An Environmental History of the World
(excerpted and edited from:
7000 BC -- Emergence of Catal Huyuk, Jarmo and Alosh cultures in the Middle East. The destruction of lush forests may have given rise to myths about the Garden of Eden. (O'Brien, 1985)
6000 BC -- Deforestation leads to collapse of communities in southern Israel / Jordan. (Grove, 1995).
2700 BC -- Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh describes vast tracts of cedar forests in what is now southern Iraq. Gilgamesh defies the gods and cuts down the forest, and in return the gods say they will curse Sumeria with fire (or possibly drought). By 2100 BC, soil erosion and salt buildup have devastated agriculture. One Sumerian wrote that the "earth turned white." Civilization moved north to Babylonia and Assyria. Again, deforestation becomes a factor in the rise and subsequent fall of these civilizations. (Perlin, 1991).
2700 BC -- Some of the first laws protecting the remaining forests decreed in Ur. (Grove, 1995).
256 BC -- India -- King Ashoka (Piyadasi) of India issues Seven Pillar edicts, one of which states: "Twenty-six years after my coronation various animals were declared to be protected -- parrots, mainas, ruddy geese, wild ducks, bats, queen ants, terrapins, boneless fish, fish, tortoises, porcupines, squirrels, deer, bulls, wild asses, wild pigeons, domestic pigeons and all four-footed creatures that are neither useful nor edible... "
500 BC - forward -- Greek coastal cities become landlocked after deforestation, which causes soil erosion. The siltation fills in the bays and mouths of rivers.
•• Greek philosopher Plato (427 – 347 BC) compared hills and mountains of Greece to the bones of a wasted body: "All the richer and softer parts have fallen away and the mere skelton of the land remains."
••One river located in Southwestern Greece, the Maender, becomes so silted that its twists and turns come to represent a river wandering – or meandering.
200 BC – Greek physician Galen observes copper miners and notes the danger of acid mists.
100 AD -- Occupational disease is well known in ancient Rome. Workers in lead and mercury mines and smelters are known to suffer from the metals, according to Rome’s famous engineer Vitruvius.
100 AD – Hero of Alexandria experiments with solar powered pumps.
100 AD - 400 AD – Decline of Roman Empire may have been partly due to lead poisoning, according to modern hi storian and toxicologist Jerome Nriagu. Romans used lead acetate ("sugar of lead") to sweeten old wine and turn grape pulp into a sweet condiment. Usually the acidic wine or pulp was simply left in a vat with sheets of lead. An aristocrat with a sweet tooth might have eaten as much as a gram of lead a day. Widespread use of this sweetener would have caused gout, sterility, insanity and many of the symptoms which were, in fact, present among the aristocrats.
535 AD -- Legal code (Institutes) of Roman emperor Justinian issued. "By the law of nature these things are common to mankind---the air, running water, the sea, and consequently the shores of the sea."
1257 -- Queen Eleanor of Provence is forced to leave Nottingham Castle for Tutbury Castle because heavy coal smoke fouls the air.
1300s -- Forest Code introduced in France aimed at regulating wood production for the Navy.
1388 -- Parliament passes an act forbidding the throwing of filth and garbage into ditches, rivers and waters. City of Cambridge also passes the first urban sanitary laws in England.
1640 -- Isaac Walton writes The Compleat Angler about fishing and about conservation.
1685 -- Jared Eliot. Born Nov. 7 (Died 22 Apr 1763)A physician, clergyman, physician, and agronomist, Eliot wrote Essays upon Field Husbandry about reducing inefficiency and waste in colonial American farming methods. He had first become concerned about soil when he noticed that water running from a bare hillside was muddy, unlike water running from grassy and forested areas.
1690 --Colonial Governor William Penn requires Pennsylvania settlers to preserve one acre of trees for every five acres cleared.
1748 -1762 -- Jared Eliot, clergyman and physician, writes Essays on Field Husbandry in New England, promoting soil conservation
1762 --1769 -- Philadelphia committee led by Benjamin Franklin attempts to regulate waste disposal and water pollution.
1769, Sept. 14 -- Alexander Von Humbolt noted in 1819 that the fluctuating levels of a Venezuelan lake were related to deforestation in the surrounding hills.
“By felling the trees that cover the tops and sides of mountains, men in every climate prepaer at once two calamities for future generations: the want of fuel and the scarcity of water... When forests are destroyed ... the beds of rivers, remaining dry during part of the year, are converted into torrents whenever great rain falls on the heights...”
1770 -- William Wordsworth born (1770 - 1850) First of the English romantic poets, is born. Wordsworth thought the Industrial revolution was an "outrage done to nature" and was appalled that the common people were no longer "breathing fresh air" or "treading the green earth."
1789 -- Benjamin Franklin leaves money in a widely publicized codicil to his will to build fresh water pipeline to Philadelphia due to the link between bad water and disease. Within a few years, one quarter of the population of the town dies in a yellow fever epidemic.
