A Brief History Of Industry And The Environment

Environmental History Resources
http://www.eh-resources.org/timeline/timeline_industrial.html


This timeline contains information that is new to me, especially together in one paper, which enables easier comparison between events and dates than in a search through many different sources. It includes subjects such as the first use of coal, development of better farming methods, and forest and plant management by prehistoric people before the Neolithic, summarizing the human impact on our environment. It is highly interesting and readily accessible to those who have done little reading on subjects such as archeology. Enjoy it!




From the website:

“This website is maintained by Dr Jan Oosthoek, an environmental historian based in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. For many years he has lectured and researched at the Universities of Newcastle (UK) and Edinburgh. At present he is a Research Assistant at the Asia Pacific Centre for Sustainable Enterprise, Griffith University, and an Associate Member of the Centre for Environmental History at the Australian National University.”



Timeline of European Environmental History

The Timeline of European Environmental History is a chronological exploration of the history of the interaction between human culture and nature, with a special focus on northwest Europe. The Timeline is based on the personal research and teaching interests of the author and is therefore selective in content and scope and with a focus on the British Isles. Nevertheless, the timeline aims to provide a reference tool for students, educators, scholars, and anyone interested in environmental history and related subjects. The Timeline extends from prehistory to the present day and will continue to expand in scope and depth over time. Use the slider at the top of this page for navigation.

Structure and navigation

The basic structure of the Timeline of European Environmental History is chronological and divided in blocks representing the main periods in European history. These periods are: prehistory & Roman period, Middle Ages, Early Modern period represented by the Little Ice Age, modern era represented by the Industrial Revolution and the 20th century. Of course this is an arbitrary periodization and the beginning and end of each period differ throughout Europe, apart from the 20th century. The beginning of the Industrial Revolution for example starts later in Italy than in the British Isles.

Each page has a timeline slider at the top of the page which can be used to navigate through time by dragging the slider right or left or by clicking on the periods. You can go to individual topics by clicking the images on the timeline slider.
 
The Industrial Age

A large part of this timelinehas been concerned with the period before 1750. That is because we are talking about a very long period spanning thousands of years, compared to the industrial epoch of the past 250 years. Before the industrial period changes were relatively slow, although the impacts could be far reaching because societies relied on wave and wind power, and solar energy, for the production of food and goods.

The most important development of the industrial period, which started in the late 18th century, was the increasingly intensive use of hydrocarbon fuels: coal, oil and natural gas.

During the 18th century, the source of power was the most important factor in the location of industrial activity. Initially the location was determined by the availability of wind or water power. The manipulation of water in order to drive water mills became very important in the United Kingdom. All over the Britain, rivers were diverted; reservoirs were built in the hills to supply mills. The greater the catchment area and fall, the more powerful and continuous the source of water power was likely to be. Effective water management of rivers and canals was a valued skill, and utilised relatively high capital investment in mill buildings, machinery and infrastructural investment in canals. One of the most famous and grandest schemes is the mill at New Lanark in Scotland.

The story of the development of water-power and its role in the rise of the factory system of production is very important in the history of the British environment. Yet it is secondary compared with the replacement of charcoal, a product derived from wood, by coal.

The development of coal mining and the use of steam power generated from coal is without doubt the central, binding narrative of the nineteenth century. But we must realize that the use of horse and waterpower remained important well into the early 20th century. However, the trend was set and soon the environment felt the full impact of industrialization in the form of air and water pollution.

Water pollution

The growth of the major industrial cities also caused water pollution.  All too often, rivers that pass through urban areas became a receptacle for human waste products, both domestic and industrial. Sewage, as in most cities, was washed out into the streets where it found its way to the rivers with disastrous consequences.

In the first half of the 18th century, both London and Paris, the largest cities in Europe with respectively 1 and 2.4 million inhabitants by 1850, experienced a series of recurring epidemics of cholera and typhoid. In 1832 over 20,000 Parisians died in a cholera outbreak; London experienced similar outbreaks. This was caused by increasing amounts of sewage dumped into the Seine and Thames rivers.

London was one of the first cities in the world to build a sewer system and improve the quality of its drinking water supply. The London Board of Health eliminated cesspools in the late 1840s, and a Metropolis Water Act of 1852 forced water companies to move their intakes upstream and regulate their filtration and storage. Drinking water showed significant improvement by the 1850s, yet the problem of the Thames hit daily by 260 tons of raw sewage by the late 1850s-caused the most stir in the popular press as well as debate in parliament. Plans for a central drainage system were stalled through much of that decade by the uncertainties of medical science and the obstruction by London’s local parish councils, which disliked the idea of a centralized authority or systems of any kind. Joseph Bazalgette was the civil engineer responsible for a project that took about 16 years (1858-74) to complete.  Cholera was by then a thing of the past and the general health or the population improved spectacularly.

London’s example of building adequate sewer systems and treatment plants was soon followed by other cities making urban environments much cleaner. However, much sewage was still discharged in open water outside cities and air pollution continued unchecked until the mid-20th century.

Air pollution

With increasing industrialisation there was a string of Parliamentary Acts in the mid 1800s designed to do something about the polluting effects of industrial and domestic smoke.

London was infamous for its combinations of smoke and fog, combined in the word smog, and therefore earned the nickname “the Big Smoke”. All major cities suffered from smoke pollution and Edinburgh’s nickname, “Auld Reekie” refers partly to the sanitary situation of the town as well as to smoke pollution. The effects of air pollution brought cities to a halt, disrupting traffic but more dangerously also causing death rates to rise. During a week of smog in 1873 killed over 700 people in London. However, the largest air pollution disaster in Britain was the Great London Smog of December 1952 which killed approximately 4,000 people.

