ENVIRONMENT

Human history is embedded in its natural environments. Space and topographical variations encourage or restrict historical development. Industrialization in Great Britain, for example, benefited from low transportation costs made possible by Britain's extensive waterways and long coast. In many countries, the existence of raw materials such as coal or iron ore enabled certain regions to develop as industrial centers (for example, coal mines in the Ruhr Basin). Climate is also a factor in history. Up to the middle of the nineteenth century, bad weather frequently caused crop failures and often resulted in famine, which could trigger upheavals such as those that took place on the eve of the French Revolution. The Irish potato famine of 1845 through 1850 was the result of an agricultural blight and caused hundreds of thousands of deaths by starvation and disease, along with massive emigration, changing the social and cultural structure of Ireland. Unfavorable environmental conditions frequently encouraged people to improve their environment through innovation. The Dutch seventeenth-century land reclamation project using dikes and polders not only protected the land from storm tides but was also accompanied by modern, capital-intensive, highly specialized, export-oriented agriculture, which created sustainable economic growth.

the nineteenth century in environmental history

In general, the influence of nature on human life, economy, consumption, and politics was much more important in early modern times than it has been since the twentieth century. Thus the nineteenth century represents a transition period in the relationship of humankind to its environment. The most important factors influencing this transformation were industrialization, the modernization of agriculture, and urban growth. In early modern times, Europeans were limited by the amount of food they could produce. During the nineteenth century, however, and particularly during its second half, they learned to mobilize natural resources and manipulate their environment to an unprecedented extent. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the manipulation of nature became the subject of systematic planning. Europeans disconnected their living conditions gradually from the vagaries of nature—and suffered more and more from pollution.

Some environmental historians argue that industrialization caused the transition from a sustainable to an unsustainable economy. Modern societies, they say, severely damage the environment and rely on nonrenewable resources, especially fossil fuel. Others, however, argue that not even agricultural societies are sustainable, pointing to soil degradation and forest overexploitation in early modern times.

Few dimensions of historical inquiry are as diverse as environmental history. As a general rule, only a regional, and often only a local, approach can produce results of any value. The information contained in this article refers primarily to the industrializing regions of west and central Europe because they pointed the way for Europe's development.

agriculture

The European population more than doubled between 1800 and 1914. Death rates fell, for example, from twenty-seven per thousand in Germany in 1850 to seventeen per thousand in the early twentieth century. This was mainly due to the increased stability of agrarian production and to improved sanitary conditions in the big cities. Since the eighteenth century, agricultural reformers inspired by the Enlightenment had tried to increase the productivity of farming, proposing more efficient variations on traditional methods. During the nineteenth century, agriculture combined traditional elements, such as crop rotation and the use of human and animal labor, with innovations such as limited mechanization, capital investment, and imported fertilizers (guano, for example) or chemical products (for example, nitrogen-based fertilizers promoted by the German chemist Justus von Liebig beginning in the middle of the century).

Before midcentury, agriculture in certain regions began to specialize and large landowners extended monoculture. In Germany, beginning in the 1860s the regions of Magdeburg and the lower Rhineland were dominated by the intense cultivation of sugar beets, which replaced imported sugar cane. Entrepreneurs opened sugar refineries in the vicinity. The German sugar regions provide a good example of the dependence of commercial monoculture on technical improvement, capital investment, and proximity to infrastructure. In the south of France, Languedoc became a vast monoculture of vineyards. The ecological fragility of monocultures was demonstrated by the phylloxera blight in the late nineteenth century, which devastated French wine production.

the transformation of landscapes

Agrarian modernization had an important impact on the European landscape. The growing influence of agronomics (i.e., the scientific research for the improvement of rural economy) made agriculture increasingly uniform. Local biodiversity was reduced by monocultures and general biodiversity was reduced by selection of the most productive cultivated plants. On the other hand, the agricultural use of non-European species (such as the potato) and the importation of ornamental plants from overseas increased the number of species populating the European countryside and both urban and rural gardens. Since the late eighteenth century, the draining of wetlands had been a central goal of agrarian policy. In England, for example, the enclosures of the late eighteenth century, transforming common ground into privately owned land, encouraged private investment in drainage. Since the Napoleonic era, the French government had supported the draining of marshes by private and public landholders. The most significant wetland drainage and construction of irrigation canals had been carried out by 1860 and nearly all of France's shallow marshes had disappeared. The amount of arable land had been expanded and severe diseases such as malaria had become less of a threat.

Many of the big central European rivers were altered in order to reclaim fertile land for agriculture, reduce flooding, and improve transportation. One of the most significant of these projects was the alteration of the Rhine between 1809 and 1876, which reduced by one-fourth the distance ships had to travel between Basel and Bingen and also accelerated the river's flow, lowering the water table. In the late nineteenth century, floods on the lower Rhine were commonly attributed to these measures. In the early twentieth century, in the

most industrialized regions of Europe, several rivers were turned into mere canals, used for shipping and to absorb waste water.

