History of environmental pollution

[2][3] In early human history, the use of fire and desire for specific foods may have altered the natural composition of plant and animal communities.

In early human history, although the energy and other resource demands of nomadic hunter-gatherers were small, the use of fire and desire for specific foods may have altered the natural composition of plant and animal communities.

[15] Archeological evidence suggests that the first civilizations arose in Sumer, in southern Mesopotamia (now Iraq) and Egypt, both dating from around 3000 BCE.

This, in turn, led to political hierarchy, bureaucracy, and religious sanction, along with standing armies to protect the emergent civilization.

Intensified agriculture allowed for population increase, but also led to deforestation in upstream areas with resultant flooding and over-irrigation, which raised soil salinity.

[18][19] Civilizations similarly thought to have eventually fallen because of poor management of resources include the Mayans, Anasazi and Easter Islanders, among many others.

Some Polynesian cultures have maintained stable communities for between 1,000 and 3,000 years on small islands with minimal resources using rahui[22] and kaitiakitanga[23] to control human pressure on the environment.

The Reverend Thomas Malthus, devised catastrophic and much-criticised theories of "overpopulation", while John Stuart Mill foresaw the desirability of a "stationary state" economy, thus anticipating concerns of the modern discipline of ecological economics.

[27][28][29] In the late 19th century Eugenius Warming was the first botanist to study physiological relations between plants and their environment, heralding the scientific discipline of ecology.

Innovations in technology (including plastics, synthetic chemicals, nuclear energy) and the increasing use of fossil fuels, were transforming society.

Modern industrial agriculture—the "Green Revolution"—was based on the development of synthetic fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides which had devastating consequences for rural wildlife, as documented by American marine biologist, naturalist and environmentalist Rachel Carson in Silent Spring (1962).

[36] In the 1970s environmentalism's concern with pollution, the population explosion, consumerism and the depletion of finite resources found expression in Small Is Beautiful, by British economist E. F. Schumacher in 1973, and The Limits to Growth published by the global think tank, the Club of Rome, in 1975.

A plethora of new concepts to help implement and measure sustainability are becoming more widely accepted including the car-free movement, smart growth (more sustainable urban environments), life cycle assessment (the cradle to cradle analysis of resource use and environmental impact over the life cycle of a product or process), ecological footprint analysis, green building, dematerialization (increased recycling of materials), decarbonisation (removing dependence on fossil fuels) and much more.

[49] In 2009 the Environmental Protection Agency of the United States determined that greenhouse gases "endanger public health and welfare" of the American people by contributing to climate change and causing more heat waves, droughts and flooding, and threatening food and water supplies.

[50] Between the years 2016 and 2018, the United States saw an increase in 5.7% of the annual average fine particulate matter, which aids in quantifying ambient air quality.