Following the Great London Smog legislation was introduced and the first Clean Air Act was passed in 1956 which moved power stations and heavy industry to more rural sites. The reduction of domestic and industrial coal burning and the use of smokeless coals has led to a reduction in the levels of emission of sulphur dioxide, one of the main contributors to acid rain, the emissions falling between 1970 and 1994 by 60 percent in British cities. Similar developments can be observed in many industrialised countries.





PREHISTORY

About 8,000 BC: The last Ice age ended when the ice sheets finally retreated from Scandinavia and the glaciers in Scotland disappeared. People, animals and plants invaded the appearing land after the ice had disappeared. Part of the North Sea is still dry.
 
 8,000 - 7000 BC: Age of the Hunter Gatherers. The European environment was transformed: the boreal forests (coniferous forests) were pushed back to Scandinavia, tundra and steppe were all but removed from the scene and the dominant vegetation type was now mixed deciduous forest covering over 80% of the land bordering the North Sea. Humans followed vegetation and recolonised northern Europe.

7,500 BC: The melting of the ice sheets resulted in the flooding of the North Sea basin and thedisappearance of the land bridge connecting Britain to the continent by 8000 years ago. This prevented many tree and plans species to invade Britain and explains, for example, why it has only two species of conifer: Scots Pine and juniper (the status of yew is contested).

6,000 - 2,500 BC: Holocene Climate Optimum. Sea level reached a slightly higher level than today coinciding with the warmest period of the past 10,000 years with temperatures about 2 degrees celsius higher than today.

Impact Mesolithic peoples, ca. 8,000-5.000 BC

Mesolithic1 Europeans altered the landscape through fire more thoroughly than their predecessors. By doing so they created a more predictable environment for themselves.

Burning grasses helped rejuvenate their environments over a period of five to six years, attracting game, especially if open areas were maintained near water sources. It probably through the use of fire and other land management techniques that created large open areas which is probably most important environmental legacy of the Mesolithic peoples.

The Europeans learned to manipulate their environments and created a mosaic of woodlands and open land that they so favoured for food gathering and hunting. Manipulation could be extreme: it was Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who first deforested the western Isles of Scotland. By 3000 years ago there was no tree left on these isles.

Arrival of agriculture, ca 5000-4000 BC

Farming, including crops like emmer and einkorn and domesticated animals, reached northwestern Europe via southeastern and central Europe by ca. 4,800 BC during the Neolithic2 period.

It is likely that local peoples were not replaced by immigrant populations but observed and adapted to the new way of life: agriculture. Immigrants would have set examples and pushed hunter-gatherers into agriculture. That must not have been hard since many hunter-gatherers had managed wild life and plant resources in a way that can be described as proto-agriculture. It is also likely that agriculture sprang up independently in some locations and was later supplemented by the grains and animals arriving from the Middle East.

The new economic and ecological regime was based on barley, oats, sheep, goats and domesticated cattle, all of which had wild ancestors in Anatolia and the Near East. This indicates that Northwest Europe was integrated into a wider cultural-economic-environmental network (a process that we call nowadays "globalisation").

Between the Neolithic and the 18th century, agriculture was the main cause of culturally driven environmental change.

Bronze and Iron Age, ca. 2100 BC – 1 AD

By about 1 AD the countryside in many parts of western Europe was already owned, managed and planned. This had been the case for most of the Bronze and Iron Age. Little wildwood remains and the land resource was well planned with field systems in rotation, pasture and coppiced woodland. Hill forts became common and acted as local centres of administration, power and refuge.


Crops

The range of crops grown had widened considerably since the early bronze age. Although the most important were wheat and barley, oats, tic beans, vetch, peas, rye, flax and fat hen were regularly grown. Storage of crops was either in pits or in raised stores and harvest was over several months - weeds, grain and then straw.

Livestock

Sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, poultry, geese and ducks. Horses were a new arrival in the farmsteads but they were not used for work so much as symbols of status.

Farming systems

Farming typically revolved around small hamlets and farmsteads with enclosed rectilinear fields - each having areas of pasture, arable and wood. Ploughing became more efficient with the arrival of the iron share (plough point) and a two field rotation was introduced; crops one year followed by a fallow that was grazed by livestock. This lead to suprisingly high yields and fuelled population growth, even though retreat from the uplands had been necessary because of climate deterioration.

Woodland and hedges

In southern parts of the country, most of the wildwood had been cleared and given way to farming or coppice management. In northern parts, or where the ground was particularly unsuitable for agriculture, wildwood remained, but under constant threat. Land around the farmsteads was usually enclosed by hazel fencing or hedging.

Climate

The climate of the iron age was much cooler and wetter by comparison with that of the bronze age - but was probably similar to that of today.

Roman Invasion

The Romans invaded large parts of Western Europe from the middle of the 1st century BC. This started a process of Romanisation of population and landscape.

59 - 51 BCE: The Gallic Wars. The conquest of Gaul (modern day France and Belgium)

43 CE: Invasion of Britain.

Roman expansion was partly driven by resource shortages and environmental degradation. The Mediterranean basin was largely deforested by the beginning of the CE. Romans required huge quantities of timber for mining, and heating, as well as for construction and the production of iron and other metals.

Grain production also drove the expansion due to the Roman population in Italy. Driven by the need to feed them Rome needed to conquer more territory that could produce grain. This drove the wars with Carthage in North Africa.  After it was conquered by the Romans North Africa was stripped of its trees and became the breadbasket of Rome.

