A Timeline on Pollution

June 22, 2019

I put these graphs together for a book chapter on the history of monitoring of Irish rivers.

Protests and activism against climate breakdown are getting the attention of politicians today, especially following the recent European elections with green parties doing very well across Europe and in Ireland. I am old enough to remember a similar mood in the late 1960s and early 1970s regarding air and water pollution. Today (22 June 2019) is the 50th anniversary of the most famous Cuyahoga River fire in 1969 — the river was so polluted by oil that it caught fire — and this ultimately led to the setting up of the US EPA by Richard Nixon.

The term "water pollution" appears 19 times in the record of Dáil Éireann between 1922 and the end of 1968. "Water pollution" was, however, mentioned 88 times in the period from 1 January 1969 up to the first "Earth Day" on 22 April 1970, the date generally taken as the beginning of the modern environmental movement — and indicating a much-increased consciousness and concern about the Irish aquatic environment.

This political trend is mirrored in the Irish Times newspaper's archive. I searched for the phrases "river pollution", "water pollution" and the more generic "pollution" over the period 1910 to 2018. The results are shown in the graph above. Note that the scale is a log scale.

The dip in the number of articles during the 1940s is understandable as being due to World War II, when journalists and letter-writers had more pressing matters to report or complain about.

The sharp increase in the 1960s is very evident with a peak in the number of articles on these topics in the mid-1970s. This general picture in the Irish Times, of predominantly Irish interest and concern, appears to reflect the Zeitgeist of the times — 1970 was "The Year of the Environment" with school-goers across the country encouraged to write essays about "The Environment" or "Pollution". (Of course, some of the earlier mentions in the Irish Times especially may have been "moral pollution".)

The Irish pattern is also mirrored in a more generic search through Google Books using its Ngram Viewer comparing the terms "Air Pollution" and "Water Pollution". Here again, a distinct rise in the occurrence of these phrases in published English language books is noticed, beginning in the early 1960s and peaking in the mid-1970s.

The other interesting feature of both graphs is the distinct drop in the number of articles or occurrences dealing with pollution in more recent years. While this may be due, in part at least, to the modern diversification and specialisation in ecological and environmental science, it may also reflect an actual improvement in environmental quality?