1791-- The New York state assembly closes hunting season on the heath hen. The species is extinct by the early 1900s.
1798 -- Rev. Thomas Malthus writes Essay on the Principle of Population which influenced Darwin and many others. Malthus observed that plants and animals produce far more offspring than can survive, and thought that Man would also be capable of overproducing unless family size was regulated.
1826 John James Audubon: first edition of Birds of America, an ongoing collection of color engravings.
1817 -- U.S. Secretary of Navy authorized to reserve timber lands producing hardwoods for naval stores.
1818 -- Massachusetts bans the hunting of robins and horned larks, both popular foods, as a conservation measure.
1819 -- British Parliamentary committee expresses concern that steam engines and furnaces "could work in a manner less prejudicial to public health."
1823 -- James Fenimore Cooper writes The Pioneers, which contains the idea that humans should "govern the resources of nature by certain principles in order to conserve them."
1824 -- Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier writes "Remarks on the Temperature of the Terrestrial Globe and Planetary Spaces" for Annales de chimie et de physique in which he proposes the theory that the sun’s heat is partially trapped in the earth’s atmosphere like a giant glass jar -- the first scientific reference to global warming.
1832 -- Arkansas Hot Springs established as a national reservation, setting a precedent for Yellowstone and eventually, a national park system.
1832 -- George Catlin, a U.S. artist and author, first proposes the idea of national parks encompassing major areas in which Indians and wild country could both be preserved
1834 -- New York bans the use of batteries (scatter guns the size of cannons) in duck hunting, but the ban is repealed the following year.
1834 -- London officials bring nuisance charges against a coal - gas manufacturing firm that contaminated the Thames by releasing large amounts of coal tar from the plant. Although other indictments had been brought, Rex v. Medley was apparently the first to have been successfully prosecuted.
Defendants unlawfully and injuriously conveyed É great quantities of filthy, noxious, unwholesome and deleterious liquids, matters, scum and refuseÉ into the river Thames, whereby the waters became charged and impregnated with the said liquid and became corrupted and insalubrious and unfit for the use of his Majesty's subjects ... People who supported themselves and their families by catching and selling fish were deprived of their employment and reduced to great poverty and distress; (all) to the common nuisance and grievous injury of his Majesty's subjects, to the evil example, and against the peace.
1835 -- Ralph Waldo Emerson writes the essay Nature, beginning an American tradition of Transendentalism continued by Thoreau, Fuller, Walt Whitman and others.
1838 -- Octavia Hill (1838 - 1912) born in London. She was founder of the most influential English society for preservation, the National Trust. As "the first woman environmentalist of significance" (according to Guha), she saw the link between social reform and environmental protection. She pioneered slum improvement, anti-smoke exhibitions and helped protect many areas of London, especially Parliament Hill.
1845 -- Johnny Appleseed dies. The legendary but real man planted apple trees across Ohio and Indiana for 50 years.
1847 -- US Rep. George Perkins Marsh of Vermont notes destructive impact of people on the land in a speech to Congress. In 1864 he will publish Man and Nature: The Earth as Modified by Human Action.
1849 -- U.S. Department of Interior established.
1854 -- Henry David Thoreau publishes Walden.
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. ... “
1857 -- State of Vermont commissions study on depleted fish populations in Connecticut River.
1864 -- Former Congressman George Perkins Marsh writes Man and Nature: The Earth as Modified by Human Action, with emphasis on forest preservation and soil and water conservation. Along with Alexander von Humboldt (1769 - 1859) and Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), Marsh is considered a founder of environmental science and the scientifically-based conservation movement.
1864 -- Federal government grants state of California land for Yosemite Valley Park.
1866 -- Founding of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
1871 -- U.S. Fish Commission formed to study decline of coastal fisheries.
1872 -- Yellowstone National Park established in Wyoming.
1873, December -- First of a series of “killer fogs” in London. Over 1,150 die in three days. Similar incidents in 1880, 1882, 1891, 1892 and later.
1874 -- German graduate student Othmar Zeider discovers chemical formula for the insecticide DDT.
1874 -- Secretary of the Interior Delano testified before Congress, "The buffalo are disappearing rapidly, but not faster than I desire. I regard the destruction of such game as Indians subsist upon as facilitating the policy of the Government, of destroying their hunting habits, coercing them on reservations, and compelling them to begin to adopt the habits of civilization."
1876 -- American Forestry Association campaigns to cut timber on government reserves, American Association for the Advancement of Science calls for federal legislation to protect timberlands.
1878 -- Iowa enacts first state bag limit law, limiting hunters to 25 prairie chickens and other game birds per day.
1878 -- National Quarantine Act empowers the Surgeon General of the Marine Hospital Service (precursor to the Public Health Service) to impose quarantines.
1879 -- Division of Forestry established in US, later to become US Forest Service.
