Renaissance Florence enacted early environmental laws against river poisoning that were widely ignored.

Evidence

Agricola may have been alluding to laws passed by the Florentines between 1420 and 1485, preventing people from dumping lime into rivers upstream from the city for the purpose of “poisoning or catching fish,” as it caused severe problems for those living downstream. The laws were enacted both to preserve the trout, “a truly noble and impressive fish” and to provide Florence with “a copious and abundant supply of such fish.” But these laws passed to safeguard the waters of the Arno and the areas of the Castino and Pistoian Apennines were not obeyed, and complaints mounted that “the rivers are empty of fish, and the fish are worse.” By 1477, new laws protected the entire domain around Florence, including the Arno, Sieve, and Serchio rivers and their tributaries, from the diverting and damming of rivers and the poisoning of fish with lime, nutshells, or the reputedly toxic Aaron’s Rod plant. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 215

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the law/institutions thread of the polyad and pairs with eco-justice pedagogy’s concern with environmental law enforcement failure.
• XREF: Links to the law/institutions strand shared across the polyad courses, and to the book’s own point that premodern ecological restraint was legal-argumentative.