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Timeline of history of environmentalism

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This timeline is a listing of events that have shaped humanity's perspective on the environment. This timeline includes human induced disasters, environmentalists that have had a positive influence, and environmental legislation.

Contents

For a list of geological and climatological events that have shaped human history see Timeline of environmental history

7th century

  • 630s — Caliph Abu Bakr commanded his army: "Bring no harm to the trees, nor burn them with fire, especially those which are fruitful. Slay not any of the enemy's flock, save for your food."
  • 676 — Cuthbert of Lindisfarne enacts protection legislation for birds on the Farne Islands (Northumberland, UK).

    • 9th–13th centuries

  • Arabic medical treatises dealing with environmentalism and environmental science, including pollution, were written by Al-Kindi, Qusta ibn Luqa, Al-Razi, Ibn Al-Jazzar, al-Tamimi, al-Masihi, Avicenna, Ali ibn Ridwan, Ibn Jumay, Isaac Israeli ben Solomon, Abd-el-latif, Ibn al-Quff, and Ibn al-Nafis. Their works covered a number of subjects related to pollution, such as air pollution, water pollution, soil contamination, municipal solid waste mishandling, and environmental impact assessments of certain localities.
  • Cordoba, Al-Andalus, had waste containers and waste disposal facilities for litter collection.

    • 13th century

  • 1272 — King Edward I of England banned the burning of sea-coal by proclamation in London, after its smoke had become a problem.

    • 14th century

  • 1366 — The city of Paris forces butchers to dispose of animal wastes outside the city (Ponting)
  • 1388 — The English Parliament passes an act forbidding the throwing of filth and garbage into ditches, rivers and waters. The city of Cambridge also passes the first urban sanitary laws in England

    • 15th century

  • 1420 to 1427, Madeira islands : destruction of the laurisilva forest, or the woods which once clothed the whole island when the Portuguese settlers decided to clear the land for farming by setting most of the island on fire. It is said that the fire burned for seven years.

    • 17th century

  • 1609 — Hugo Grotius publishes Mare Liberum (The Free Sea) with arguments for the new principle that the sea was international territory and all nations were free to use it for seafaring trade. The ensuing debate had the British empire and France claim sovereignty over territorial waters to the distance within which cannon range could effectively protect it, the three mile (5 km) limit.
  • 1640 — Isaac Walton writes The Compleat Angler about fishing and conservation.
  • 1690 — Colonial Governor William Penn requires Pennsylvania settlers to preserve 1-acre (4,000 m2) of trees for every five acres cleared.

    • 18th century

  • 1711 — Jonathan Swift notes the contents of London's gutters: "sweepings from butchers' stalls, dung, guts and blood, drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud..."
  • 1720 — In India, hundreds of Bishnois Hindus of Khejadali go to their deaths trying to protect trees from the Maharaja of Jodhpur, who needed wood to fuel the lime kilns for cement to build his palace. This event has been considered as the origins of the 20th century Chipko movement.
  • 1739 — Benjamin Franklin and neighbors petition Pennsylvania Assembly to stop waste dumping and remove tanneries from Philadelphia's commercial district. Foul smell, lower property values, disease and interference with fire fighting are cited. The industries complain that their rights are being violated, but Franklin argues for "public rights." Franklin and the environmentalists win a symbolic battle but the dumping goes on.
  • 1748 — Jared Eliot, clergyman and physician, writes Essays on Field Husbandry in New England promoting soil conservation.
  • 1762 to 1769 — Philadelphia committee led by Benjamin Franklin attempts to regulate waste disposal and water pollution.
  • 1773 — William Bartram, (1739–1823). American naturalist sets out on a five-year journey through the US Southeast to describe wildlife and wilderness from Florida to the Mississippi. His book, Travels, is published in 1791 and becomes one of the early literary classics of the new United States of America.
  • 1798 – Thomas Robert Malthus publishes An Essay on the Principle of Population, an evolutionary social theory of population dynamics as it had acted steadily throughout all previous history.