Modern forestry also changed European landscapes. In the early modern period, forests were used in ways that often conflicted. These uses included pasturing, hunting, berry picking, producing charcoal, gathering firewood, and cutting timber for building. In general, forest use was regulated to at least some extent by common law. Beginning in the eighteenth century, authorities began to transform forests into public or private property. German foresters developed the idea of sustainable use (nachhaltige Nutzung), in which cutting had to be planned carefully and balanced by new plantings. They considered the production of timber the main goal of forestry, banning other uses from the woodlands. As a result, forests often were turned into rationally designed plantations of rectangular monocultures, uniform in both species and age. Where scientific forestry dominated, the result was a forest vulnerable to disease, insect predation, and storm. In many regions, the wooded areas expanded, and foresters often favored conifers over other trees. Landes, near Bordeaux, which had been one of the biggest swamplands in Europe, was transformed into an immense woodland under Emperor Napoleon III when millions of stone pines were planted. The German Black Forest, which had been deciduous woodland, was replanted with pine trees and firs.

Industrialization also altered the notion of space during the nineteenth century, when the mobility of persons and goods increased. In Great Britain, 2,500 miles of canals were built between 1750 and 1815; they constituted 95 percent of the canals in use in 1900. Nevertheless, railways dominated nineteenth-century traffic. The age of the railway started in 1825, when the first public line opened between Stockton and Darlington, in England. By 1850 the French railway network comprised approximately 1,900 miles. In 1885 118,000 miles of railroad were built in Europe, including 25,000 in Germany, 19,000 each in England and France, 6,000 in Italy, 2,500 in Belgium, and 100 in Greece. Railroad building itself constituted an important interference with the environment and also allowed Europeans to move natural resources far from their sources.

energy systems

Industrialization was accompanied by a revolution in the use of energy. The wooden or solar era ended when coal was introduced for industrial use. The early modern economy had relied on renewable energy sources such as wood, charcoal, water, wind, and human or animal labor. Whereas these sources of energy were based on the short-term input of solar energy, fossil fuel is solar energy captured over millions of years. By the end of the nineteenth century, fossil fuel had enabled Europeans to overcome the energy shortage that had hindered economic growth in the eighteenth century. Coal-fired engines empowered humankind to mobilize natural resources seemingly without limit. Since then, human impact on the environment has continued to grow. In the early twentieth century, petroleum and natural gas joined coal as energy sources, and the introduction of electricity required the construction of large power plants. However, these new sources of energy caused problems. First, the use of nonrenewable resources is, in the long run, not sustainable. Second, the burning of coal caused air pollution from smoke, dust, and chemical compounds such as carbon monoxide. The new (and old) manufacturing processes tended to produce artificial substances that disturbed the environment, causing problems for humans, flora, and fauna. The immense increase in production and the concentration of consumption in the cities also caused perpetual problems with garbage.

industrial pollution

Air pollution was not a new phenomenon, but during the nineteenth century it became more and more serious. One important source was the coal-fired engine. Additionally, the smelting of ore released large amounts of sulfur, which harmed plants, animals, and people. In some places, this problem dated back to the preindustrial era. Technicians and health experts looked for ways to reduce the harmful effects of pollutants. With respect to industrial air pollution, the common solution all over Europe was dilution. Factories built high chimneys so that the smoke could drift away. The tallest one (approximately 450 feet) was built in Freiberg, in Saxony, in 1889. Even then, some experts argued that the emissions did not disappear when diluted, but high chimneys lowered the concentration of toxins and made it difficult to identify any specific source of pollution. Other solutions were suggested, including filters, but they proved less efficient and too expensive.

Industry was not the only source of air pollution. The coal stoves used in many households emitted high levels of dust, sulfur dioxides, and particulates. The famous London fog, for example, was in large part the result of individual heating.

Industry produced other forms of pollution. It frequently used fresh water as a resource and dumped waste water into the rivers. The manufacture of sugar from beets required between 247 and 953 cubic feet of water per ton of beets. The nineteenth-century chemical industry produced acids, alkalis, fertilizers, and dyes, and it produced new noxious substances, including formaldehyde, formic acid, phenol, and acetone. Although the dangers posed by these toxins were known, safety precautions were minimal and the chemical industry often poisoned rivers and ground water. In some places, the smell and the color of the rivers depended on the production process of the local industry. Not surprisingly, one of the most striking phenomena of nineteenth-century river pollution was the frequency of large-scale fish kills. Fishermen and hygiene experts were often the most important groups to fight river pollution. One of the few examples of improvement was the production of alkali, which became cleaner as the century progressed. In 1863 England passed the Alkali Acts, forcing soda factories to reduce their emissions of hydrochloric acid.

