ABSTRACT
Think of western Europe in the 1940s and 1950s. Each nation was committed to a programme of reconstruction and reindustrialization. The aim was to build a better post-war world and indicators of economic growth suggested this was a possibility not a dream. However in major cities across Europe, centres of growing populations, expanding transport systems and new enterprises, as well as in regions of high industrial concentration, a new social problem was being produced. In itself, of course, this ‘new’ problem-pollution-was hardly unfamiliar to these cities and regions. The industries of the nineteenth century, mining, smelting, refining and so on, all changed the landscape and affected air quality, with health consequences for local populations. It was the scale and severity of pollution that were new. For example, in London in 1952, the number of deaths caused by the ‘Killer Smog’ (which sounds like a science-fiction fantasy but was actually dense atmospheric pollution), caused public alarm and calls for action, leading to the Clean Air Act of 1956. In parts of Eastern Europe, such problems were, we now realize, even greater (Carter and Turnock, 1993).
