London’s seventeenth-century coal smoke already triggered ecological health crises

Evidence

Evelyn devoted another treatise specifically to the discussion of air pollution in London. His Fumifugium, like his Silva and Terra, showed a sophisticated awareness of the important ecological interrelationships between air, water, and the health of living things. The Fumifugium was presented in 1661 to Charles II, “who is the very breath of our nostrils,” in response to general concern over the increase of “fuliginous and filthy vapors” caused by the burning of “sea coal.” Its sulfurous fumes permeated the environs of London, penetrating even into the heart of the royal palace, causing “catarrhs, phthisics, coughs, and consumptions” in the inhabitants, premature deaths in infants, and leaflessness and barrenness in fruit-bearing trees. Air pollution had continued to grow, owing to the increase in “brewers, dyers, lime burners, salt and soap boilers, and … other private trades.” The pollution had reached such proportions in London that “the sun itself which gives day to all the world besides, is hardly able to penetrate and impart it … and the weary traveler, at many miles distance, sooner smells, than sees the city to which he repairs.” — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 894

Categorization

• CANDY: A traveler in 1661 could smell London from miles off — air pollution was a recognizable civic crisis before the Industrial Revolution.
• SEED: Angle for Fumifugium: the first treatise on urban air pollution predates the Industrial Revolution and already frames health, ecology, and political address together — useful as an eco-justice pedagogy case.
• XREF: connects to: Timber depletion in England drove the exponential rise of coal mining. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 331