    • 19th century

  • 1820 — World human population reached 1 billion.
  • 1828 — Carl Sprengel formulates the Law of the Minimum stating that economic growth is limited not by the total of resources available, but by the scarcest resource.
  • 1845 — First use of the term "carrying capacity" in a report by the US Secretary of State to the Senate.
  • 1849 — Establishment of the U.S. Department of Interior.
  • 1851 — Henry David Thoreau delivers an address to the Concord (Massachusetts) Lyceum declaring that "in Wildness is the preservation of the World." In 1863, this address is published posthumously as the essay "Walking" in Thoreau's Excursions.
  • 1854 — Henry David Thoreau publishes Walden; or, Life in the Woods.
  • 1859 — Publication of second edition of William Elliott's Carolina Sports by Land and Water (first published in 1846), an early example of the hunter-as-conservationist, a phenomenon which became increasingly important for conservationism.
  • 1860 — Henry David Thoreau delivers an address to the Middlesex (Massachusetts) Agricultural Society, entitled "The Succession of Forest Trees," in which he analyzes aspects of what later came to be understood as forest ecology and urges farmers to plant trees in natural patterns of succession; the address is later published in (among other places) Excursions, becoming perhaps his most influential ecological contribution to conservationist thought.
  • 1862 — John Ruskin publishes Unto This Last, which contains a proto-environmental indictment of the effects of unrestricted industrial expansion on both human beings and the natural world. The book influences Mahatma Gandhi, William Morris and Patrick Geddes.
  • 1864 — George Perkins Marsh publishes Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (revised 1874 as The Earth as Modified by Human Action), the first systematic analysis of humanity's destructive impact on the natural environment and a work which becomes (in Lewis Mumford's words) "the fountain-head of the conservation movement."
  • 1866 — The term ecology is coined in German as Oekologie by Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel (1834–1919) in his Generelle Morphologie der Organismen. Haeckel was an anatomist, zoologist, and field naturalist appointed professor of zoology at the Zoological Institute, Jena, in 1865. Haeckel was philosophically an enthusiastic Darwinian. Ecology is from the Greek oikos, meaning house or dwelling and logos, meaning discourse or the study of.
  • 1869 — Samuel Bowles publishes Our New West. Records of Travel between the Mississippi River and the Pacific Ocean, an influential traveller's account of the wilds and peoples of the West, in which he advocates preservation of other scenic areas such as Niagara Falls and the Adirondacks.
  • 1872 — The term acid rain is coined by Robert Angus Smith in the book Air and Rain.
  • 1873 — International Meteorological Organization is formed.
  • 1874 — Charles Hallock establishes Forest and Stream magazine sparking a US national debate about ethics and hunting.
  • 1876 — British River Pollution Control Act makes it illegal to dump sewage into a stream.
  • 1879 — U.S. Geological Survey formed. John Wesley Powell, explorer of the Colorado River a decade earlier, will become its head in March 1881.
  • 1883 — Francis Galton coins the still controversial concept of eugenics in his book Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development.
  • 1890 — Yosemite National Park Bill, established the Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks in California.
  • 1891 — Oscar Baumann, Austrian explorer of East Africa, publishes an eye-witness account of the extreme drought period 1883–1902 called Emutai by the Maasai.
  • 1892 — John Muir, (1838–1914), founded the Sierra Club.
  • 1895 — Svante Arrhenius presented to the Stockholm Physical Society the paper “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground.” It is the first scientific work concerning the influence of a rise in carbon dioxide on the atmospheric warming. He used previous studies by Josef Stefan, Arvid Gustaf Högbom, Samuel Langley, Leon Teisserenc de Bort, Knut Angstrom, Alexander Buchan, Luigi De Marchi, Joseph Fourier, C.S.M. Pouillet, and John Tyndall.
  • 1895 — Sewage cleanup in London means the return of some fish species (grilse, whitebait, flounder, eel, smelt) to the River Thames.

