I started to say that maybe things just aren't as simple as they once were and then I found this.
Environmental Timeline 1200 - 1750
radford.edu
1257 -- Queen Eleanor of Provence is forced to leave Nottingham Castle for Tutbury Castle because heavy coal smoke fouls the air, (according to Markham and Brimblecombe).. A similar account is given in Hughes: unendurable air pollution from wood smoke led Henry II's wife Elaanor of Aquataine to flee Tutbury Castle in 1157.
1275 -- Marco Polo, the Italian traveler, notices black rocks that burn on his journey through China.
1300 -- The British are already beginning to use the black rocks, calling them "sea coals" because they are brought by barge or boat to London from Newcastle and other parts of northeastern England.
1300s -- Forest Code introduced in France aimed at regulating wood production for the Navy.
1306 -- Edward I forbids coal burning in London when Parliament is in session. Like many attempts to regulate coal burning, it has little effect.
1347 -- 1350s Bubonic plague decimates Europe, creating the first attempts to enforce public health and quarantine laws. Reaction to the plague also includes genocidal pogroms against Jews in most cities of Europe. One not very satisfying idea about this is that Jews, with greater understanding of elementary hygiene, may have had a lower infection rate, which in turn might have seemed suspicious. People had no explanation for the Black Death other than rumor, superstition and vague theories about miasmas and air pollution. (Ziegler, Markham).
1366 -- City of Paris forces butchers to dispose of animal wastes outside the city (Ponting); similar laws would be disputed in Philadelphia and New York nearly 400 years later.
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.
1473 -- Ulrich Ellenbog writes first pamphlet on occupational disease.
1494 -- March 24, Georgius Bauer (known as Agricola) born at Glauchau, in Saxony (Germany).
1556 --Agricola writes De Re Metallica, a book concerning techniques of assaying, mining and smelting a variety of metals. Parts of the book deal with occupational hazards. Published 1556 He writes that Italian city-states passed laws against mining because of its effects on woodlands, fields, vineyards and olive groves: "The critics say further that mining is a perilous occupation to persue because the miners are sometimes killed by the pestilential air which they breathe; sometimes their lungs rot away..." Agricola discounted these and other concerns. "Things like this rarely happen, and only insofar as workmen are careless," he wrote. The idea that workmen were to blame for occupational disease would be repeated with surprising frequency into the mid-20th century.
1546 -- Italian physican Girolamo Fracastoro outlines theory of contagious disease. He reasoned that infectious diseases could be passed on in 3 ways: simple contact, indirect contact (e.g., bedclothes) and minute bodies over distance through the air. Thus, isolation and disinfection were the ways to take action against epidemics. es.rice.edu
1560-1600 -- Rapid industrialization in England leads to heavy deforestation and increasing substitution of coal for wood.
1589 -- Water closet invented by Sir John Harrington in England but indifference to filth and lack of sewage meant that the invention was ignored until 1778, when Joseph Bramah began marketing a patented closet. (Markham).
c.1590 -- Queen Elizabeth "greatly grieved and annoyed" by coal smoke in Westminster Palace. (Brimblecombe)
1593 -- Aug. 9 -- Isaac Walton born in England (dies Dec 15th 1683).
1603 -- James I succeeds Elizabeth I and orders coal burned in his London household, but rather than smokey bituminous coal from Lancashire, Durham and Cornwall, he orders importation of hard, cleaner-burning anthracite from Scotland.
1640 -- Isaac Walton writes The Compleat Angler about fishing and about conservation.
1661 -- John Evelyn writes "Fumifugium, or the Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoake of London Dissipated" to propose remedies for London's air pollution problem. These include large public parks and lots of flowers. users.synflux.com.au accd.edu
"The immoderate use of, and indulgence to, sea-coale in the city of London exposes it to one of the fowlest inconveniences and reproaches that can possibly befall so noble and otherwise incomparable City... Whilst they are belching it forth their sooty jaws, the City of London resembles the face rather of Mount Aetna, the Court of Vulcan... or the suburbs of Hell [rather] than an assembly of rational creatures..."
In his diary, Evelyn writes in 1684 that smoke was so severe "hardly could one see across the street, and this filling the lungs with its gross particles exceedingly obstructed the breast, so as one would scarce breathe."
