Environmental Issues Between
1900-1919
By Dan Sheridan
1900 -- May 25 -- Lacey Act
• regulates interstate traffic in wild birds in
order to stop importation of birds where they
have become endangered.
• The act is a reaction to lobbying by the
womens clubs and Audubon society.
• Birds, particularly egrets, were being
slaughtered on a mass scale to provide elegant
plumes for ladies hats.
1900 -- Water pollution lawsuit
• The state of Missouri issues the state of
Illinois and the City of Chicago's sewer system
for polluting the Mississipi.
• Eventually, US Supreme Court allows the
Chicago city sewer department to maintain a
canal draining city sewage into the Des Plaines
River and, eventually, the Mississippi River. In
Missouri v. Illinois and the Sanitary District of
Chicago,
1901 -- The American Scenic and
Historic Preservation Society
• founded in New York developing out of the
state-level Trustees of Scenic and Historic
Places and Objects which had been founded
by Andrew H. Green, president of the
Commissioners of the State Reservation at
Niagara, in 1895, and modelled after Britain's
National Trust
National Bird Preserve
• 1903, March 14 -- President Theodore Roosevelt
creates first National Bird Preserve, (the begining
of the Wildlife Refuge system), on Pelican Island,
Florida.
• In all, by 1909 the Roosevelt administration
creates 42 million acres of national forests, 53
national wildlife refuges and 18 areas of "special
interest," including the Grand Canyon.
• The record will not bet equaled until Bill Clinton's
last year in office.
1904
• Child lead poisoning first linked to lead-based
paints (Warren).
• Ida Tarbell's book The History of Standard Oil
exposes John D. Rockefeller's business methods
and adds to the argument for controlling
monopolies through stronger anti-trust laws.
• Upton Sinclair's book The Jungle describes the
injustices faced by ordinary people at the hands
of corporations, especially the meat packing
industries. He also described the smoke from the
great chimneys of Packingtown (Chicago)
A solar power plant using amonia
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Two American engineers, H.E. Willsie and John Boyle, set up the Willsie
Sun Co. in St. Louis in 1904. A solar power plant using amonia drove a six
horsepower engine, but the inventors decided to move to the desert of
California to continue tests.
By 1908 they built a system that had overcome many of the traditional
problems of solar energy.
The engine heated water in two stages of flat plate hot boxes, then used
the pool of hot water as a heat source for a sulphur dioxide pump. Since
hot water could be stored throughout the night, and still run the pump,
the intermittant nature of solar energy was not a problem.
The sun plant cost $164 per hp, compared to $40 to $90 for a
conventional plant. For a while, operating costs favored the solar plant in
the Southwest, where coal was hard to get.
Willsie claimed the plant would pay for itself in two years. But when
motors that used coal gas (4 times more efficient) were introduced, the
savings became more elusive, and the Willsie company went out of
business.
1905
• Congress establishes first game preserve (later
called wildlife refuges) in Wichita, Kansas
• National Audubon Society organized by George
Bird Grinell to promote wildlife conservation.
• It is a reorganization from an earlier attempt in
1886. The society is named in honor of wildlife
painter John James Audubon (1785 - 1850).
Merritt Clifton of Animal People writes of this
event
1906
• The Federal Food and Drug Act creates FDA to
regulate the adulteration and misrepresenting of
foods and drugs. The initial concern involves
price, not health, but the act provides the
constitutional basis for modern day regulation of
testing, marketing and promotion of drugs
• US Congress passes the Burton Act, making
diversion of water for power supplies subordinate
to preservation of Niagara falls.
1907
Rachel Carson born. Biologist and author of
Silent Spring, The Sea Wind and other nonfiction work intended to improve the public
understanding of science, Carson became a
leading figure in the environmental
movement before her death in 1964.
USDA Animal Health and Plant Health
Inspection Service founded.
Edward Howe Forbush publishes Useful
Birds and Their Protection, the first major
work by an American to analyze the
economic importance of birds and the
strategies necessary for their protection
1908
• Teddy Roosevelt holds governors conference on
conservation policy; forrester Gifford Pinchot
chairs technical committee with follow-up report
on national resource inventory. This became the
National Conservation Commission, and its
report, delivered Jan. 22, 1909, was called by
Roosevelt "one of the most fundamentally
important documents ever laid before the
American people."
• National Bison Range established on Flathead
Indian Reservation in Montana.
1909
• Louis Glavis blows the whistle on the Alaskan
coal scandal involving low-cost leases on
federal land to companies that made huge
profits selling coal for the shipping trade.
• France, Belgium and Austria ban white-lead
interior paint.