    • 20th century

  • 1902 — George Washington Carver writes How to Build Up Worn Out Soils.
  • 1903 — March 14, US President Theodore Roosevelt creates first National Bird Preserve, (the beginning of the Wildlife Refuge system), on Pelican Island, Florida.
  • 1905 — The term smog is coined by Henry Antoine Des Voeux in a London meeting to express concern over air pollution.
  • 1906 — Antiquities Act, passed by US Congress which authorized the president to set aside national monument sites.
  • 1908 — Muir Woods National Monument was established on January 9 and now governed by the National Park Service.
  • 1909 — US President Theodore Roosevelt convenes the North American Conservation Conference, held in Washington, D.C. and attended by representatives of Canada, Newfoundland, Mexico, and the United States.

    • 1910s

  • 1913 — US Congress enacts law which destroyed the Hetch Hetchy Valley.
  • 1916 — US Congress created the National Park Service.
  • 1918 — The Save-the-Redwoods League is founded to the protect the remaining coast redwood trees. Over 60% of the redwoods in California's state redwood parks have been protected by the organization.
  • 1919 — The National Parks Conservation Association is founded.

    • 1920s

  • 1921 — Thomas Midgley, Jr. discovers lead components to be an efficient antiknock agent in gasoline engines. In spite of the well known toxic effects, lead was in ubiquitous use. First banned from use in Japan 1986.
  • 1922 — The Izaak Walton League is founded.
  • 1924 — The death of English textile worker Nellie Kershaw from asbestosis was the first account of disease attributed to occupational asbestos exposure.
  • 1927 — Great Mississippi Flood.
  • 1928 — Thomas Midgley, Jr. develops chlorofluorocarbons (CFC's) as a non-toxic refrigerant. The first warnings of damage to stratospheric ozone were published by Molina and Rowland 1974. They shared the 1995 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their work. Since 1987 world production is reduced under the Montreal Protocol and banned in most countries.
  • 1929 — the Swann Chemical Company develops polychlorinated biphenyl (PCBs) for transformer coolant use. Research in the 1960s revealed PCBs to be potent carcinogens. Banned from production in the US 1976, probably 1 million tonnes of PCBs were manufactured in total globally.

    • 1930s

  • 1930–1940 — The Dust Bowl, widespread land degradation due to drought in the North American prairie.
  • 1930 — World human population reached 2 billion.
  • 1933 — Legislation on Animal rights adopted, Germany.
  • 1934 — Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act.
  • 1935 — Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act.
  • 1936 — The National Wildlife Federation is founded.
  • 1939 — The insecticidal properties of DDT discovered by Paul Hermann Müller, who was awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for his efforts. The first ban on its use came in 1970.

    • 1940s

  • 1947 — Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA)
  • 1948 — World Conservation Union or International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) is an international organization dedicated to natural resource conservation. Founded in 1948, its headquarters is located in Gland, Switzerland.
  • 1949 — First known dioxin exposure incident, in a Nitro, West Virginia herbicide production plant. Extensively used by the British during the Malayan Emergency and the US during the Vietnam War 1961 – 1971 as Agent Orange. Production ban in the US on some component from 1970.

    • 1950s

  • 1951 — The Nature Conservancy is an environmental organization founded in the United States.
  • 1954 — The first nuclear power plant to generate electricity for a power grid started operations at Obninsk, Soviet union on 27 June. The first substantial accident happened on 10 October 1957 in Windscale, England.
  • 1955 — Air Pollution Control Act
  • 1956 — Minamata disease, a neurological syndrome caused by severe mercury poisoning.
  • 1958 — Mauna Loa Observatory initiates monitoring of atmospheric Carbon Dioxide (CO2) levels. The time series eventually became the main reference on global atmospheric change.

    • 1960s

  • 1960 — World human population reached 3 billion.
  • 1961 — World Wildlife Fund (WWF) registered as a charitable trust in Morges, Switzerland, an international organization for the conservation, research and restoration of the natural environment.
  • 1962 — Rachel Carson publishes Silent Spring.
  • 1963 — The Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty is signed by the U.S., the U.K. and the U.S.S.R.
  • 1964 — Norman Borlaug takes position as the director of the International Wheat Improvement Program in Texcoco, Mexico. The program leads to the Green Revolution.
  • 1965 — In the Storm King case, a judge rules that aesthetic impacts could be considered in deciding whether Consolidated Edison could demolish a mountain, a landmark case in environmental law.
  • 1966 — National Wildlife Refuge System Act.
  • 1967 — Environmental Defense Fund founded.
  • 1968 — The Apollo 8 picture of earthrise.
  • 1969 — National Environmental Policy Act including the first requirements on Environmental impact assessment.

