ON THE DARK SIDES OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION: DESTRUCTION OF THE ENVIRONMENT
With the industrial revolution, humans have set in motion an ongoing, seemingly unstoppable process of ecological destruction and serious health risks. Even leaving aside the large-scale transformation of natural landscapes and overexploitation of resources, industrial processes have caused so much and such diverse damage to nature and human health that it is still taking a long time just to record the pollutants and their complex effects - and even longer to combat them, which has been massively hampered by economic interests.
There is evidence of the environmental damage caused by the large-scale proto-industrial operations of the Romans in ancient times: ore smelters, glassworks, potteries and industrial bakeries not only consumed vast quantities of firewood, but also produced smog over Rome, a city of millions. The hills of Las Médulas in northern Spain, where Roman water-powered gold mining left a grotesquely deformed man-made landscape, are still a vivid example of ancient landscape destruction.
In the Middle Ages, local authorities were concerned about the air pollution caused by the roasting of flax. From the 15th century onwards, "smelter smoke" became a fixed term: initially it referred to the foul-smelling, poisonous gases from the extraction of arsenic and sulphur by roasting ore, but soon it came to include the fumes from other smelting processes as well. In the 17th century, observers in London - including William Shakespeare - linked the smell of sulphur in the city to the burning of coal in breweries and lime kilns: sulphurous gases in the air we breathe then became one of the greatest health hazards in industrial regions for centuries.
With the onset of industrialisation in the 1750s, increasingly dense clouds of pollutants gathered over Britain's rapidly growing cities. Smoke from factory chimneys and furnaces in overcrowded working-class neighbourhoods polluted the air we breathed with a cocktail of dusts and gases, especially ammonia, sulphur, carbon and nitrogen compounds released by the mass burning of coal. When the smoke cleared was determined by the weather: the notorious fog in the highly industrialised metropolis of London, for example, drastically increased air pollution - hence the combination of the words 'smoke' and 'fog' to form 'smog'.
As the number of coal mines and smelting works increased, black smoke became a widespread phenomenon in the British Isles, eventually covering the country from Scotland in the north to Yorkshire and central England. Nevertheless, until the end of the 19th century, air pollution was largely accepted as an inevitable side effect of the industrial boom.
From about the middle of the 18th century, the chemical industry also played its part in the increasing destruction of the environment. The mass production of the three classic raw materials, sulphuric acid, soda and chlorine, released other environmental toxins that collected in rivers and deposited on plants. While contemporaries had long been blind to air pollution, by the end of the 19th century the stench and discolouration of rivers and the damage to forestry and agriculture led to growing protests. The health risks to workers, who were exposed to chlorine, sulphur and hydrochloric acid gases with virtually no protection, also led to increasing complaints.
However, the more varied the chemicals, the more varied the damage to health and the environment: pulp production in paper mills, for example, polluted exhaust air and waste water with sulphurous compounds. The by-products of the new gas lighting in factories and streets were tar and ammonia residues, which were discharged into watercourses or deposited in landfills, from where water-soluble elements leached into the groundwater.
London's first sewers emptied into the Thames just behind the city, so that floods pushed the filth back into the metropolis - during the "Great Stink" of 1858, even the honourable Members of Parliament had to stop work. Taller chimneys for factories and power stations, now widely required, improved the air in the immediate vicinity - but the fact that the wind simply carried the pollution further away was largely ignored.
In the first half of the 20th century, wars and economic crises hampered research into environmental degradation, let alone the fight against it. In the rivers of Europe's mining and industrial regions, whether the Tawe in Wales, the Rio Tinto in Spain or the Emscher in the Ruhr, pollution and fish kills were obvious, but industrial effluent continued to be discharged untreated. From 1906, the Emscher and its tributaries were officially converted into an open sewer, into which phenol-laced effluent from coking plants flowed until the 1920s. The highly toxic chemical was also found in the Ruhr, which was used to produce drinking water.
It was not until the 1950s that researchers in Western Europe gradually uncovered many of the mechanisms of damage caused by industry. In 1952, the "Great London Smog" blanketed the English metropolis for five days, reducing visibility to just a few centimetres - and sulphur compounds and water droplets in the air formed sulphuric acid, which was inhaled by the population. Some 12,000 people died within two weeks. During a similar smog event in the Ruhr area in 1962, the death rate rose by 20% compared to the previous year.
More efficient air pollution control technologies, especially for power plants in large cities, then gradually reduced the health risks, but generally only reductions in particulate emissions were required, not filters for sulphur dioxide. Overall, sulphur dioxide emissions continued to rise in many countries as the fumes from tall chimneys spread into rural areas. Forests and farmland were severely damaged and some plant species were threatened with extinction, particularly in England, Germany, the Netherlands and central and eastern Europe. It was not until the early 1970s that European politicians became aware of the problem, when Scandinavian researchers proved that "acid rain" was carrying sulphur from neighbouring countries into Scandinavia and killing fish in acidified waters. In 1983, the first international treaty came into force, gradually reducing sulphur dioxide emissions in Western Europe.
In the 1970s, a previously unknown risk factor for health, crops and natural vegetation was identified: ground-level ozone. It is formed from carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds in the air and is one of the causes of forest dieback, which became highly visible in the 1980s, particularly in the mountainous regions of Poland, Czechoslovakia and the two German states. Sulphur, nitrates and heavy metals in precipitation have also been implicated, but the mechanisms of damage are not yet fully understood.
Human health came back to the forefront of environmental research in the 1990s when researchers in the US realised that particulate matter in the air was probably the biggest health risk to people living in large cities. Particulate matter, or particulate matter, is made up of different chemical elements, can be both solid and liquid - and appears under various names in complaints about the air in ancient Rome.
Since the beginning of the 21st century, global warming, another long-ignored environmental damage caused by industrialisation, has become the focus of debate, especially the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide produced by combustion processes.
