1I would like to start off with some basic remarks concerning the scientific approach of environmental history, which does not actually belong to the « classical fields » of historiography. This specific view of the past is mainly determined by questions of future development, while current problems form the starting point. Sceptical undertones are hard to ignore. In his collection The Ends of the Earth1 Donald Worster defines environmental history as being « about the role and place of nature in human life », Brimblecomb and Pfister describe it as the « silent countdown »2.

2In the last few years, the concepts of environmental history have been intensely discussed on the periphery of our discipline. Since the beginning of the 1980s, scientific interest in issues like the « environment », « nature », « environmental impacts » or « men and nature » has obviously increased ; yet they have largely remained concepts or projects3. Dealing with current problems of anthropogenic environmental pollution – like the depletion of material resources, the destruction of landscapes, waste, noise, emissions, not to forget the disaster of Tschernobyl4, these studies were of closely defined topical interest – while human impacts on nature in earlier times had not yet been made subjects of discussion.

3In this early stage the scientific concepts of environmental history had been discussed controversially (a discussion which is not over yet): some historians tend to consider the discipline of environmental history as a « science of survival », of which they expect precise environmental guidance, with possible scenarios of how to overcome the emerging problems. Others are demanding anthropological and evolutionary insights. Regarding the frequently mentioned idea of « learning from history », it is to be treated with caution : environmental history does not mean dealing with examples, but with complex networks5.

4An open and wide definition of this field of research therefore seems most appropriate – I could not help thinking of Marc Bloch’s hint : « the drive of extension, the aspiration of knowledge, that yet isn’t clearly delimited, the best of every intellectual verve is determined by the meticulous exactness of a definition »6. In 1889 Eberhard Gothein argued against narrowing-tendencies in his monograph on cultural history : « Upcoming science doesn’t require a timid segregation of their working area. Its force is actually based on preserving the closest interface to all related spheres of science, inciting [...] researchers for collaboration. [...] It is their task to destroy the old-established limitations and to remind of the original coherence and unity of all sciences with the help of better combinations »7.

5Wherever the tasks of an environmental history might exist, the ongoing discussion emphasizes the debt to historiography. Nowadays this debt is accepted to a great extent, despite the variety of different concepts that coexist within this specific field.

Perspectives

6So far historiography has put man into the centre of scientific reflection. With the approach of environmental history, however, nature becomes the subject of historical interest – the methodology of our discipline turns out to be inadequate, even though different traditions can be observed in an international comparison8.

7While the United States’ consumption of resources has always been extraordinarily high, they are also the country in which a lot of environmental initiatives have been launched in the last one hundred years. This situation has had a remarkable impact on the development of American environmental history as an academic discipline, which has become established in American universities since the 1970s, with roots going back over a century. The American historical tradition bears a stronger link to natural science – nature as an actor is deeply rooted in the American consciousness, which could be explained by the role which the natural environment played in the formation of the American Society9.

8In Europe the French Annales-tradition has given strong impulses for the European development of environmental history, which we associate with researchers like Bloch, Braudel or Febvre. Fernand Braudel’s « geohistoire » is to be regarded as an important theoretical approach. He connected nature with longue durée (as opposed to the rather fast-moving histoire événementielle), analysing longue durée as a disturbing, difficult and largely unknown historical element. For me Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s article « Le climat. L’histoire de la pluie et du beau temps » offered necessary starting points. In the year 1977 it was published in German along with Braudel’s thesis concerning longue duree10. These publications met with general interest especially among German and Austrian students, mainly because cultural-historical approaches had not yet been developed at their universities, even social history still being closely tied to political history. The Annales-positions were also criticised, especially for conceptualising nature as an ontological dimension as well as for their biological and economical determinism. One could interpret the social-constructivist approaches – where nature is seen as a construct, as an idea – as a reaction against them11. Today mediating approaches seem to dominate, as confirmed by Donald Worster : « Nature is an order and a process that we did not create, and in our absence it will continue to exist ; […] all the same, nature is a creation of our minds too, and no matter how hard we may try to see what it is objectively, in and by and for itself, we are to a considerable extent trapped in the prison of our own consciousness and web of meanings »12.

Environmental Aspects

9In 1974 Le Roy Ladurie published an Annales special edition, outlining the research-fields of environmental history. These fields included a large variety of aspects, such as epidemics, climate, natural phenomena, the pollution of air and water, noise and – last but not least – urbanization. Ladurie even focuses on the highly concentrated settlement-structures of urban landscapes13.