1910
• Japan presents 2,000 ornamental cherry trees to the city of
Washington DC., but they are burned on the Washington
monument grounds due to pests and diseases. On February 14,
1912, another 3,020 cherry trees of 12 varieties were shipped from
Yokohama on board the S.S. Awa Maru, bound for Seattle. Upon
arrival, they were transferred to insulated freight cars for the
shipment to Washington where they now surround the tidal basin.
• Jacques Cousteau born. The French oceanographer, inventor,
explorer and environmental activist helped people around the
world understand that a threat to the oceans was a threat to all life
on earth.
• Insecticide Act mandates that pesticides be effective if they are to
be sold. Administstered by USDA, become FIFRA in 1947, EPA given
oversight in 1972.
1911
• Preparing a report about the 1909 Glascow
incidents, Dr. Harold Antoine Des Voeux coins
term "smog" as a contraction for smoke-fog
which he proposes at the Smoke Coal
Abatement Society meeting in Manchester,
England.
• Wisconsin becomes first state to establish a
workers compensation program
1912
• David Brower born in Berkeley, California. President of the Sierra Club and
founded of friends of earth and Earth island instute, Bower is remembers
as an uncompromising environmental activist in the John Muir tradition.
• Frank Shuman's Sun Power Co. builds a massive solar irrigation pump in
the Egyptian desert for the British government in 1912. The 55
horsepower plant cost $8,200, or about $150 per hp, but was
economically viable in a remote location like Egypt. Shuman was hailed as
a success in Europe and signed a $200,000 contract with the Germans to
build a plant in S.W. Africa. But WWI intervened and the plant was never
built.
• Federal Water and Sanitation Investigation Station established in
Cincinnati.
• National Waterways Commission report recommends waterway
improvements.
• National Audubon Society begins campaign to boycott hat makers using
endangered tropical bird feathers.
1913
• U.S.-Canada boundary pollution commission established. Following an
initial report, Congress considered a bill to prevent dumping of sewage
into the Great Lakes and its tributaries, but the Public Health Service
objects on the basis that the bill would be enforced by localities with
questionable jurisdiction. Fishermen have already gutted key provisions of
a the treaty in 1906. The greatly weakened boundary commission can do
little more than observe as conditions deteriorate.
• Migratory Bird Act to regulate hunting runs into controversy; spring
hunting and marketing of hunted birds prohibited; treaty with Canada in
1918 solidifies regulations. Act also prohibits importation of wild bird
feathers for women's fashion into the U.S., ending "millinery murder."
• William T. Hornaday, head of New York Zoological Society, writes Our
Vanishing Wildlife, Its Extermination and Preservation. By 1914, he helps
establish the Permanent Wildlife Protection Fund with grants from
Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford and George Eastman.
• McLean Act gives Secretary of Agriculture power to regulate waterfowl
seasons.
1914
• Corps of Engineers, Bureau of Mines, Public
Health Service begin pollution surveys of
streams and harbors. Reports filed over the
next eight years show an accumulation of
heavy damage from oil dumping, mine runoff,
untreated sewage and industrial waste
1915
• California legislature authorizes $10,000 to
start planning and construction of the John
Muir Trail.
• Dinosaur National Monument established in
Utah.
1916
• National Park Service created. President Woodrow Wilson created
the national park system with the Organic Act of 1916 designed to
"conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects [and]
leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations."
According to the Environmental News Network, there are now 77.5
million acres of land preserved in the Park system. One inspiration
that helped the Organic Act pass Congress was a motion picture of
proposed park areas by photographer Herford Cowling.
• GM and United Motors buy Charles Kettering's DELCO, leaving him
free to begin experiments with preventing engine knock that lead
to leaded gasoline. By 1919, Kettering's research group will become
the nucleus of the General Motors research division, and the engine
knock experiments will lead to leaded gasoline by 1921.
1917
• Corps of Engineers removed lock gates in old
canal in Virginia's Dismal Swamp, allowing salt
water into North Carolina's Currituck Sound, a
major waterfowl estuary. After a fight with the
Corps of Engineers, environmental activists
finally persuade Congress in 1930 to restore
the gates and preserve the sound
• Mount McKinley National Park established in
Alaska
1918
• Save the Redwoods League founded.
• Migratory Bird Treaty with Canada restricts
hunting of geese and other migratory birds.
• Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky says: "The
proper goal of communism is the domination of
nature by technology and the domination of
technology by planning, so that raw materials of
nature will yield to mankind all that it needs and
more besides." This philosophy will lead to
environmental disasters in decades ahead.
1919
• London General Omnibus Co. experiments
prove effectiveness of ethanol as antiknock
(octane booster).
References
• http://www.runet.edu/~wkovarik/envhist/5pr
ogressive.html
• Reference packet