Choking to death, for many millennia
AsI write this piece, people are gasping for clean air under a thick smog blanket in Delhi and several parts of north India. Hopefully, the sun will shine out there when you read it.
We all, but those brought up in a metropolis, remember the days when the air was at least breathable. But even those days of the past weren’t pristine.
The Industrial Revolution, which began in Europe sometime in the late 1700s, is squarely blamed for the beginning of the deterioration of air quality throughout the globe. But the history of air pollution is even longer and darker — probably starting when our ancestors first ignited t he wood fire (the effects of which have been found in mummified lung tissues from ancient Egypt, Peru, and Britain).
Humans have released greenhouse gases on a large scale for at least 2,000 years, according to research conducted by Célia Sapart of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. A record of the air trapped in Greenland’s ice found methane levels rose about 2,000 years ago and remained at that higher level for almost two centuries — the glory days of the Roman Empire and the Han Dynasty.
Methane was probably released during deforestation for farming and from the use of charcoal as fuel to smelt metal to make weapons, Sapart was quoted as saying by Reuters. “Per capita, they were already emitting quite a lot in the Roman Empire and the Han Dynasty.”
In 61AD, Seneca the Younger, philosopher and statesman, wrote about the pollution in Rome: “No sooner had I left behind the oppressive atmosphere of the city and that reek of smoking cookers which pour out, along with clouds of ashes, all the poisonous fumes they’ve accumulated in their interiors whenever they’re started up, than I noticed the change in my condition.” Romans, according to Smithsonian.com, called their city’s smoky air gravioris caeli (heavy heaven) and infamis aer (infamous air).
In addition, in the then capital city of the Roman Empire, Constantinople, air pollution became such a major concern that emperor Justinian I instituted the first recognised clean air Act in 535 AD and proclaimed clean air as a birthright. “By the law of nature, these things are common to mankind — the air, running water, the sea.”
Earlier, Babylonian and Assyrians laws dealt with similar issues, and in around 200 AD, the Hebrew Mishnah sought to control sources of air pollution in Jerusalem ( The Basic Environmental History, edited by Mauro Agnoletti and Simone Neri Serneri).
Traces of massive air pollution were also found in Peru’s Quelccaya Ice Cap — the second-largest glaciated area in the tropics. According to Paolo Gabrielli, who led a team of researchers from t he Ohio State University, “When the Spanish conquered South America in the 16th century, they took over the Incas’ mines and soon began to pump clouds of lead dust over the Andes. The silver the conquistadors sent back home made them wealthy. It also made them the world’s first industrial-scale toxic metal air polluters. ( weforum.org)”
In the late 13th century, in a futile effort to reduce air pollution in London, England’s King Edward I threatened residents with harsh penalties if they did not stop burning coal. Similar efforts later failed, too (somehow odd- even, halting construction activities, etc, popped up in my mind).
But t he worst was yet to come — t he I ndustrial Revolution, when coal fuelled human ambitions, and lessons from which we’ve never learned.
We are currently i n the midst of a definite low level in the human history of air pollution. Hopefully, if future humans, in thousands of years from now, were to learn about the Anthropocene period, the proposed geological epoch dating from the start of significant human influence on the geology and ecosystems of the planet, they view it as the time when our species reached great heights, and not as the period when in our own success we choked to death.