    • 1970s

  • 1970 — Earth Day – April 22., millions of people gather in the United States for the first Earth day organized by Gaylord Nelson, former senator of Wisconsin, and Denis Hayes, Harvard graduate student.
  • 1971 — The international environmental organisation Greenpeace founded in Vancouver, Canada. Greenpeace has later developed national and regional offices in 41 countries worldwide.
  • 1972 — The Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm, Sweden 5 to 16 June, the first of a series of world environmental conferences.
  • 1973 — OPEC announces oil embargo against United States.
  • 1974 — Chlorofluorocarbons are first hypothesized to cause ozone thinning.
  • 1975 — Energy Policy and Conservation Act.
  • 1976 — Dioxin accidental release in Seveso, Italy on 10 July, killing animals and traumatizing the population.
  • 1977 — Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act.
  • 1978 — Brominated flame-retardants replaces PCBs as the major chemical flame retardant. Swedish scientists noticed these substances to be accumulating in human breast milk 1998. First ban on use in the EU 2004.
  • 1979 — The Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution is established to reduce air pollutant emissions and acid rain.

    • 1980s

  • 1980 – Superfund (Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act or CERCLA)
  • 1981 — Lois Gibbs founds the Citizens' Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste
  • 1982 — Coastal Barrier Resources Act.
  • 1984 — Bhopal disaster in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh (Methyl isocyanate leakage).
  • 1985 — Rainforest Action Network founded.
  • 1986 — Chernobyl, world's worst nuclear power accident occurs at a plant in Ukraine.
  • 1987 — World human population reached 5 billion.
  • 1988 — Ocean Dumping Ban Act.
  • 1989 — Exxon Valdez creates largest oil spill in US history.

    • 1990s

  • 1990 — National Environmental Education Act.
  • 1991 — The Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty was signed 4 October. The agreement provides for the protection of the Antarctic environment through five specific annexes on marine pollution, fauna, and flora, environmental impact assessments, waste management, and protected areas. It prohibits all activities relating to mineral resources except scientific.
  • 1992 — The Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro from June 3 to June 14, was unprecedented for a United Nations conference, in terms of both its size and the scope of its concerns.
  • 1993 — The Great Flood of 1993 was one of the most destructive floods in United States history involving the Missouri and Mississippi river valleys.
  • 1994 — United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification.
  • 1995 — Scotland's Environmental Protection Agency is established.
  • 1996 — Western Shield, a wildlife conservation project is started in Western Australia, and through successful work has taken several species off of the state, national, and international (IUCN) Endangered Species Lists..
  • 1997 — July, U.S. Senate unanimously passed by a 95–0 vote the Byrd-Hagel Resolution, which stated that the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol that did not include binding targets and timetables for developing as well as industrialized nations.
  • 1999 — World human population reached 6 billion.

    • 21st century

  • 2001 — U.S. rejects the Kyoto Protocol.
  • 2002 — Earth Summit, held in Johannesburg a United Nations conference.
  • 2003 — The world's largest reservoir, the Three Gorges Dam begins filling 1 June.
  • 2004 — 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami affects coutries surrounding the Indian Ocean, killing nearly a quarter of a million people.
  • 2005 — Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma cause widespread destruction and environmental harm to coastal communities in the US Gulf Coast region.
  • 2006 — Former U.S. vice president Al Gore releases An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary that describes global warming. The next year, Gore is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (jointly with the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change) for this and related efforts.
  • 2007 — The IPCC release the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.
  • 2009 — Power Shift 2009 – The Energy Action Coalition hosted the second national youth climate conference to be held at the Washington Convention Center from February 27 to March 2, 2009. The conference aims to attract more than 10,000 students and young people and will include a Lobby Day.
  • 2010 – Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill.
  • 2011 — United Nations designates day that world human population reached 7 billion.
  • 2014 — The IPCC release the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report.

    • References

    Timeline of history of environmentalism Wikipedia
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