Air Pollution and Fuel Crises in Preindustrial London, 1250-1650

19th centuries. Such a view implies that there were no serious environmental problems before industrialization, that, could we eliminate certain offending industries or develop the proper technology to control them, our present ecological ills would be cured. More properly, however, the basic problems of disposing of wastes and finding adequate sources of food, water, and fuel, though certainly aggravated by modern industrialization, are as old as civilization itself. I intend to show in this paper that the occurrence of air pollution in London before the Industrial Revolution was symptomatic of one of these basic environmental problems-the exhaustion of a society's preferred source of fuel and the subsequent difficulty of finding an adequate substitute-and, further, that it was intimately connected to certain demographic and economic developments within that society.