That was not enough because Rome gradually ran out of metals such as gold, iron, led and silver and had to turn elsewhere: Northern Europe.

Northern Europe was the periphery on which the core of the Roman Empire relied for raw materials.

The direct environmental consequences of the Roman Empire in Northern Europe can be best understood by examining the following activities: Road Building, agriculture, logging, and mining and urbanisation.

Roads

One of the most visible changes in the landscape must have been the construction of Roman roads. Over time quite a dense network of characteristically straight roads was build and cut the landscape up in a patchwork. Many of these Roman roads are still in use (following at least the course of the roads).
 
 Agriculture

During the Roman period a range of new crops were introduced in Britain and these included cabbage, parsnip and carrots as well as spelt. The new crops complemented the existing crops of wheat, barley, oats, tic beans, vetch, peas and rye.

The introduction of better iron ploughs that ploughed deeper and tougher soil made the cultivation of more land possible. The two handed scythes and harvesitng machines made the cutting of the cereal crops faster and easier. Better quality axes meant woodland could be cleared faster and so turned into farmland.

The livestock was also improved and by careful breeding and better supplies of winter fodder, the quality of the breeds of cows, sheep and pigs made for better quality diary and meat produce.

Logging. Wood shortage was so bad that by the first century CE ceramics factories were relocated to Gaul due of a lack of fire wood in the Roman heartland. Increasingly the Romans turned to the forests of the north in Germany for timber, for example in the Vosges Mountains.

Mining

The mining landscapes of Roman Europe had several typical features for any industrial landscape: waste tips from mass production such as slag heaps, workshops for mass production, large quarries, mineshafts and communication networks (Roads, rivers, canals) in order to transport and distribute products. Local water pollution and air pollution caused by mining and smelting. Lead production caused pollution on a wider scale: we find lead deposits in the Greenland ice cap: the first global impact of industrial activities in history?

Urban Settlements

Urban settlements increased in number and size in Northern and western Europe and were a new element in Britain when the Romans arrived. Towns sprang up all over the country.

Environmental impacts urbanization:

Garbage and wastewater must be transported out of cities. In order to do so the Romans devised a system of Garbage collection.

The Romans were also the first to build sewer systems but as a result it was very unwise to swim downstream a town since the sewerage water was dumped downstream into rivers. Luckily, the amount was relatively small so that rivers could under normal circumstances deal with this naturally.

Local air pollution affected people locally.

a serious problem in urban areas in Roman times was lead poisoning. Roman water pipes were made of lead and left little amounts of led in the water. Led is a poison and when you drink it day after day, it accumulates in the body and causes lead poisoning.

After about 350 CE, there was a shift to wetter, colder weather in north Western Europe, a deterioration that intensified after 450 CE. By the late Roman period, there may have been as much as a 10% increase in rainfall in the British Isles. Together with deforestation and expanded agriculture and grazing, heavier rains would have aggravated soil erosion and flooding. Soil would be leached of its nutrients and fertility; and heaths and bogs would have claimed arable soil and lessened productivity.

410 - Rome sacked by Visigoths   
439 - Vandals sack Carthage  
455 - Vandals sack Rome  
476 - Romulus Agustus, the last Roman Emperor, is deposed by the Gothts

Decline of Roman Empire coincides with cooling trend. It probably affected agricultural productivity. However, it is unlikely that climate fluctuations were the direct cause of the decline of the Empire. It was one of the many other problems that the Romans encountered.


Footnotes

1. The Mesolithic (mesos=middle and lithos=stone or the 'Middle Stone Age') is a period in the development of human technology between the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods. It began at the end of the Pleistocene epoch (coinciding with the last Ice Age) around 10,000 years ago and ended with the introduction of farming.
2. The Neolithic (or "New" Stone Age) was a period between the introduction of farming and the introduction of metal tools. The dates vary per region depending on the beginning of the development or arrival of farming and metal technology.



Middle Ages , 500 - 1500 CE

The 535-36 event

Between 536 and 551 AD tree ring growth was very low throughout Europe and many other parts of the world, including North America, New Zealand and China. Contemporary writers in southern Europe described what modern climate scientists call a ‘dust veil event’ which sharply reduced solar radiation reaching the earth’s surface. This depressed temperatures, disrupted weather patterns, reduced biological productivity, including food crops, and resulted in famine and social disruption during the 6th century. The consequences were experienced worldwide. In Britain, the period 535—555 experienced the worst weather of the 6th century. In Mesopotamia there were heavy falls of snow and in Arabia there was flooding follow by famine. In China, in 536, there was drought and famine and yellow dust rained down like snow. In Korea, AD535 and 536 were the worst years of that century in climatic terms with massive storms and flooding, followed by drought. It has also been suggested that the occurrence of the Justinian Plague, a pandemic which affected the Byzantine Empire, including its capital Constantinople, in the years 541–42 AD is linked to the climatic events five years earlier.

What caused it?

Although historians have sought to explain the ‘dust veil’ in terms of a comet hitting the earth, only recently, with the help of earth scientists, is it becoming clear that we are dealing here with a volcanic event. There was a series of severe volcanic eruptions in central and South America that put so much dust into the atmsophre that it depressed the temperature of the earth for years.1

This catastrophic event can be regarded as the trigger that ended the classical world and the beginning of the Middle Ages. It blotted the sun out and resulted directly and indirectly, in climate chaos, famine, migration, war and massive political change on all continents.

Note: Climatic and environmental disasters are "funnels", not direct causes for historical events.They reinforce already existing historical patterns such as migration or political instability, over exploitation etc.

