Prior to 19th century Air pollution has always accompanied civilizations. Pollution started from
prehistoric times, when humans created the first
fires. According to a 1983 article in the journal
Science,
soot found on ceilings of prehistoric caves provides ample evidence of the high levels of pollution that was associated with inadequate ventilation of open fires. Metal
forging appears to be a key turning point in the creation of significant air pollution levels outside the home. Core samples of
glaciers in Greenland indicate increases in pollution associated with Greek, Roman, and Chinese metal production. The burning of coal and wood, and the presence of many horses in concentrated areas made the cities the primary sources of pollution. King
Edward I of England banned the burning of
mineral coal by proclamation in
London in 1306, after its smoke became a problem; the fuel was named
seacoal at the time, getting its name from the fact that it was delivered from overseas (as opposed to
charcoal, which was referred to as "coal").
19th century The
Industrial Revolution gave birth to environmental pollution as we know it today. London also recorded one of the earliest extreme cases of
water quality problems with the
Great Stink on the
Thames of 1858, which led to the construction of the
London sewerage system soon afterward. Pollution issues escalated as
population growth far exceeded the ability of neighborhoods to handle their waste problem. Reformers began to demand sewer systems and clean water. In 1870, the sanitary conditions in
Berlin were among the worst in Europe.
August Bebel recalled conditions before a modern
sewer system was built in the late 1870s:
20th and 21st century The primitive conditions were intolerable for a world national capital, and the
Imperial German government brought in its scientists, engineers, and urban planners to solve the deficiencies and forge Berlin as the world's model city. A British expert in 1906 concluded that Berlin represented "the most complete application of science, order and method of public life," adding "it is a marvel of civic administration, the most modern and most perfectly organized city that there is." The emergence of great factories and consumption of immense quantities of coal gave rise to unprecedented
air pollution, and the large volume of industrial chemical discharges added to the growing load of untreated human waste.
Chicago and
Cincinnati were the first two American cities to enact laws ensuring cleaner air in 1881. Pollution became a significant issue in the United States in the early twentieth century, as
progressive reformers took issue with air pollution caused by coal burning, water pollution caused by bad sanitation, and street pollution caused by the three million horses who worked in American cities in 1900, generating large quantities of urine and
manure. As historian Martin Melosi notes, the generation that first saw automobiles replacing horses saw cars as "miracles of cleanliness". By the 1940s, automobile-caused
smog was a significant issue in
Los Angeles. Other cities followed around the country until early in the 20th century when the short-lived Office of Air Pollution was created under the
Department of the Interior. The cities of Los Angeles experienced extreme smog events and
Donora, Pennsylvania, in the late 1940s, serving as another public reminder. Air pollution would continue to be a problem in England, especially later during the Industrial Revolution, and extending into the recent past with the
Great Smog of 1952. Awareness of atmospheric pollution spread widely after World War II, with fears triggered by reports of
radioactive fallout from atomic warfare and testing. Then a non-nuclear event—the Great Smog of 1952 in London—killed at least 4000 people. This prompted some of the first major modern environmental legislation: the
Clean Air Act of 1956. Pollution began to draw significant public attention in the United States between the mid-1950s and early 1970s, when Congress passed the
Noise Control Act, the
Clean Air Act, the
Clean Water Act, and the
National Environmental Policy Act. Severe incidents of pollution helped increase consciousness.
PCB dumping in the
Hudson River resulted in a ban by the
EPA on consumption of its fish in 1974. National news stories in the late 1970s—especially the long-term
dioxin contamination at
Love Canal starting in 1947 and uncontrolled
dumping in
Valley of the Drums—led to the
Superfund legislation of 1980. The pollution of industrial land gave rise to the name
brownfield, a term now common in
city planning. The development of nuclear science introduced
radioactive contamination, which can remain lethally radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years.
Lake Karachay—named by the
Worldwatch Institute as the "most polluted spot" on earth—served as a disposal site for the
Soviet Union throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
Chelyabinsk, Russia, is considered the "Most polluted place on the planet".
Nuclear weapons continued to be tested in the
Cold War, especially in the earlier stages of their development. The toll on the worst-affected populations and the growth since then in understanding the critical threat to human health posed by
radioactivity has also been a prohibitive complication associated with
nuclear power. Though extreme care is practiced in that industry, the potential for disaster suggested by incidents such as those at
Three Mile Island,
Chernobyl, and
Fukushima pose a lingering specter of public mistrust. Worldwide publicity has been intense on those disasters. Widespread support for
test ban treaties has ended almost all nuclear testing in the atmosphere. International catastrophes such as the wreck of the
Amoco Cadiz oil tanker off the coast of
Brittany in 1978 and the
Bhopal disaster in 1984 have demonstrated the universality of such events and the scale on which efforts to address them needed to engage. The borderless nature of the atmosphere and oceans inevitably resulted in the implication of pollution on a planetary level with the issue of
global warming. Most recently, the term
persistent organic pollutant (POP) has come to describe a group of chemicals such as
PBDEs and
PFCs, among others. Though their effects remain poorly understood owing to a lack of experimental data, they have been detected in various ecological habitats far removed from industrial activity, such as the Arctic, demonstrating diffusion and
bioaccumulation after only a relatively brief period of widespread use. on the coast of
Guyana|300x300px The
Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a concentration of plastics in the
North Pacific Gyre. It and other garbage patches contain debris that can transport invasive species and that can entangle and be ingested by wildlife. Organizations such as
5 Gyres and the Algalita Marine Research Foundation have researched the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and found
microplastics in the water. Pollution introduced by light at night is becoming a global problem, more severe in urban centres, but contaminating also large territories, far away from towns. Growing evidence of local and global pollution and an increasingly informed public over time have given rise to
environmentalism and the
environmental movement, which generally seek to limit
human impact on the environment. ==See also==