10I would like to continue by making a few remarks on the European perspective. In contrast to the situation in America, where the development of cities and urban structures did not start prior to the 19^th century, the structures of modern European cities resulted from reshaping and expanding existing urban and cultural landscapes, a phenomenon mainly based on the rise industry.

11In Europe urbanization has a long tradition14, so that many problems of the urban environment – like water supply, the disposal of waste water or air pollution – were already known in the late Middle Ages, in pre-modern times and especially in the 18^th and 19^th centuries15. These problems were of a cyclical nature. People – and local authorities – benefited from their manifold experiences and were able to develop solutions to and strategies for dealing with the urgent problems. Hence the loss of importance of some « traditional » fields of environmental pollution during the phase of early industrialization – the danger of city fires, for example, was reduced to some extent, as was the problem of intra-urban pollution, which was mainly caused by animals. Now central slaughterhouses were founded and run by the city authorities.

12The transition to the industrial age brought about an increase in population and a surge in urbanization, which aggravated existing problems16, thus leading to urban-hygienic consequences like cholera-epidemics, which occurred all over Europe in 1832 and were to plague some cities until the end of the 19^th century17. Competition for « public goods » intensified, mainly as a result of urban compression – housing and industrial work could no longer coexist within the same space, and conflict situations concerning the location of industrial sites in urban areas arose. Aside from « newer » industrial and mining cities, older urban functions and images generally had an obstructive effect, since it was not possible to change the old town structure at will. The railway station, for example, was inevitably situated on the outskirts of the « old » town. Sometimes even the interests of the tourist industry influenced such decisions.

13Above all, conflicts concerning the location of industrial plants in urban areas demanded a solution. Napoleon’s imperial decree of 1810 represents an early approach to town planning : special authorizations were required for running an industrial plant, which were now classified according to possible risks and the danger of pollution. Napoleon’s idea of keeping factories at an adequate distance from human dwellings followed the pre-industrial model of banishing environmentally harmful industries and crafts to the outskirts of the city18. This law was adopted in 1830 by the Belgian state, Prussia followed fifteen years later, England in 186019.

14The extensive sealing and isolation of urban soil by pavement and the canalising of the water cycle are two different strategies for improving inner city hygiene20.

• By the use of pavement it was possible to reduce the daily pollution by dust or mud. In a second phase town planning brought forth the model of a more « traffic-oriented town », which was then mainly based on the inner city public transport system – horse powered busses in those days, and electric trams after 1890. It is obvious that the outward change in the streetscape brought about by pylons or power lines was more readily accepted by the Americans than in Europe. As the motorized traffic increased at the turn of the century, a second wave of road building introduced asphalt and concrete as new building materials, which led to a complete isolation of the soil21.

• Regulating water supply and the disposal of waste water was the technical prerequisite for improving public hygiene22. The municipalities – like Paris or other French cities – worked on solutions for the supply of fresh water and organized private companies after the model of London or Edinburgh. This was not the first attempt, since older water networks had existed in some towns since the early modern times. But these systems soon turned out to be overburdened, a problem which could not be solved then23. Initially the newer systems were established only for some quarters of the city, keeping large parts of the community without water supply. In the year 1907 only half of the German cities with more than 2000 inhabitants had a central system of water supply, which was often of very poor quality – in this context the dimension of social segregation and inequality can surely not be overlooked. In order to ensure the water supply communities fell back on reservoirs in the hinterland. A famous example is the « first Viennese spring water aqueduct », which was constructed in 1873 and provided the city with fresh water from the Rax-area, situated at a distance of 80 kilometres. Other source regions were developed, so that the second spring water aqueduct could be opened in 191024.

• The expansion of cities – also by means of incorporation – and the significant increase in the per capita water consumption caused problems of disposal, particularly concerning the disposal of faeces. For a long time faeces had been brought to the countryside to be used there as fertilizer. Due to the widespread introduction of the water toilet – which in the 1880s had only been used in every fourth German household – water consumption increased dramatically, making the reorganization of waste disposal unavoidable. From 1840 onwards the European cities gradually extended their sewage systems, following different strategies. First both London and Paris had dumped their waste water into the rivers, the Thames and the Seine, purification plants were established later25. The concept of Berlin was different : the radial system of 1873, which implied letting the sewage trickle onto surrounding fields, could not prevail over the method of dumping the waste water into rivers or canals26.

