press.

 

 

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1990 - 2000 Persian Gulf War creates environmental disaster with thousands of burning oil wells. Ken Saro Wiwa, journalist and environmental activist, is executed in 1995 for his outspoken opposition to oil industry practices in Nigeria. The dictatorial government of Nigeria, and its partner Shell Oil, is held responsible by the international community. Political standoff between conservative and liberal factions in Congress ended more or less in a draw, with strong national opinion polls favoring environment over economic development. A Gallup poll finds 76 percent of Americans call themselves "environmentalists." China's Three Gorges Dam continues on schedule, despite international protests. MTBE may fight air pollution, but water pollution turns out to be the major side effect of the fuel additive. It's another example of the law of unintended consequences.

Windmills in California.

Essential Reading

Adler, Jonathan, 1995, Environmentalism at the Crossroads, Capital Research Center (Competitive Enterprise Institute).

Chapman, Graham, and others, Environmentalism and the mass media: the North-South Divide, London, Routledge (Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla).

Dwyer, William. O., and Frank Leeming, 1995, Earth's Eleventh Hour: Environmental Readings from the Washington Post, Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.

Gore, Albert, 1993, Earth in the Balance : Ecology and the Human Spirit N.Y : Plume

Gottlieb, Robert 1993, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement, Washington, DC: Island Press.

LaMay, Craig and Everette Dennis, Eds., 1991, Media and the Environment, Washington DC: Island Press.

Levy, Walter, and Christopher Hallowell, 1994, Green Perspectives: Thinking and writing about nature and the environment, NY: Addison Wesley Longman.

Mark Neuzil and William Kovarik, 1996, Mass Media and Environmental Conflict: America's Green Crusades, Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage.

Pepper, David, 1996, Modern Environmentalism, London, Routledge

Postman, Neil, 1992, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, NY: Random House.

Shabecoff, Phillip, 1993. A Fierce Green Fire: The American Environmental Movement. NY: Hill and Wang.

Slovic, Scott H., and Terrell Dixon, 1993, Being in the World: An Environmental Reader for Writers, NY: McMillan Publishing Co.

 

Full Bibliography

The new millenium US leadership changes from president Bill Clinton, a devoted conservationist, to George Bush in 2001, who easess environmental regulation on behalf of industry, to Barack Obama in 2009, who restores enviornmental and conservation missions for US regulatory agencies. Global climate change becomes a pressing priority, as scientists issue increasingly serious warnings about their observations of the changing climate; but the scientific process stumbles over relatively minor mistakes made under increasing media scrutiny. Attempts at international agreements fail at Copenhagen in 2009, but world leaders continue attempting to bridge gaps in policy approaches. Coal mining especially in the US Appalachian region continues to spark controversy over serious enviornmental impacts. A disaster at the Tennessee Valley Authority shows how serious the waste products of coal combustion can be. Coal mine disasters continue to haunt the US and China. Toxic Waste dumping in developing nations continues to be an urgent problem.

Scientist works with experimental fermenter at the National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colo.

Essential Reading

Guha, Ramachandra, 2000 Environmentalism, A Global History New Delhi, Oxford U Press

Perlin, John, 1999, From Space to Earth: The Story of Solar Electricity, Ann Arbor, Mich., AATEC Publications

Warren, Christopher, 2000, Brush with Death: A Social History of Lead Poisoning, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Full Bibliography

The Future On Earth Day 2010, a web search for ideas about the future of the environment brings up over 200 million hits. With all this thinking, we must surely be learning something. And yet, paging through the documents and web sites, it's clear that the catalog of problems greatly exceeds the ideas for solutions. The 1987 United Nations report on Our Common Future, chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland, documented global problems of poverty, expanding population, resource scarcity, deterioration of oceans and forests. All these have accelerated in the past two decades. To this we now add the enormous burden of accelerating climate change and the strange American retreat into a spiral of climate change denial.(For more on climate denial see this Planet Ark article.) Many scientists now believe that we have underestimated the problem of climate change. Stefan Ramstorf, for instance, has calculated higher levels of potential sea level rise than IPCC models. The end of the last ice age saw ocean level rises of one meter per century, and there is no reason to suggest that this -- or worse -- wont happen again. Research by Martin Heimann and associates has shown instability in large volumes of methane trapped under the Arctic Ocean. What if we decided to act? Imagine what the global goal of preventing more than a 2 degree C warming will mean. First, we'd have to limit CO2 to about 750 billion tons over the next 40 years, according to Ramstorf and others. If we take an equitable apporach, we would give each person on earth a carbon budget of about 110 tons of fossil CO2. But consider this: Americans are spending their carbon budget at the rate of 20 tons per year, while Europeans are spending it at the rate of 10 tons per year. Developing nations, most of the world's human population, are spending their per-capital carbon budget at the rate of only one ton per year. So what is Sustainability and how do we achieve it? How much sacrifice is required, and how do we balanace that against the risk we are running by doing next to nothing? This is the greatest question of conscience now facing humanity.

