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Birthday of John Evelyn

Author in 1661 of “Fumifugium, or the Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoake of London Dissipated.” The book described air pollution in London and proposed remedies, including large public parks and lots of flowers.

“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.”

Izaak Walton author of The Compleat Angler, a book published in 1653 about fishing and about conservation, was (according to tradition) born this day in 1593. Walton’s argument for conservation inspired the founding of the Isaac Walton League in the US on Jan. 16, 1922.

William Wordsworth one of the great romantic poets, born this day in 1770. Wordsworth thought the Industrial revolution was an “outrage done to nature” and was appalled that people were no longer “breathing fresh air” or “treading the green earth.” From Tintern Abby:
… If I should be, where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence, wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream
We stood together; and that I, so long
A worshipper of Nature, hither came,
Unwearied in that service…

Henry David Thoreau born this day in 1817. Thoreau is best known for civil disobedience in protest of the Mexican War and for his book Walden, a masterpiece of American literature published in 1854. In Walden Thoreau describes his retreat into the woods and what it meant to him:
“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… “ For more see this Library of Congress site and  the Thoreau reader.

Frankenstein published on this day in 1818 in London. The first science fiction novel, written on a dare by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly, Frankenstein is the classic cautionary tale of science gone horribly wrong. Scientist Victor Frankenstein, intrigued by the idea of animating dead tissue with electricity, stitches a few body parts together and creates a monster. At one point in the novel, the doctor says that while he had “a contempt for the uses of modern natural philosophy, it was very different when the masters of the science sought immortality and power.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson born this day in 1803. Emerson writes the essay Nature in 1836, promoting the idea that a person can only know reality by discovering nature, through which God best expresses divine principles. This Transcendentalist philosophy also includes most of the great writers of the early 19th century, including Coleridge, Byron, Shelly, Keats, Thoreau, Ruskin, Whitman and many others. Nature is the “Universal Being”, Emerson wrote. “The aspect of nature is devout. Like the figure of Jesus, she stands with bended head, and hands folded upon the breast. The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.” In other words, Emerson and other Transcendentalists did not worship nature, they learned to worship God from nature. This has often been misinterpreted by those who, for political reasons, would like to paint the roots of environmentalism as mere nature-worship.  Also see Library of Congress resources on Emerson and the transcendentalists.

Alexis de Tocqueville a French writer whose description of the United States in the 1830s is a classic in early political science, is born this day in 1805. De Tocqueville warned that “modern democracy may be adept at inventing new forms of tyranny, because radical equality could lead to the materialism of an expanding bourgeoisie and to the selfishness of individualism.” In a later book, Journey to England, he described the industrial city of Manchester: “Thirty or forty factories rise on the tops of the hills…six stories (high). The wretched dwellings of the poor are scattered haphazrd around them. Round them stretches land uncultivated but without the charm of rustic nature… the fetid, muddy waters stained with a thousand colours by the factories … Look up and all around this place and you will see the huge palaces of industry. you will hear the noise of furnaces, the whistle of steam. These vast structures keep air and light out of the human habitations which they dominate; they envelope them in perpetual fog; here is the slave, there the master; there is the wealth of some, here the poverty of most.”

Edward Carpenter former priest and Cambridge fellow, is born on this day in 1844. Carpenter wrote the 1889 book “Civilisation, Its Cause and Cure,” in which he argued that civilization is a form of disease that human societies go through. The book caught the attention of many reformers, including Mohandas Gandhi. Carpenter wrote:
“Only a vast dense cloud, so thick that I wondered how any human being could support life in it, that went up to heaven like the smoke from a great altar. An altar, indeed, it seemed to me, wherein thousands of lives were being yearly sacrificed. Beside me on the hills the sun was shining, the larks were singing; but down there a hundred thousand grown people, let alone children, were struggling for a little sun and air, toiling, moiling, living a life of suffocation, dying (as the sanitary reports only too clearly show) of diseases caused by foul air and want of light — all for what? To make a few people rich!”

Rachel Carson, a leading figure in conservation advocacy and environmental science, is born on this day in 1907. Carson was the author of Under the Sea-Wind (1941), The Sea Around Us (1952), The Edge of the Sea (1955) and the influential and controversial book, Silent Spring (1962), which called for an end to indiscriminate pesticide use and a change in the way we view nature.

• Carson is held in high esteem by many who shared her views, but she was viciously attacked by others, especially in agri-chemical industry and government. Some feared that sentimentality would undermine scientific progress or that a switch away to more benign pesticides was not possible. Time has proven both critiques to be unfounded.
• Even today, Carson is controversial. Some people mistakenly claim that banning DDT created a public health disaster that killed millions of people by exposing them to malaria. This is demonstrably false. In the first place, bans of DDT from general agricultural use do not (under the Stockholm convention) preclude public health or mosquito eradication uses. Secondly, anti-mosquito / anti-malaria tactics are available that are more effective and also more benign than DDT. Third, the attacks on Carson’s legacy by right-wing critics do not include reasoned general arguments about public health, pesticide impacts, agriculture or the effectiveness of alternatives. One is simply asked to believe that banning a chemical could be equivalent to murder — a claim that elevates political superstition over scientific logic.
• The Silent Spring controversy is often mistaken as the initial cause of the environmental movement of the 1960s but it would be more accurate to say that the book was at the center of a revived conservation movement. No doubt an environmental movement would have occurred without Silent Spring, just as a US Civil War would have taken place without the book Uncle Tom’s Cabin. However, in both cases, the book embodied and helped spark the conflicts.
  

John Ruskin — Author, art critic, Oxford professor, and romantic who detested the industrial revolution, Ruskin was born on this day in 1819. It was Ruskin who said every city was “…little more than laboratories for the distillation into heaven of venomous smokes and smells, mixed with effluvia from decaying animal matter, and infectious miasmata from purulent disease… [Every river was] a common sewer, so that you cannot so much as baptize an English baby but with filth, unless you hold its face out in the rain, and even that falls dirty.”