ABSTRACT
It has to be said at the very beginning that environmental awareness in the modern sense does not predate the 1960s anywhere. Industrial development had advanced throughout the nineteenth and the greater part of the twentieth centuries in western Europe and America with little regard for resource consumption or environmental impact, although outbreaks of cholera and typhoid had stimulated significant public health legislation. Social concern had similarly stimulated radical improvements in public housing and space provision. Major rivers, however, such as the Rhine, were highly polluted, urban air quality, particularly in the more heavily industrialised areas, left much to be desired, and land contamination was widespread. The Soviet Union had followed a very similar path, although at a much more frenetic pace.
