Environment : Past and Present

Concern for the environment is not an entirely new phenomenon. In isolated instances, environmental and wildlife protection laws have been enacted in the past. Similarly, astute early physicians and scientists occasionally recognized occupationally related health problems within the general population. As early as 500 BC, a law was passed in Athens requiring refuse disposal in a designated location outside the city walls. Ancient Rome had laws prohibiting disposal of trash into the river Tiber. In seventeenth century Sweden, legislation was passed forbidding ‘‘slash and burn’’ land clearing; those who broke the law were banished to the New World. Although no laws protecting workers from occupational hazards were enacted until much later, the first observation that occupational exposure could create health hazards was made in 1775 by a London physician, Percival Pott. He observed among London chimney sweeps an unusually high rate of scrotal cancer that he associated (and rightly so) with exposure to soot. Colonial authorities in Newport, Rhode Island, recognizing a danger of game depletion, established the first closed season on deer hunting as early as 1639. Other communities became aware of the same problem; by the time of the American Revolution, 12 colonies had legislated some kind of wildlife protection. Following the example of Massachusetts, which established a game agency in 1865, every state had game and fish protection laws before the end of the nineteenth century (1). In 1885, to protect the population from waterborne diseases such as cholera and typhoid fever, New York State enacted the Water Supply Source Protection Rules and Regulations Program. These instances of environmental concern were sporadic. It was not until some time after World War II that concern for the environment and for the effects of industrial development on human health became widespread. The industrial development of the late eighteenth century, which continued throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, converted the Western agricultural societies into industrialized societies. For the first time in human history, pervasive hunger in the western world ceased to be a problem. The living standard of the masses improved, and wealth was somewhat better distributed.