Environmental History of Air Pollution and Protection

Abstract

Concerns about air pollution have a long and complex history. Complaints about its effects on human health and the urban environment were first voiced by the inhabitants of ancient Athens and Rome. But urban air quality worsened considerably during the Industrial Revolution, as the widespread use of coal in factories in Britain, Germany, the United States and other nations ushered in an ‘age of smoke’. Despite the tangible nature of this form of air pollution, early laws to control it were generally weak and ineffective—regardless of its high socio-environmental costs—reflecting the importance of coal-fuelled steam power to economic growth. Not until the mid-twentieth century, after major air pollution episodes such as London’s ‘Great Smog’ had demonstrated beyond doubt that polluted air was as harmful to the public’s health as polluted water supplies, were stringent national laws to abate smoke finally introduced to clear the skies over the cities of the first industrial nations. However, while the citizens of the developed world now breathe cleaner air, smoke pollution is still a significant environmental problem in many industrial cities of developing countries today. In terms of their scale, the effects of coal smoke in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were largely local and regional. But after the Second World War a number of invisible threats began to emerge—acid rain, photochemical smog, ozone depletion and climate change—that were transnational and global in character. It often required the cooperation of scientific experts across academic and political borders, as well as new techniques such as computer modelling, to make these new threats ‘visible’ to the public. Global environmental problems also required collective political and legislative action on the part of nations if solutions were to be found. The success of the Montreal Protocol in phasing out the use of ozone-depleting CFCs stands as a successful example of international environmental governance. However, it will need a strong commitment to international cooperation if an effective agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is to be reached, particularly as global warming is a concept that the public (and many politicians) still find difficult to grasp.