1881 -- Norway tracks first signs of acid rain on its western coast (Mongillo, 2001)
1885 -- U.S. Biological Survey created, partly out of concern over the near extermination of the buffalo and the passenger pigeon.
1887 -- Aldo Leopold born Jan. 11 in Burlington, Iowa. The conservationist and naturalist was famous for his Sand County Almanac, published in 1948. He was a professor of forestry at the University of Wisconsin and one of the founders of the Wilderness Society in 1935.
"A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."
1891 -- Baltimore inventor Clarence Kemp patents first commercial Climax Solar Water Heater.
1892 -- June 4 -- Sierra Club founded by John Muir, Robert Underwood Johnson and William Colby "to do something for the wilderness and make the mountains glad."
1894 -- Dec. 24 -- Swedish chemist Svante August Arrhenius begins to wonder what increases of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from fossil fuels will do to the climate. (See 1908)
1895 -- US Attorney General Judson Harmon tells Mexico that the US will "do whatever it pleases" with water from the Rio Grande.
1895 -- American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society is founded.
1897 -- Forest Management Act -- Authorizes commercial use of public forrests.
1898 -- Oct. 16 -- William O. Douglas born. He was appointed to the US Supreme court in 1939 and retired in 1975. He was also author of A Wilderness Bill of Rights (published in 1965) and an activist for environmental causes while a justice. For example, in 1954, Douglas organized a 189 mile hike along the C & O canal towpath to protest a proposed highway into the park area along the river west of Washington DC.
1900 -- Lacey Act regulates interstate traffic in wild game, brings importation of birds and mammals under federal control.
1900 -- Wild buffalo population drops to fewer than 40 animals from an estimated 30 million a century beforehand. Most are killed in the years just after the Civil War, when the US Army hopes to remove the buffalo in order to move Indians onto reservations. (See Smits, 1994 and Isenberg, 2000).
1900 -- Water pollution lawsuit begins in Supreme Court. The state of Missoui sues the state of Illinois and the City of Chicago's sewer system for polluting the Mississipi. Eventually, US Supreme Court allows the Chicago city sewer department to maintain a canal draining city sewage into the Des Plaines River and, eventually, the Mississippi River. In Missouri v. Illinois and the Sanitary District of Chicago, the court said:
"It is a question of the first magnitude whether the destiny of the great rivers is to be the sewers of the cities along their banks or to be protected against everything which threatens their purity. To decide the whole matter at one blow by an irrevocable fiat would be at least premature. If we are to judge by what the plaintiff itself permits, the discharge of sewage into the Mississippi by cities and towns is to be expected..." The court also said that a similar suit would have failed 50 years beforehand because an older common law nuisance standard would at least have required evidence of change obvioius to the senses such as new smells or a visible increase in filth. (Barros, 1974)
1903, March 14 -- President Theodore Roosevelt creates first National Bird Preserve, (the begining of the Wildlife Refuge system), on Pelican Island, Florida. In all, by 1909 the Roosevelt administration creates 42 million acres of national forests, 53 national wildlife refuges and 18 areas of "special interest," including the Grand Canyon. The record will not bet equaled until Bill Clinton's last year in office.
1907 -- Air pollution lawsuit begins in Supreme Court. In various decisions through 1915, the Court will decide to limit the amount of sulfur and other noxious fumes that can emerge from the Tennessee Copper Co. following a suit by the State of Georgia. The suit involved sulfur dioxide fumes from Copper Basin smelters in Tennessee that were killing forests and orchards and making people sick over the Georgia border. The state of Tennessee refused to move against the copper companies and disputed Georgia¹s right to interfere. Georgia sued in 1907 and won in 1915 after investigation and attempts to reduce the pollution , including a court-mandated reduction and mandatory inspections by a Vanderbilt university professor. The majority opinion was delivered by the clearly indignant Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes:
"It is a fair and reasonable demand on the part of a sovereign that the air over its territory should not be polluted on a great scale by sulphurous acid gas, that the forests on its mountains Š should not be further destroyed or threatened by the act of persons beyond its control, that the crops and orchards on its hills should not be endangered." -- Georgia v. Tennessee Copper Co. and Ducktown Sulphur, Copper & Iron Co, 206 U.S. 230 (1907)
1908 -- Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius argues that the greenhouse effect from coal and petroleum use is warming the globe. According to his calculations, doubling C02 would lead to average temperature increase of 5 to 6 degrees C. Rather than being alarmed, Arrhenius is pleased that people in the future would "live under a warmer sky and a less harsh environment than we were granted
1914 -- The last passenger pigeon dies in the Cincinatti zoo.
1926 -- First large scale survey of air pollution in U.S., in Salt Lake City.
1933 -- Civilian Conservation Corps formed; 2,000 camps opened, trees planted, roads, fire towers, buildings and bridges constructed. More than 2.5 million people serve until program ends in 1942. Other federal programs, including the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Soil Conservation Service, begin during FDR presidency.