This chapter provides an historical overview of the development of environmental awareness among the peoples of the world. An historical context is established within which environmental awareness has developed, and selected recent examples of environmental degradation that have heightened environmental awareness are discussed.
The Historical Context Within Which Environmental Awareness Has Developed
With respect to a concern for the environment, it is probably fair to state that most people think that environmental awareness is a relatively recent phenomenon, dating at most back to the first Earth Day in 1970 (DiSilvestro, 1990, p. 5). Among Americans, it is also probably fair to state that most of them think that a concern for the environment is an American phenomenon (Vig and Kraft, 1990, pp. 9 11). While it is true that environmental protection actions have become more numerous and more effective in recent decades, it is not true that concerns for the protection of the environment did not exist far earlier. It is also true that effective environmental clean up and protection actions were effected in countries such the United Kingdom well before most of the body of environmental law now existing in the United States was enacted. Environmental degradation in the United States, however, does have a long history. It is said, for example, that "many Europeans in the
1700s believed that the air of the American continent was so bad that human beings could not grow in that atmosphere" (Petulla, 1987, p. 16).As noted in the introduction to this study, environmental protection in this study is considered in the contexts of both environmental health and ecological protection. Environmental health is, in concept, a part of public health. Contemporary public health policies are determined, at least in part, in the context of costs and accountability. These concepts, however, were also in place in ancient Rome, where physicia...