Agriculture also contributed to water pollution. The runoff of fertilizers added nutritients to

the water, dissolving the oxygen and leading to eutrophication.

cities and pollution

Urban growth was an important element of everyday life in nineteenth-century Europe. London grew from about 1 million inhabitants in 1800 to 2.3 million by 1850. This increasing concentration caused considerable problems involving hygiene and health. Some twenty thousand Parisians died in the great cholera epidemic of 1832, which was caused by water pollution. It was common for mud containing organic garbage and human and animal manure to be discharged into the streets and the rivers. Eventually, public authorities had to react. Whereas few cities possessed an adequate sewage system in the middle of the nineteenth century, by 1900 nearly all major cities in northern Europe had facilities to ensure the distribution of clean water, and these were separated from the evacuation of waste water. Sewers contributed significantly to a reduction in epidemics of cholera and typhoid, and in some places urban manure was put to use. In 1870 Paris established an area of several hundred hectares on the outskirts of the city that was fertilized by sewage water; it was used by farmers who grew vegetables for the capital and constituted a new model for symbiotic urban-rural relations, including consumption, evacuation, and recycling/production. Many cities copied the Parisian example. But the big rivers suffered severely from urban pollution. Although by around 1900 several cities had established their first sewage plants, the cleansing of rivers remained an unsolved problem, not least because it was expensive.

During the nineteenth century, pollution remained regional. Highly industrialized areas and urban centers suffered immensely, but other regions were left nearly untouched by chemicals, smoke, and organic waste.

attitudes toward nature and the environment

In general, nineteenth-century European political and economic thought celebrated technical progress and human liberation from the constraints of nature, and most Europeans welcomed the control of nature. Life expectancy and the quality of life both improved during the nineteenth century.

The Romantics identified what they called "pristine nature" as an inspiring counterpart to modern humanity. Later, agrarian Romanticism developed as a cultural and political ideology, and after 1900 urban reform and health movements called their members "back to nature." At the same time, powerful political movements developed to protect animals and nature itself. Whereas bourgeois landscape protection concentrated on aesthetic issues, pollution control was largely debated among experts and technical specialists. Far from neglecting the harmful effects of pollution, they tried to work out practical solutions. The driving forces behind pollution control were public administrators. In spite of the existence of global environmental protection strategies, authorities tried to solve local problems individually. So the British Public Health Act (1875) contained a smoke abatement section in order to reduce the health problems caused by domestic heating and industrial emissions. As long as damages to the population's health were difficult to prove scientifically, however, the only way for individuals to defend their interests against the big polluters was through lawsuits by claiming economic losses.

The two sides of nineteenth-century attitudes toward nature are exemplified by the human relationship with animals. On the one hand, animals were integrated into the increasingly complex structures of urban, agricultural, and industrial life. Public transportation in the cities relied on horses until the end of the century, as did coal mining. The newly established slaughterhouses ensured the total, efficient, and hygienic processing of livestock. On the other hand, among the middle classes, the keeping of pets resulted in a new vision of the animal as a companion to humans, highly esteemed and even loved. Large predators such as bears and wolves, however, were nearly exterminated when they disturbed farmers. Species that served industrial production were exploited like other natural resources. Whaling, for example, grew into a bloody industry based on explosive harpoons and factory ships. By contrast, birds were greeted as the feathered friends of humankind. In northern Europe, at least, songbirds were excluded from menus and the use of their plumes was a subject of heated debate by 1900.

See alsoCities and Towns; Industrial Revolution, First; Industrial Revolution, Second.

bibliography

Brüggemeier, Franz-Josef. Tschernobyl, 26 April 1986: Dieökologische Herausforderung. Munich, 1998. Outlines major environmental problems from 1800 to the present.

Cioc, Mark. The Rhine: An Eco-Biography 1815–2000. Seattle, Wash., 2002. Ecological transformations of one of the largest rivers in Europe.

Delort, Robert, and François Walter. Histoire de l'environnement européen. Paris, 2001. First comprehensive European environmental history.

Hughes, J. Donald. The Mediterranean: An Environmental History. Santa Barbara, Calif., 2005.

Luckin, Bill, Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud, and Dieter Schott, eds. Urban Environment: Resources—Perceptions—Uses. London, 2005. Collection of essays on the urban environment.

Radkau, Joachim. Natur und Macht: Eine Weltgeschichte der Umwelt. Munich, 2000. English translation forthcoming. World environmental history from the beginnings to the twentieth century, with special focus on agriculture.

Sieferle, Rolf Peter. The Subterranean Forest: Energy Systems and the Industrial Revolution. Cambridge, U.K., 2001.

Simmons, Ian G. An Environmental History of Great Britain: From 10000 Years Ago to the Present. Edinburgh, 2001.

Whited, Tamara, et al. Northern Europe: An Environmental History. Santa Barbara, Calif., 2005.

Jens Ivo Engels