800: coronation Charlemagne. At the beginning of the 9th century, when Charlemagne is ruling most of Europe, the winter weather turns cold again. This did not prevent Charlemagne from becoming emperor. This is a period of cultural and economic growth and flourishing. The colder conditions did not affect this in a negative way because of political stability and the fact that society was resilient enough to cope with this climatic fluctuation.

10th – 14th century: The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) or Medieval Climate Optimum

During the High Middle Ages in Europe experienced a climate slightly warmer than in the period preceding and the period following it. The summer temperatures were between 1 and 1.4 degrees higher than the average temperature of the 20th century. The winters were even warmer with an average temperature in England of 6 degrees, which is slightly warmer than for most of the 20th century. The warmer conditions were caused by the fact that the air circulation above the Atlantic changed position, as did the warm sea currents, transporting warmer water to the arctic.

In Europe the warm conditions had positive effects. Summer after summer the harvests were good and the population increased rapidly. As a result thousands of hectares were cleared of woodland and farmers expanded their fields high into the hills and on mountain slopes. It was even possible to grow successfully grapes as far north as Yorkshire.

Under these conditions, art, literature and even science were developing apace and we see the height of medieval civilisation. The most visible achievements of this period are undoubtedly the construction of the many cathedrals all over Europe. The good harvests had made Europe rich and the good weather freed people from the burden of the struggle against the elements. It created the wealth and labour force to build cathedrals. It was a golden period for European Architecture and art.

9th & 10th centuries: Vikings reach Island and Greenland during the milder condition that prevailed during Medieval Warm Period.

Norse settlers arrived in Iceland in the 9th and Greenland in the 10th century with an agricultural practice based on milk, meat and fibre from cattle, sheep, and goats. The settlers were attracted by green fields and a relatively good climate and driven there by population pressures in Scandinavia.

They were able to sail to Iceland and Greenland as well as Labrador because of a decrease in sea ice in the north Atlantic.

Beginning of Little Ice Age

Environmental upheavals linked to sever climate variability characterised the period from 1300 to 1400. 

All tree ring series in northern Europe show a decline in growth rates, indicating an adverse climatic change. This marked the transition from a “Medieval Warm Period” to the “Little Ice Age” when temperatures were on average 1.5 degrees Celsius lower than before and with greater seasonal variation. The cooling trend associated with the Little Ice Age progressively moved from north-west to south-east across Europe, with the Vikings in the far North experiencing the clooing first, British Isles experiencing the effects from the 1290s and the Mediterranean after 1320.

Written records from the 14th century provide accounts of severe weather in the period from 1314 to 1317, which led in turn to crop failure and famine. This episode of failed harvests and its consequences is known as “The Great Famine”. Notwithstanding these ecological calamities, the population of northern Europe was at an all time high by the second quarter of the 14th century. However, the arrival of the Black Death, in Europe in 1347 pushed the European population into a century-long demographic decline and caused long term changes in economy and society.

The Black Death, 1340s-1350s

Germs and microbes are part of our environment. In fact, these creatures can be regarded as the most successful living things on the planet. Our invisible environment of microbes has also shaped events in world history in many ways. Nowhere was this more evident and visible ultimately, in the Black Death that affected, and infected, Eurasia during the 14th century. The Black Death spread from central Asia along trade routes and reached southern Europe in 1347. It swept quickly through the continent and reached northern Scandinavia and Iceland in 1350.  Few areas escaped and by late 1350 between 30 and 40% of the European population had perished.

But what catapulted the Black Death on the world stage? Recently it has been suggested that a climatic event similar to the 536 dust veil event is responsible. Based on comparing the chronologies of prices, wages, grain harvests and the corresponding chronologies of growing conditions and climactic variations, taking into consideration dendrochronology, the Greenland ice cores it has emerged that the episodes of the Black Death coincide with depressed temperatures. Find out more in this video lecture by Professor Bruce Campbell of Queens University Belfast.

The dramatic decline of the European population caused by the Black Death coincided with a decline in global temperature. Coincidence? The climate was already getting colder because the northern hemisphere was heading for the Little Ice Age. At the same time agricultural land was taken out of production in Europe because of the 25-40% decline of the European population (depending on region). This means ploughing of less ground, which releases greenhouse gasses (Methane and carbonates) and forest clearance was reversed. More trees and scrubs mean that more carbon (CO2) was taken out of the atmosphere and stored in biomass. The abandoned farmland acted as a significant carbon sink because trees store carbon taken from the CO2 in the air.

From about 1350 CO2 levels in the atmosphere appear to fall following the Black Death. However, a long term declining trend may have already started before the Black Death. We know that the first two decades of the 14th century were wetter, windier and climatically more unstable than before. The declining trend also continued after the recovery of agriculture after 1440. The reforestation that followed the Black Death and the resulting decrease of CO2 in the atmosphere pronounced a natural cooling trend that was already underway. This was the beginning of the LIA. This means the LIA was not triggered by the Black Death but possibly contributed to it, although temporarily.


Footnotes

1. L. B. Larsen et al., ‘New ice core evidence for a volcanic cause of the A.D. 536 dust veil’, Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 35 (, 2008): L04708. http://www.agu.org/journals/gl/gl0804/2007GL032450/, accessed: 25 November 2008


Landscape change and energy transformation: 1600-1800

Between 1700 and 1800, in common with other early modern societies, British society developed new capability, efficiency, stability, and durability which laid the foundations for the Agricultural revolution. New, complex, large-scale organizations that enhanced human capacity for collective action mobilized and directed the rising flow of natural resources arose during this period. There was a general desire in many European societies to increase their wealth and power by trans­forming the natural world. This was no more apparent then in the British Isles, the first country in the world that would make the first full transition to an industrialized society. For this reason this timeline will mainly focuse on the British Isles and the environmental changes that occurred during the transition from low energy society to an high energy consuming society which occurred during the 18th and 19th centuries.

