London banned smoky sea-coal in 1272, centuries before the green movement
In 1272 Edward I proclaimed a ban on burning and selling sea-coal in London after its smoke became a citywide nuisance. The fuel took its name from lumps found washed up on beaches and wheeled away in barrows, and Londoners used it because wood was scarce. Concern for the environment is far older than the word.
Earlier traditions pointed the same way. Jainism, revived by Mahavira in the 6th century BC, taught nonviolence toward all life and the interdependence of living things with earth, water, air, fire and space. In the 630s the Caliph Abu Bakr ordered his soldiers not to harm or burn trees and to kill enemy flocks only for food. Islamic physicians from the 9th to 13th centuries, among them Al-Razi and Avicenna, wrote about fouled air, polluted water, contaminated soil and mishandled refuse. Francis of Assisi's Canticle of the Sun, from around 1224, praised Sister Mother Earth and questioned human dominion over creation. Philip II of Spain ordered forests conserved, warning in 1582 that stripping them would wrong future generations.
The modern movement grew from industrial smoke. Factories and soaring coal use filled manufacturing towns with pollution, and after 1900 chemical discharges added to untreated sewage. Britain's Alkali Acts of 1863, aimed at hydrochloric acid gas released by soda ash production, were the first large-scale modern environmental laws. The zoologist Alfred Newton campaigned for closed hunting seasons during breeding, helping inspire the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the Sea Birds Preservation Act of 1869, the world's first nature protection law.
In the United States, Henry David Thoreau's Walden urged close contact with nature, and John Muir, moved by Yosemite's geology and ecology, lobbied for a national park there and founded the Sierra Club in 1892. Woodrow Wilson created the National Park Service in 1916.
Mid-century disasters widened public alarm. The Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb test in 1954 showered fallout on the 23 crewmen of the Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon 5. The tanker Torrey Canyon grounded off Cornwall in 1967, oil spilled into the Santa Barbara Channel in 1969, and a 1971 Japanese lawsuit exposed decades of mercury poisoning at Minamata.
Source: Environmentalism
