ON GRIEVOUS RANSOMS AND FINE-NOSED CITY DAMES

The author was diarist and Royal Society Fellow John Evelyn, and his complaint the "impure and thick Mist, accompanied with a fuliginous and filthy vapour, which renders them obnoxious to a thousand inconveniences, corrupting the Lungs,... causing Catarrhs, Phtisieks, Coughs and Consumptions [to] rage more in this one City than in the whole Earth besides."

The cause: "sea coal," today Simply known as coal. (The term is said to be of unknown origin, but it seems obvious that it was used to distinguish the coal shipped by Sea from Newcastle from the coal it was displacing, namely charcoal.)

Pollution by coal smoke had been troublesome since the end of the 13th century; in 1307, Edward I issued a Royal Proclamation prohibiting the use of sea coal in kilns, and when it was observed with the same enthusiasm as EPA's decrees, he authorized another Royal Commission "to punish offenders with grievous ransoms."

To no avail: Queen Elizabeth was so "greved and annoyed with the taste and smoke of sea cooles" in 1578 that the Company of Brewers agreed to use only wood for brewing operations, but alum works, among others, continued to use the new fuel, causing aggrieved citizens' lobbies to petition against it. Sea coal was not only responsible for "tainting the pastures," but, according to the forerunners of the Friends of the Earth in 1627, "poisoning the very fish in the Thames." The problem was temporarily "solved" by a typical case of government-business incest: Charles I attempted to sell the monopoly of coal trade to the City of Newcastle, running into the bitter opposition of London shipowners.

The result of such ICC-FEA-FPC-like policies was no coal for anybody by the winter of 1637-38; and in 1644 Robert Gesling, in a pamphlet with the telling title Artificiall Fire, or Coale for Rich and Pore, reports that "some fine Nosed City Dames" used to complain about " the Smell of this Cities Seacole Smoke," but now they cry "would to God we had Seacoale. O the want of Fire undoes us! . . . How we want them now, no fire to your Seacole!" [More: "Air pollution and fuel crises in preindustrial London, 1250-1650," by W. H . Te Brake, Technology and Culture, July l975.]

In the long run, of course, neither kings nor Fine-Nosed City Dames were able to stop the inexorable advance of industry; by the early 18th century, London had become the world's leading industrial city. But it had also become the city of London Fog, which until the 1950's would, on occasions, completely stall traffic and have people groping along walls in zero visibility at high noon.

But in those days, environmentalists were still interested in clean air, not the abolishment of technology: Most members of the Clamshell alliance had not yet been born or were wetting their pants. It took the death of 3,900 Londoners who died within a week after a particularly bad pollution episode in 1952 to get people moving, but move they did: Within a few years, the technology of "smoke abatement" (as pollution control was then called) had prolonged the life of the average Londoner by several years, had banished London Fogs for good, and had, ruthlessly ignoring the teachings of latter-day ecologists, stamped out the viruses and other endangered species that used to thrive in it. London was the first to show the world that pollution is cured by technology, not by its absence.

Those who have not learned the lessons of history are destined to relive it; the trouble is the rest of us are condemned to relive it, too. As for the members of the Clamshell Alliance, they are to be commended for no longer wetting their pants; for they have learned nothing else.