Agriculture: the basis

During the early modern centuries, the societies of the British Isles un­derwent some important changes. Human numbers swelled threefold, from around 5 million in 1500 to about 16 million in 1800, in spite of sustained out-migration to North America and the Caribbean.

This was a pattern that repeated itself around the North Sea Basin, France and to a lesser extent the German lands.

Agricultural production was increased through four developments:

Introduction of new crops and practices. These included pulses, parsnip and most importantly clover. The latter was used as fodder but it also brought nitrogen into the soil, thus fertilizing the soil. This meant that more intensive continuous rotation regimes could be adopted and thus food production could increase.

Mechanization but also experimentation with new breading techniques à  Jethro Tull

Jethro Tull (1674-1741), important English innovator
Plow horses instead of slower oxen
Drilling equipment (seed drill), not sowing by hand
Selective breeding of livestock

By 1770 English farmers producing 300% more food than in 1700, only 14% increase on farm workers.

Increase was also due to new landscape organization.

New organization of land use: enclosure.

Enclosure meant that village-controlled land and wooded wasteland was converted to individually owned, bounded, perma­nent pasture for cattle and sheep. Only the highest and most barren tracts of the wasteland were left unenclosed. This change encouraged the spread of dispersed farmsteads away from nucleated villages. Those who lost out were undertenants, who were given small allotments determined by their landlords, and squatters, who received no allotments of land. All the lesser folk in the manor lost access to most of the highly productive common graz­ing land in the parish. So, the new landowners profited handsomely from enclosing the land.

The landscape changed from being open into a compartmentalized patchwork of fields enclosed with hedgerows and dry stone walls. These became habitats and corridors of biological migration, the main ecological framework of the British landscape.

Reclamation and cultivation of marginal grounds such as uplands and swamps.
Examples are the hills of the Cheviots, the Pennines and the Fens in East Anglia, the latter were drained by Dutch engineers in the mid 17th century and caused the same problems as in Holland: sinking peat and therefore they had to bring in technology to stay dray and save the newly won agricultural land.

In general population pressure drove expansion of arable land in Tudor and Stuart England. Woodlands, forests, moors and other thinly inhabited lands were colonized, reclaimed and settled.

Forest depletion and responses: management and coal

One of the most formidable problem facing modern Europe was deforestation. A world without wood would mean that most buildings, funiture and even entire cities could not exist. In the early modern period it was even more extreme. The most important machines of the era, windmills, were largely made out of wood, as were houses and ships. A warship in the late 17th century needed 3500 trees aged 80 to 120 years old.

In addition wood was an important source of fuel to heat and cook things. In addition charcoal was needed for the production of iron.

Despite the obvious dependency on wood, Europeans cleared forests to create arable land to feed a growing population, placing pressure on the forests.

In total, forests covered less than 10% of the land surface area in Britain and in the Low Countries it was even lower. Already by the 17th century, most of the largest mammals had disappeared, for example the beaver and wolf, both these species became extinct by the late 1600s. Large areas of Scotland, the Low Countries and Denmark were entirely destitute of trees, the inhabitants were forced to use peat or coal for fuel and to import Scandinavian timber for construction.

Increasingly, people enclosed and managed their woodlands by coppicing to obtain sustainable supplies of fuel for charcoal for gunpowder and iron making, and for tanbark and oak to split for basket weaving.

New techniques also led to increased energy efficiency, e.g.charcoal production, of which fast quantities of charcoal was needed. Around industrial cities such as Sheffield in England, woodlands were carefully managed to sustain the cities stel production. This was soo efficient that the inferior fule of coal did not replace charcoal until the 1820s.

Despite these conservation measures and improved techniques for charcoal production, the forests steadily gave way to agriculture and intensified grazing as well as charcoal production.
 
Coal: entering the age of fossil fuel
The response to the wood shortage was the shift to a new fuel: coal. Britain had enough of it and there were many seams at the surface, easy to exploit, especially in the Tyneside area around Newcastle. Most of this coal was transported to London.

But with the increased use of coal air pollution also increased. The proliferating coal fires emitted a lot of dense, sulfur-laden, smoke that gave London its well-known smoky gray atmosphere. By the mid-17th century, the air pollution in London had reached such proportions that it did not go unnoticed. John Evelyn, one of the creat mind of the day and advocate for forest regeneration, wrote with only slight exaggeration that:

... London was enveloped in such a cloud of sea-coal, as if there be a resemblance of hell upon earth, it is in this volcano in a foggy day: this pestilent smoak, which corrodes the very yron [iron], and spoils all the moveables, leaving a soot on all things that it lights: and so fatally seizing on the lungs of the inhabitants, that cough and consumption spare no man.

Two years later, in his polemic Fumfugium, a treatise on London' air pollution, he claimed that the the harmful effects of coal smoke turned drying clothes black, tarnished paintings, corrodedbuildings , water became undrinkable, and especially, human health deteriorated. It was a warning that foreshadowed the environmental effects of industrialisation on cities around the globe.