1662 -- John Graunt publishes a book of mortality statistics compiled by parish and municipal councils in England. Although the numbers are inaccurate, a start was made in epidemiology and the understanding of disease and public health.
1666 -- Japan's shogun warns against dangers of erosion, stream siltation and flooding caused by deforestation, and a proclaimation urges people to plant tree seedlings. Additional measures lead to an elaborite system of woodland management by 1700. (Collapse by Diamond, p. 301, citing Conrad Totman).
1669 -- Stricter forest codes introduced in France, again aimed at regulating wood production for the Navy.
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. He conducted experiments such as plowing green crops back into the soil to enrich it, and planting grasses and legumes to make better pastures for livestock.
1690 --Colonial Governor William Penn requires Pennsylvania settlers to preserve one acre of trees for every five acres cleared.
1690s -- Paris becomes first European city with extensive sewer system. See Frederique Krupa's Paris: Urban Sanitation Before the 20th Century.
1700 -- Some 600 ships are engaged in hauling "sea coal" from Newcastle to London, an enormous increase compared to 1650, when only two ships regularly carried sea coal. The reason? Rapid industrialization and the demand for iron and naval supplies has stripped England's forests.
1706 -- Benjamin Franklin born January 17 in Boston, Mass. Franklin's concern for sanitation and pure drinking water was a part of his lifelong concern for the improvement of Philadelphia in "small matters." But Franklin also saw a larger question -- one of "public rights" as opposed to private rights -- in many of these controversies.
1709 -- Abraham Darby of Coalbrookdale, England uses coal instead of wood for manufacturing iron. British coal production around this time is 3 million tons per year, or five times more than the rest of the world combined. (Simmons).
1711 -- Johnathan Swift notes the contents of London's gutters: "sweepings from butchers' stalls, dung, guts and blood, drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud..." (Markham, Brimblecombe).
1712 -- Bernardo Ramazzini (1633 - 1714), the father of occupational medicine, publishes De Morbis Artificum Diatriba (English title, printed in 1764 was The Diseases of artificers, which by their particular callings they are most liable to, with the Method of avoiding them, and their Cure). The book describes the hazards of 52 occupations, including leather tanning, wrestling, and gravedigging. Ramazzini says that with a general improvement in diet and less arduous work, people would be better able to resist attacks on their health. Ramazzini also noticed that nuns tended to have a higher incidence of breat cancer and that lead miners and workers often had skin the same color as the metal. ÒDemons and ghosts are often found to disturb the [lead] miners,Ó he said.
1720 -- In India, hundreds of Bishnois Hindus of Khejadali go to their deaths trying to protect trees from the Maharaja of Jodhpur, who needed wood to fuel the lime kilns for cement to build his palace. (Guha)
1721 -- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, popularizes smallpox inoculation, a practice she had observed in Turkey.
1723 -- Lead in alcohol stills causes serious stomach pains, a commission of inquiry learns. The commission, based in Boston, investigates complaints about New England rum from consumers in North Carolina. "It poisoned their people, giving them the Dry Bellyache," Benjamin Franklin said of the incident in a 1767 letter to a friend who was investigating a similar incident in Devonshire.
1739 -- Benjamin Franklin and neighbors petition Pennsylvania Assembly to stop waste dumping and remove tanneries from Philadelphia's commercial district. Foul smell, lower property values, disease and interference with fire fighting are cited. The industries complain that their rights are being violated, but Franklin argues for "public rights." Franklin and the environmentalists win a symbolic battle but the dumping goes on.
1741 -- Foundling Hospital of London established. Other children's hospitals in Germany and France built, showing concern for infant mortality. By 1800, infant mortality in one London hospital dropped from 66 per thousand to 13 per thousand.
1748 -- Jeremy Bentham born 15 February, (d 6 June 1832) A philosopher and jurist whose doctrine of Utilitarianism and the principle of `the greatest happiness of the greatest number' was a yardstick for the progress of social reform in 19th century Britain. He was an outspoken advocate of law reform, a pugnacious critic of established political doctrines like natural law and contractarianism, and the first to produce a utilitarian justification for democracy. He also had much to say of note on subjects as diverse as prison reform, religion, poor relief, international law, and animal welfare. ucl.ac.uk
1748 -1762 -- Jared Eliot, clergyman and physician, writes Essays on Field Husbandry in New England, promoting soil conservation
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