Essential reading

Caldicott, Helen, 1992, If you love this planet: A Plan to Heal the Earth NY: W.W. Norton.

Clancy, Noreen, 2001, Our Future, Our Environment, Rand Institute

Corn, Joseph J., 1985, Imagining Tomorrow: History, Technology and the American Future, Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Fuller, R. Buckminster, Utopia or oblivion: the prospects for humanity (Toronto, New York, Bantam Books 1969). Other Fuller books include his Ideas and Integrities. What makes Fuller particularly interesting is his premise that more imaginative and less wasteful design in the way we use technology can allow us to create an affordable and civilized lifestyle for every person on earth.

Johansson, Thomas B., ed., 1992, Renewable Energy: Sources for Fuels and Electricity, Washington DC, Island Press. Slightly dated, this United Nations survey on the costs and potentials of renewable energy is among the best baseline sources of information.

MacLean, Doug and Peter G. Brown, 1983 Energy and the Future , Totowa, N.J., Rowman & Allanheld. This is a book about the ethics and philosophy of energy and is part of the University of Maryland studies in Public Philosophy series.

Sessions, George, 1995, Deep Ecology for the 21st Century (New York: Random House) A collection of essays about ethics, ecology and the future by Sessions, Arne Naess, Gary Snyder and others.

Paul and Anne Erlich, Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment, Island Press, 2008.

 

Full Bibliography

 

 

 

RESOURCES on this site Home People Environmental Leaders Killed Major Events Special Features Radium girls Leaded gas Anti-pollution league Womens movement Mother of the Forest Fuel of the future About this Timeline References RESOURCES on other sites Happy 42nd Earth Day Links to EH sites American Society for Environmental History European Society for Environmental History Goldman Prize

2011 year-end note: The global escalation of environmental assassinations, in retaliation for peaceful oppostion to mining and logging, is one of the most disturbing trends we have observed in environmental history. Circumstances call for concerted investigations by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and other international human rights and environmental NGOs.

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Welcome to the Environmental History Timeline

This is an independent project by an American scholar, not funded by any government agency or supported by any foundation or advertising. Ideas, corrections and suggestions are welcome. For more information see About this Timeline.

The educational purpose of the timeline is to remind ourselves that:

Environmental issues have surfaced throughout human history.

The evidence is in manuscripts, publications and historical archives, but it is often found under labels like public health, conservation, preservation of nature, smoke abatement, municipal housekeeping, occupational disease, air pollution and water pollution. So the modern word "environmental" encompasses longstanding concerns.

A broad lack of historical perspective about environmental events and public health reformers has its origins in both neglect and misinformation. Issues often emerge in the mass media without context and then disappear with little more than symbolic resolution. Political conservatives seem not to recognize the reflection of their own values in conservation movements. Political liberals lack a sense of the traditions of social reform.

Dangerous myths emerge in the vacuum of history. For example:

• That Rachel Carson's Silent Spring started all the uproar;
• That environmentalism is just an hysterical reaction to science and technology;
• That environmentalism is a passing fad with no serious ideas to offer;
• That environmentalism is a false substitute for religion.

The myths call us like sirens, telling us that environmental issues can be safely ignored, or that the global environmental crisis need not concern the average person. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The forgotten history of the environment comes as a surprise to many people. It is not found in every history textbook, although it is becoming better known.

Just as individuals are lost without their memories, civilization needs its collective memory in the form we call history. But history is not a static collection of well known facts any more than science is an unchanging description of the physical world.

History does not simply accumulate. History represents views of the past that may change, grow and coalesce around facts that may only become available only decades after events take place. Historians must take an interest in recovering facts and interpretations that may be significant to their time.

It is now clear that long before Silent Spring was written or Greenpeace activists defied whalers' harpoons, many thousands of "green crusaders" tried to stop pollution, promote public health and preserve wilderness.

Their struggles deserve to be remembered. In doing so, we may develop a more mature view of the challenges confronting us all.