• Even in early modern times the collection of garbage had been considered a municipal duty, but along with the process of town-compression and expansion public awareness was raised by the growing waste problem27. Now the rising standard of living and the new « world of goods » began to change the waste materials. Municipal waste disposal was transferred from the city itself to the hinterland, where the refuse was dumped on landfills. In the 1870s English engineers developed new methods of waste disposal, like the use of incinerating plants (dust combustion plants). The transfer of these technologies to continental Europe brought about several problems, since it was the high coal content of English waste that allowed this method of incineration28. At the turn of the century different techniques were developed and tested, like, for example, the trisection of the waste : collected waste was sorted into ashes, compostable and non-compostable parts. But many cities transferred their disposal problems to the hinterlands, which is still an ongoing process and has become an international phenomenon in the field of hazardous waste. An international comparison yields a remarkable result : « urban hygiene » had been established as an independent special field in US-American science just before the first world war. It was accompanied by hygiene-campaigns, which only continued and intensified the work of so-called « Sanitary Engineers », who had been working actively on such problems since the 1890s.

• The explosive growth of cities and industrialization required new approaches to substitute older concepts of town planning such as Napoleon’s decree of 1810. The need for a structural design that would be adjusted to the urban development arose even in « newer » cities. From 1870 onwards a new and general phenomenon of compaction occurred : the upper classes left the urban area and moved to the countryside. It was mainly ecological reasons that induced them to this « urban flight ». On the other hand, industrial complexes were built, polluting the neighbourhoods with harmful substances, like noise or emissions. The constantly growing sphere of noise got worse as motorization set in, which was widely noticed by contemporaries, as Radkau emphasises, who labelled this phase as a « nervous age »29. Consequently, older approaches of town planning were substituted by a zone-concept, which was first introduced in Dresden in 1878. A distinction was made between residential, industrial and mixed town-areas, so as to separate work and housing.

15The compaction of the urban landscape, which was increasingly pressed by industry, actually appeared in artistic images, which articulated the problems of those days. Let me illustrate this point by two examples :

16Richard Gessner’s expressionist painting « Industriestadt », which dates back to the year 1922, shows a typical industrial city in the Ruhr area30 – here the industry is clearly putting pressure on the urban area, while a procession of demonstrators is cutting across the picture (fig. 1). Three years later, in 1925, Max Schulze-Sölde painted « The era of technology » (« Zeit der Technik »), which shows a deserted town filled with railways, steelworks and barracks (fig. 2). Both pictures make the « plague of smoke » a subject of discussion, with the chimney dominating the scene. What started off as a symbol of productivity and technical possibilities, as the « lighthouse of progress », which claimed the victory of the factory, turns into a metaphor for the destructive industrial culture31. Smoke pollution increased during the 1870s and 1880s, and not only London was plagued by smog : « it is the smoke, that makes the cockney fog so perishable ».

17It was this « smoke-plague » that led to urban flight and to the rediscovery of nature, which manifested itself in the foundation of the first « Alpine Clubs ». Health resorts, like Karlsbad for example, were fighting against the menace of smoke, in Swiss alpine health resorts it was even prohibited to heat with coal. Aside from the domestic use of coal, it was mainly industry that was responsible for the air pollution, with high chimneys spreading the smoke also over the hinterland. The growth of cities was followed by an increase in coal incineration, leaving the « smoke plague » as an inevitable result for larger cities. The city of Hamburg, for example, had suffered a tremendous climatic deterioration since the year 1870 and passed for « one of the greatest German soot-towns ». The sun was hardly ever seen, with 130 days of fog per year. Soon people began to link this phenomenon with the term of « maladie de la fin de siècle », blaming the fog and the scarcity of sunlight for physical or psychic disorders. As a result engineers were struggling for the invention of « smokeless » incineration, which led to several patents, but remained without practical effect – chimneys grew higher and higher, as the example of Freiberg in Saxony shows. In the year 1899 its chimney reached the height of 144 meters. As coal was gradually superseded by other sources of energy, at that time mainly electricity, the slogan of the « smokeless city » appeared. Ultimately, however this celebration of the « victory » of electricity over the smoke plague could not obscure the fact that the old problems had not yet been solved – the smoke plague had only been displaced.

18If we pay attention to these points – and I shall again refer to the picture-sceneries – the model of separating work and housing becomes more easily comprehensible. The practical realisation of this concept was laid down in the Charter of Athens in 1933. During the 1970s a new urban conception gained importance, that of the compact and intermixed town.