The Industrial Age

A large part of this timeline has been concerned with the period before 1750. That is because we are talking about a very long period spanning thousands of years, compared to the industrial epoch of the past 250 years. Before the industrial period changes were relatively slow, although the impacts could be far reaching because societies relied on wave and wind power, and solar energy, for the production of food and goods.
The most important development of the industrial period, which started in the late 18th century, was the increasingly intensive use of hydrocarbon fuels: coal, oil and natural gas.

During the 18th century, the source of power was the most important factor in the location of industrial activity. Initially the location was determined by the availability of wind or water power. The manipulation of water in order to drive water mills became very important in the United Kingdom. All over the Britain, rivers were diverted; reservoirs were built in the hills to supply mills. The greater the catchment area and fall, the more powerful and continuous the source of water power was likely to be. Effective water management of rivers and canals was a valued skill, and utilised relatively high capital investment in mill buildings, machinery and infrastructural investment in canals. One of the most famous and grandest schemes is the mill at New Lanark in Scotland.

The story of the development of water-power and its role in the rise of the factory system of production is very important in the history of the British environment. Yet it is secondary compared with the replacement of charcoal, a product derived from wood, by coal.

The development of coal mining and the use of steam power generated from coal is without doubt the central, binding narrative of the nineteenth century. But we must realize that the use of horse and waterpower remained important well into the early 20th century. However, the trend was set and soon the environment felt the full impact of industrialization in the form of air and water pollution.

Water pollution

The growth of the major industrial cities also caused water pollution.  All too often, rivers that pass through urban areas became a receptacle for human waste products, both domestic and industrial. Sewage, as in most cities, was washed out into the streets where it found its way to the rivers with disastrous consequences.

In the first half of the 18th century, both London and Paris, the largest cities in Europe with respectively 1 and 2.4 million inhabitants by 1850, experienced a series of recurring epidemics of cholera and typhoid. In 1832 over 20,000 Parisians died in a cholera outbreak; London experienced similar outbreaks. This was caused by increasing amounts of sewage dumped into the Seine and Thames rivers.

London was one of the first cities in the world to build a sewer system and improve the quality of its drinking water supply. The London Board of Health eliminated cesspools in the late 1840s, and a Metropolis Water Act of 1852 forced water companies to move their intakes upstream and regulate their filtration and storage. Drinking water showed significant improvement by the 1850s, yet the problem of the Thames hit daily by 260 tons of raw sewage by the late 1850s-caused the most stir in the popular press as well as debate in parliament. Plans for a central drainage system were stalled through much of that decade by the uncertainties of medical science and the obstruction by London’s local parish councils, which disliked the idea of a centralized authority or systems of any kind. Joseph Bazalgette was the civil engineer responsible for a project that took about 16 years (1858-74) to complete.  Cholera was by then a thing of the past and the general health or the population improved spectacularly.

London’s example of building adequate sewer systems and treatment plants was soon followed by other cities making urban environments much cleaner. However, much sewage was still discharged in open water outside cities and air pollution continued unchecked until the mid-20th century.

Air pollution

With increasing industrialisation there was a string of Parliamentary Acts in the mid 1800s designed to do something about the polluting effects of industrial and domestic smoke.

London was infamous for its combinations of smoke and fog, combined in the word smog, and therefore earned the nickname “the Big Smoke”. All major cities suffered from smoke pollution and Edinburgh’s nickname, “Auld Reekie” refers partly to the sanitary situation of the town as well as to smoke pollution. The effects of air pollution brought cities to a halt, disrupting traffic but more dangerously also causing death rates to rise. During a week of smog in 1873 killed over 700 people in London. However, the largest air pollution disaster in Britain was the Great London Smog of December 1952 which killed approximately 4,000 people.

Following the Great London Smog legislation was introduced and the first Clean Air Act was passed in 1956 which moved power stations and heavy industry to more rural sites. The reduction of domestic and industrial coal burning and the use of smokeless coals has led to a reduction in the levels of emission of sulphur dioxide, one of the main contributors to acid rain, the emissions falling between 1970 and 1994 by 60 percent in British cities. Similar developments can be observed in many industrialised countries.

Romantic movement, late 18th and early 19th century

Romanticism was an intellectual and artistic movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century. It was a reactionary response against the scientific rationalisation of nature during the Enlightenment, commonly expressed in literature, music, painting and drama. But it was not simply a response to the rationalism of the Enlightenment but also a reaction against the material changes in society, which accompanied the emerging and expanding industrial capitalism in the late eighteenth century. In this transition production became centralised in the city. The factory system of mass production was centred on processes that used and controlled natural forces such as water and wind, but also increased power by increasingly using fossil fuels. These processes, combined with the profit motive, ‘degraded and despoiled’, as some romantics saw it, the environment. Cities grew unprecedented, into centres of poverty and deprivation. They began to symbolise the failure of laissez faire liberalism’s philosophy that a perfect society could be attained by essentially permitting people to follow their self-interest. Population movement from the land, and rational search for economically efficient production methods (involving division of labour, timekeeping and mechanisation) led, according to the Romantic Movement, to spiritual alienation of the masses from the land and nature. As Marx and Engels perceived it, they became units of production: cogs in an impersonal productive machine. People and nature were objectified, and reduced to commodity status.

This was regarded as undesirable and leading to the degradation of humans. According to the Romantics, the solution was “back to nature” because nature was seen as pure and a spiritual source of renewal. It was also a way out of the fumes of the growing industrial centres for the new rich. Inspired by romantics such as Worthworth, Keats and Shelly, they hopped on the newly developed railways and travelled to the Lake District. This led in the end to an appreciation of the landscape, described in terms as the “Sublime” and also “Delight” (in the landscape).  Spoliation of a pure natural landscape was regarded as undesirable and destructive. These ideas are still with us and led the way for modern day conservation en environmentalism as well as outdoor recreation and appreciation for natural and historical heritage.

