Sunday, July 06, 2025

The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis (1967)

"A conversation with Aldous Huxley not infrequently put one at the receiving end of an unforgettable monologue. About a year before his lamented death he was discoursing on a favorite topic: Man's unnatural treatment of nature and its sad results. To illustrate his point he told how, during the previous summer, he had returned to a little valley in England where he had spent many happy months as a child. Once it had been composed of delightful grassy glades; now it was becoming overgrown with unsightly brush because the rabbits that formerly kept such growth under control had largely succumbed to a disease, myxomatosis, that was deliberately introduced by the local farmers to reduce the rabbits' destruction of crops. Being something of a Philistine, I could be silent no longer, even in the interests of great rhetoric. I interrupted to point out that the rabbit itself had been brought as a domestic animal to England in 1176, presumably to improve the protein diet of the peasantry."

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Sorry for the class PDF. Original on JSTOR with access only.

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More FTA:

"People, then, have often been a dynamic element in their own environment, but in the present state of historical scholarship we usually do not know exactly when, where, or with what effects man-induced changes came. As we enter the last third of the 20th century, however, concern for the problem of ecologic backlash is mounting feverishly. Natural science, conceived as the effort to understand the nature of things, had flourished in several eras and among several peoples. Similarly there had been an age-old accumulation of technological skills, sometimes growing rapidly, sometimes slowly. But it was not until about four generations ago that Western Europe and North America arranged a marriage between science and technology, a union of the theoretical and the empirical approaches to our natural environment."

#1 | Posted by Dbt2 at 2025-07-06 09:38 AM

"The phenomenon of "London fog" long predated the crisis of the early 1950s. Known as "pea-soupers" for their dense, yellow appearance, such all-encompassing fogs had become a hallmark of London by the 19th century. But polluted fog was an issue in London as early as the 13th century, due to the burning of coal, and the situation only worsened as the city continued to expand. Complaints about smoke and pollution increased in the 1600s, when ultimately ineffective legislation was passed under King James I to restrict coal burning. Rapidly increasing industrialization that began in the late 1700s made conditions even worse.

These hazes were not natural formations of the atmosphere: water vapor would stick to particulates released by coal-burning factories, producing dark and heavy clouds that impaired visibility. This variety of fog later came to be known as smog (a merging of the words smoke and fog), a term invented by a Londoner in the early 20th century."

#2 | Posted by LegallyYourDead at 2025-07-06 03:11 PM

#2: A London sketch from Charles Dicken's era: i.guim.co.uk

#3 | Posted by C0RI0LANUS at 2025-07-06 03:18 PM

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