No Environmentalist Movement?
- Thread starter Beatriz
- Start date
Riain
Banned
I've heard that environmentalism is closely linked to wealth, once people have food and other economic security they can turn their thoughts to bigger things like the environment.
Without the IR the environment wouldn't be fucked.
Without the IR the environment wouldn't be fucked.
The symbolic turning point was when the evening news displayed the Cuyahoga River in fire in central Cleveland.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/hist...ozen-times-no-one-cared-until-1969-180972444/
This was not the only example of direct threat from polution. In that era certain roads near my rural home town used to catch fire in the summer. The trucks hauling peat moss from the bog to the bagging plant were not covered and the dry Peat that blew off the top collect at the edge of the road. there it was saturated with automobile oil, from leaking engines and transmissions. Every parking place in those days had a large oil stain as gaskets failed in only 10k or 15k miles. Some dry fertilizer mixed in as well. The bagging plant sat adjacent to the railroad tracks & once or twice a similar thing occurred there as dry peat fragments drifted from the bagging area to the brush along the track, which were already littered with residues from the passing trains. Like a lot of plant fibre peat generates heat as it decomposes and catches fire. On hot July days the road would become linked with burning grass & industrial residues generating a nasty smoke.
The Cuyahoga fire story kind of rammed home the fact that we were ankle deep in out own s...t & it was not going away on its own.
Question: Where did household garbage go in the pre landfill era? When I built a house in 1996 on a in town lot we were reminded where. Excavating the foundation, landscaping, and trenching for utility lines turned up several dozen pockets of trash. Broken glass, rusted metal, rotted wood, and unidentifiable stuff. The unidentifiable included lead paint flaked off the metal & rotted wood, or near empty paint cans, used hydraulic fluid, near empty packages of herbicide or insecticide, used containers of rodent poison... Then there were 'dumps' scattered about the landscape. A large open drainage ditch ran through the center of town & the bottom was lined with debris like I described. At the head of this ditch outside town a farmer had a largish 'dump' of a quarter acre. filling the low spot with whatever. The thing leached bits of everything & all its toxins into the ditch, where it flowed off to a small stream & then into the Wabash River. Many of the cities along the Wabash drew their drinking water directly from the river, into which thousands of these minor dumps leaked their collective effluvia.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/hist...ozen-times-no-one-cared-until-1969-180972444/
This was not the only example of direct threat from polution. In that era certain roads near my rural home town used to catch fire in the summer. The trucks hauling peat moss from the bog to the bagging plant were not covered and the dry Peat that blew off the top collect at the edge of the road. there it was saturated with automobile oil, from leaking engines and transmissions. Every parking place in those days had a large oil stain as gaskets failed in only 10k or 15k miles. Some dry fertilizer mixed in as well. The bagging plant sat adjacent to the railroad tracks & once or twice a similar thing occurred there as dry peat fragments drifted from the bagging area to the brush along the track, which were already littered with residues from the passing trains. Like a lot of plant fibre peat generates heat as it decomposes and catches fire. On hot July days the road would become linked with burning grass & industrial residues generating a nasty smoke.
The Cuyahoga fire story kind of rammed home the fact that we were ankle deep in out own s...t & it was not going away on its own.
Question: Where did household garbage go in the pre landfill era? When I built a house in 1996 on a in town lot we were reminded where. Excavating the foundation, landscaping, and trenching for utility lines turned up several dozen pockets of trash. Broken glass, rusted metal, rotted wood, and unidentifiable stuff. The unidentifiable included lead paint flaked off the metal & rotted wood, or near empty paint cans, used hydraulic fluid, near empty packages of herbicide or insecticide, used containers of rodent poison... Then there were 'dumps' scattered about the landscape. A large open drainage ditch ran through the center of town & the bottom was lined with debris like I described. At the head of this ditch outside town a farmer had a largish 'dump' of a quarter acre. filling the low spot with whatever. The thing leached bits of everything & all its toxins into the ditch, where it flowed off to a small stream & then into the Wabash River. Many of the cities along the Wabash drew their drinking water directly from the river, into which thousands of these minor dumps leaked their collective effluvia.
Last edited:
Anderman
Donor
The pod of 1960 is to late the first organisation for protection the enviroment in Germany was forment in 1899.
Starting with protectiong birds.
en.wikipedia.org
Starting with protectiong birds.
Naturschutzbund Deutschland - Wikipedia
Yes, this is pretty generally true. We see environmentalist movements pop up in societies that are quite different but have achieved a certain degree of economic success and now want to enjoy the fruits of their labors, for example China vis-a-vis its infamous smogs (very much like the United Kingdom in the 1950s, for instance).
Not as much, true, but human societies pre-Industrial Revolution could and did have catastrophic effects on the natural environment. Many species were extirpated from parts of their range or driven entirely extinct, and often quite large areas were under intensive human management (despite appearing "wild" to modern eyes). There was even large-scale change of the natural environment, the most extensive example of which is probably the Mediterranean basin; human action caused large changes in the ecosystem over much of the region in the classical and post-classical eras. There were even global impacts, if smaller than today's, for example the lead emissions caused by Rome.
Riain
Banned
True, but there's only so much impact less than 2 billion people without various combustion engines can do. Population pressure is the huge driver behind so much environmental damage, having 1/4 or 1/5 of today's population will make a huge difference to the damage done to the environment.
The pod of 1960 is to late the first organisation for protection the enviroment in Germany was forment in 1899.
Starting with protectiong birds.
Naturschutzbund Deutschland - Wikipedia
The Sierra Club was 1892.
People have been worried about deforestation for a long time: