ABSTRACT
Seemingly contemporary environmental problems have apparently existed in the past and fuelled ecological concern. The Romans, as we have seen, undoubtedly suffered from lead poisoning. Air pollution may have been an unpleasant reality for the inhabitants of ancient Mesopotamia. Poor planning decisions and industrial toxic waste blighted medieval communities. Dilemmas that seemed unimaginable before the Second World War have been speculated upon far earlier. For example, a Swedish scientist, Svante Arrhenius (1859-1927) noted that coal burning was ‘evaporating our coal mines into the air’. Doubling the amount of natural carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would cause a 5ºC rise in temperature worldwide. The ice caps might melt and sea levels would rise; the greenhouse effect had been described. A century earlier the Egyptologist Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768-1830), who developed the theory of heat conduction, also speculated on such a ‘hothouse’ effect. The physicist Frederick Soddy (1877-1956) worried about the ill effects inherent in exploiting the atom in the 1920s, decades before the discovery of nuclear power or the invention of the atom bomb (Martinez-Alier 1990: xv).
