AIR POLLUTION HISTORY

Peter Brimblecombe

1.1 Europe and the Near East: Early History and Legislation

1.2 Early Ideas about Air and Its Pollution

1.3 Urban Histories of Air Pollution

1.4 Air Pollution Disasters and Episodes

1.5 Environmental Damage by Acid Rain

1.6 Global Air Pollution Issues

1.7 Final Thoughts

Although interest in indoor air pollution seems relatively recent, our earliest evidence of air pollutants often comes from indoor environments, such as dwellings filled with smoke and associated pollutants from poorly ventilated fires. When cities developed, these also became associated with pollution problems. The development of air pollution over the last 700–800 years seems to follow consistent patterns. Air pollution has often been related to the history of fuel use and the perceptible change in air pollution that arises from the fuels. Increasing energy demands and the adoption of new fuels (sequentially: coal, petrol, diesel) have caused air pollution problems. Mieck (1990) has argued that the numerous pollution decrees from the Middle Ages are essentially a response to single sources of what he terms pollution artisanale. These were usually just one particular type of pollution and distinct from the later and broader pollution industrielle that characterised an industrialising world.

Air pollution has often been visible as smoke, photochemical smog and diesel smoke. The concentration of air pollutants from a given source, such as coal, seems to increase for a long period and undergo a decrease due to declining emission strength. The pollution from one source is often replaced by another (e.g. coal smoke by petrol-derived pollution).The patterns of changing air pollution, although similar from one country to another, can take place over very different timescales. The changes, which took almost 800 years in Britain, all seem to have occurred in about 50 years in China, as it has moved from wood, to coal, to oil and then to gas.

Air pollution problems have not been easy to solve and the slow rate of improvement has often interested historians. The obvious cause is the reluctance of industry to expend money on abatement and limit technological progress. It is also possible that citizens in polluted cities have come to accept the state of the air where they live and work. The cosiness of the open coal fire and the fear of job losses (Mosley 2001) may have limited the strength of public protest. More recently, the implications of air pollution control on personal freedom (i.e. not having access to a car) seems an additional source of resistance to change.

From the second half of the twentieth century, air pollution problems have also been more global. There is a wide social awareness of the enhanced greenhouse effect, acid rain, the ozone hole and Asian brown haze.

The history of air pollution shows that our atmospheric environment is in a state of continual change. Problems emerge, reach some kind of crisis and then decline, only to be overtaken by others. The scales involved have become ever larger. The ability to detect pollutants and their effects has led to increasing instrumentation rather than influencing human perception. As people often interpret air pollution from local perceptions (Bickerstaff and Walker 2001), it may be increasingly difficult to maintain interest on larger temporal and spatial scales involving other pollution problems that are ever more subtle.

1.1 Europe and the Near East: Early History and Legislation

Our understanding of the first few thousand years of air pollution history is clearest for Europe and the Near East, where there are the most numerous written records, see Figure 1.1.

Sinusitis in Anglo-Saxon England

Examination of skulls from burial sites can be used to establish the frequency of sinusitis (Figure 1.1a). An increased incidence of sinusitis in the Anglo-Saxon period has suggested smoky interiors to huts which lacked chimneys. In earlier periods there may have been a greater tendency to cook outside, so interiors may have been less smoky (Brimblecombe 1987a).

Anthracosis in mummies

Soot deposits in desiccated lung tissue from mummies, most particularly in Egypt, suggest long exposure to smoke (Figure 1.1b).

Air pollution in dwellings, Sweden

Studies of indoor air pollution in reconstructed houses, shown in Figure 1.1c, from the Scandinavian Iron Age attest to pollutant concentrations sufficient to affect health (Edgren and Herschend 1982; Skov et al. 2000).

Babylon

Babylonian and Assyrian law included clauses that affected neighbours' property. Although the earliest laws, those of Hammurabi (twenty-third century BC) relate mostly to water (Driver and Miles 1952), smoke was typically treated in the same way in ancient law (Brimblecombe 1987b). Around AD 200, the Hebrew Mishnah, and its interpretation through the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmud, details pollution issues (Mamane 1987).

Hermopolis, Egypt

The Victory Stela of King Piye tells of the Nubian king's campaigns in Egypt, and that stench and a lack of air caused the city of Hermopolis to surrender c. 734 BC (Lichtheim 1980).

Greece

Cities of the ancient world were often small, but the inhabitants lived in high density, which led to pollutants becoming concentrated. Policy decisions regarding pollution in classical Greece were made by the astynomoi (controllers of the town), who were to ensure that pollution sources were well beyond the city walls; fortunately, industrial processes often took place in forests where fuel was abundant.

Rome

Sextus Julius Frontinus (c. AD 30–100) oversaw water supply to imperial Rome (recorded in his book, De Aquaeductu Urbis Romae) and believed his actions also improved Rome's air. Civil claims over smoke pollution were brought before Roman courts almost 2000 years ago (Brimblecombe 1987b).

Indoor air pollution at...