Wanderer above a Sea of Fog (Caspar David Friedrich, ca. 1818)

This image is probably one of the best known romantic paintings. It illustrates the sublime, so popular with Romantic artists and associated with emotions of greatness as well as awe and terror. At the same time it represents the glories of nature and landscape that open up during long walks in the hills and mountains, a theme that features prominently in English Romantic literature and poetry.

But the painting is also the very icon of the alienation from nature experience by urban dwellers of industrial towns. It depicts the wanderer as a stranger in nature, and at the same time as a conqueror of nature. This contradiction in this painting illustrates the complexity of Romantic art.

Nature conservation in Britain, ca. 1870-1945

The origins of public interest in nature conservation in Britain go back to the early 19th century when Wordsworth wrote about that Lake District that it is a "sort of national property in which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy". Systematic conservation efforts only started in the latter half of the 19th century and are reflected in legislation such as the first Wild Birds Protection Act in 1872 and the Ancient Monuments Act of 1882, which enabled the state to take care of monuments of historic significance, including landscapes.

But there were also private efforts such as the creation of The National Trust for Places of Historic Interest and Natural Beauty. This organisation was the brain child of Canon Hardwick Rawnsley, a vicar in the Lake District and seasoned countryside campaigner who founded the Lake District Defence Society in 1876 in response to the Manchester Corporation damming Thirmere. In 1883 his efforts to to prevent the construction of a railway to carry slate from the quarries above Buttermere brought him into contact with social reformer Octavia Hill and Sir Robert Hunter, solicitor to the Commons Preservation Society. They combined forces and started to campaign for the creation of a National Trust and as a result of their efforts the trust was established in 1895.

The trusts aims were described as follows in the National Trust Act of 1907:

To promote the permanent preservation , for the benefit of the nation, of lands and tenements (including buildings) of beauty or historical interest; and, as regards land, to preserve (so far practicable) their natural aspect.

There was also a growing sense of the finiteness of native flora and fauna and the vulnerability of their habitats. The Society for the promotion of Nature reserves was formed in 1912 and gave the impetus to the National Trust’s acquisition of woods, downs and cliff as well as historic houses.

An additional concern was the protection of birds and in 1889 the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) was created. That organisation was established in response to the dissatisfaction over the 1872 Bird Protection Act. The Efforts of the RSPB led to a series of measures culminating in the Bird Protection Act of 1954.

The RSPB originated as a middle class suburban movement with some wealthy and influential backers. The British middle classes loved birds and there was a kind of a bird craze growing. This is reflected in the membership development and in 1900 the RSPB had 25000 members.

The aims of the Society were:

Encourage better conservation and protection of birds.
Discourage the wanton destruction of birds by wearing feathers and killing game birds for sport.

The charter also contained an idea that came from the other side of the Atlantic: National Parks, however, in Britain this was too far ahead of their times. It would take another 50 years before the first national park would be established in the Lake District and Scotland had even to wait until 2002. Today the RSPB looks after more than 182 nature reserves and is the largest wildlife conservation charity in Europe with more than a million members.

The Interwar Period was not only focussed on birds but more importantly on the impact of changes in the landscape and the main thrust of conservation efforts was focussed on the preservation of scenic and historic landscapes. In addition the forestry Commission was set up in 1919 and its reafforstation efforts amounted to the singles largest land change in Britain during the 20th century. Millions of hectares were planted with conifers to create a timber resource for the nation.

During the 1920 and 30s a whole host of organisations comparable to its English counterparts were set up including the National Trust for Scotland (1931) and the Association for the Preservation of Rural Scotland (1926).

It was only after the Second World War National Parks were established in England and Wales with the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act of 1949. The national parks in England and Wales are not owned by the government, in contrast with national parks in other countries. All English national parks are still working landscapes where tourism, ariculture and even industry are combined with preservation of the beauty and diversity of the landscape. Another characteristic of theses parks is that they are mainly situated in areas of low agricultural value. The first four national parks were established in 1951 and included: the Peak District, Lake District, Dartmoor and Snowdonia. Scotland had to wait until 2002 before the first national park was established in the Loch Lomond area.

Other countries
In other countries similar efforts can be observed. In the United States a national parks service was established in 1912 and earlier, in 1892, the Sierra Club had been formed. The objective of both organisations was to protect landscapes against human development and preserve it for future generations.

In 1905 the Society for preservation of nature monuments in the Netherlands(Vereniging tot Behoud van Natuurmonumenten in Nederland) was established in response to plans of the council of Amsterdam to use a nearby wetland as a rubbish dump for the expanding city. The society bought the wetlands and saved it from destruction. This was the first grassroots environmental effort in the Netherlands. Today “Natuur Monumenten” is one of the largest landowners in the Netherlands looking after 100,000 hectares of nature reserves and parks.

The modern Environmental movement began in the 1960s and was much concerned with air and water pollution and habitat loss. The modern environmental movement was a response to the increasing impact of humans on the earths environment caused by increasing industrialisation, the use of chemicals in agriculture and increased numbers of cars.  The focus of environmental organizations became broader in scope to including all landscapes, environments and human activities, increasingly on a global scale following the emergence of global environmental concerns such as global warming, acid rain and ozone depletion.

The 20th century: The great Acceleration and environmental globalization

The space age created an environmental revolution during the 1960s. NASA’s Apollo missions and their view of the small blue Earth floating in space is the first global image of the environment that is home to all humans and living things known to humanity. It reminds us of how fragile and unique the Earth’s systems are and it forces us all to imagine ourselves globally. The image also a testament that humanity has become a global dominant species with global environmental impacts such as global warming and ozone depletion.

The most remarkable development of the 20th century was the "Great Acceleration", the sharp increase in human population, economic activity, resource use, transport, communication and scientific, in particular since World War II and which has continued into the 21st century. The “engine” of the Great Acceleration is an interlinked system consisting of population increase, rising consumption, abundant cheap energy, and liberalised political economies.

With the Great Acceleration came also a globalization of environmental problems. Embedded in the idea of the Great Acceleration is the J-curve, statistical graphs that turn progressively upwards. Whether it is population, economies, extinctions or numbers of cars, the story is all about growth. But this growth has its limits and beyond certain thresholds starts to impact on the global environmental systems, which are most visible as global warming and ozone depletion.
 
Acid Rain

Acid rain or deposition can damage terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, attack vegetation and disrupt food webs. It can also cause severe damage to buildings and stonework. The problem of acid rain in urban and industrial areas probably started during the first stages of the industrial Revolution in the 18th century. But the real impact and scale of acid rain became only visible during the second half of the 20th century. Acidification of the environment is caused by emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides from power and chemical plants and traffic. Since the introduction of tall chimneys the problem intensified in rural areas because the tall chimneys allow the wind to transport pollutants over long distances. Around 1980 scientists became alarmed by the state of the European forests. These were affected by acid rain, which damaged foliage and could even kill trees. In 1984 it was reported that almost half of the trees in the famous Black Forest in Germany had been severely damaged by acid rain. The impact of acid deposition was even worse in the communist countries of Eastern Europe where air pollution was much less regulated than in the west. In 1988, as part of the United Nations-sponsored Long Range Transboundary Air Pollution Agreement, 25 industrial nations agreed to limit nitrogen oxide emissions to 1987 levels. Legislation that sets targets has now been introduced to lower nitrogen emissions. The UK has reduced its nitrogen oxides emissions by 30 percent compared to 1980 levels and mast cars are now fitted with catalytic converters to combat these emission

A hole in the ozone Layer

The story of the hole in the ozone layer started in 1928. It was then that Thomas Midgley invented CFC (Chloroflourocarbon), a gas that was perfectly suited to refrigerating and for use in spray cans. Midgley is an interesting individual and historian John McNeill has remarked that Midgley “had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in earth history.” Not only did he invent CFCs but also discovered that adding lead to fuel makes engines run better. One could argue that Midgley's inventions symbolize how humankind, by developing technology, is supposedly killing itself. However this view is too simplistic since it was thought initially that CFCs were harmless. In addition, the gas is highly stable: it does not react with any other gas or substance. This remarkable chemical stability made people confident that there would be few, if any, environmental side effects, so the chemical was embraced by industry.

In 1974, Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina discovered that CFCs are agents that can destroy stratospheric ozone under the influence of ultraviolet light. By 1977 it was almost certain that these gases, which were used on a large scale in spray cans and refrigerator systems, was almost certainly damaging the ozone layer, which protects us from harmful UV-B radiation. However, governments, pressurised by the chemical industry, refused to act since the mechanisms by which ozone was destroyed were by then not fully understood. It was argued that more data and research was needed to warrant action.

By the mid-1980s a severe seasonal thinning of ozone over the Antarctic was observed and by 1987 the world’s media were reporting on a ‘Hole in the Ozone Layer’. It was during that year that the Montreal Protocol established a scheme that led to a total global ban of the production of CFCs by the late 1990s. In 2003, observed levels of chlorine in the atmosphere peaked and then began to fall. However, they will remain high for decades to come and it is expected that atmospheric concentrations of ozone will not return to natural levels before the middle of the century.

Greenhouse gasses

Another major by-product of industrial activity, transport and agriculture in the increased emission of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane, the two most important of the so called “greenhouse gases”. The earth’s atmosphere acts like a blanket. Once the sun’s energy heats up the earth, the heat is radiated back into space but the atmosphere traps part of this heat so the earth is warmer than it would be if it had no atmosphere. This is essential for life and without greenhouse gases the earth would be permanently frozen. However a rise in the concentration of the greenhouse gases caused by industrial processes has meant that more heat than usual is being trapped, leading to a slight but significant rise in the earth’s average temperature.

Industrialisation and population growth has led to an annual increase of 5 billion tonnes of CO2. Methane from land fill sites and agriculture is increasing at a rate of over 1% per year. Plant life cannot absorb this rapid increase of greenhouse gases so the overall concentration of CO2 is rising, and the temperature with it. The release of greenhouse gases is now recognised as a hazard for the planet. International legislation is trying to decrease the levels of pollution but the industrialised countries, although reducing their levels of pollution, still contribute most to the problem.

Keeling Curve 

The graph shown at the right shows the history of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations as directly measured at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, between 1958 and 2007. This curve is known as the Keeling Curve, and is an essential piece of evidence of the man-made increases in greenhouse gases that are believed to be the cause of global warming. The Mauna Loa observations are the longest record of carbon dioxide increase available and confirm that human activity is increasing the amount of this gas in the atmosphere.  The annual fluctuations in the graph are caused by seasonal variations in carbon dioxide uptake by vegetation. Since more forest is concentrated in the Northern Hemisphere, more carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere during Northern Hemisphere summer than Southern Hemisphere summer. This annual cycle is shown in the inset figure by taking the average concentration for each month across all measured years. The black line shows the average monthly concentrations of CO2.