Gross Domestic Happiness is enhanced by caring about things beyond human flourishing for many people. Many people care about the environment. GDH was in fact invented precisely to capture dimensions beyond that of human material improvement (more dams, more houses, etc.)
A clean environment is a luxury good most people didn't even know they wanted until economies advanced enough to make them an option. To see a present-day version of this difference, one need only look at China. That's how Americans viewed the environment before WWII.
If you watch the evolution of, say, the Sierra Club, its focus has shifted to reflect the changes in values over time It's very interesting. One of the really fun! things about Micheal Crichton's "State of Fear" is his curmudgeonly way of bringing out the denial of the nearly axiomatic assumption these days of environmental purity being a path to happiness.
You're confusing "didn't even know they wanted" with "took for granted". In the pre-industrial era with much lower populations, human-sourced massive environmental pollution wasn't common. Many people didn't even realize it was possible. Everyone wanted and most people had clean environments and only learned to make it an issue when the clean environments started to disappear in places.
John Adams and others much like him thought cities were just dens of iniquity and filth. Since he lost a son to drink, it's no small wonder. You can only imagine the filth, crime and degradation of those places then.
Even before the Romantics, people like Jefferson considered networks of small freeholders the only sustainable way to have people live.
No. "Didn't know they wanted." There has been a protracted and concerted propaganda effort to change consciousness about this subject. What makes a Theodore Roosevelt exceptional is that he listened to John Muir decades before that kind of thinking was commonplace.
I think there was a long span of time where you could set rivers on fire, cut the air in cities with a knife and become sickened or killed by drinking water from a pubic well. The Thames was a severe, dangerous public nuisance in the time of Samuel Pepys ( who happened to write about it ).
This became a "thing" only since WWII.
People used open-belt farm machinery. 90% of electrical linemen died on the job. You could buy machine guns at paint stores, or by mail. "Safety" as a discipline is quite recent. Environmentalism is even more recent. My Dad worked for a Bell company and was decades ahead of the general flow of safety, and we picked up our trash as we left campsites, when most didn't.
Of course the Boy Scouts had this as a practice, but it was otherwise not mainstream.
"The past is a different country; they did things differently there." - L.P. Hartley.
From my comment: "… pre-industrial … most people …" etc.
There's been probably as much or more protracted and concerted propaganda from industrialists (who have more wealth and power to spread their messages) as the environmental sort.
You're just fantasizing if you think there have been large populations of people who lived next to rivers on fire and horribly polluted air and water and litter and yet "didn't know they wanted" a clean environment. They may not have had the political terminology to talk about it, but basically nobody likes living in trash.
The whole failure of large populations not to pick up their litter etc. makes complete sense to anyone who understands social-psychology, game theory etc. It's in no sense evidence that people liked living with litter or didn't want an unlittered environment.
The environmental movement correlates strongly with the increasing amount of pollution and other environmental issues in the world. This is not arbitrary coincidence. It also involves things like increased understanding of the impacts of pollution from advances in scientific knowledge.
The fact that people lived close enough to observe rivers on fire might imply that they were willing to put up with it, for "progress" or "jobs." I don't think anybody lived right next to them.
Zappa lays claim[1] to the first use of the word "pollution" in any popular ( meaning non-academic ) media, by virtue of a song title, "Nine Types of Industrial Pollution." That's from 1969.
[1] no doubt erroneously - he just meant in his personal light cone.
I am actually saying - people can get used to anything, including living in trash. People went for centuries without bathing. My ( born around 1900 ) grandparents were once-a-week bathers. You're projecting the mores of the present on people who lived in the past - presentism, IMO.
We also have a heck of a lot more trash than people used to. They'd use fire barrels and dig middens to dispose of trash of they could. Trash trucks are also relatively recent. Obviously, those in concrete cities could not do that necessarily.
Of course people are adaptable and get used to whatever. Once-a-week bathing is not a big deal at all. I hope you didn't intend to equate that with poisoned rivers. There's even lots of evidence that without bathing people maintain a healthier and less smelly bacteria population than happens with a regular bather who then has a bath-hiatus. There are even products now to promote a healthy probiotic skin culture and stop bathing…
Of course there's relativity here. People who never had clean water won't complain about it the way those who had it and then saw it poisoned will. What's relevant is the change that the industrial revolution brought — including the WEALTH it brought that allowed people to be more secure and start caring about environmental issues since fewer of us worried about whether we would eat or whether we'd die of polio etc.
My point isn't that there's no environmental propaganda or that things things aren't complex. The point is that the environmental movement is based on real on-the-ground issues that were going to come up because of the issues. It's quite unreasonable to describe it as though it's just some sort of manufactured concern.
Good points, but be careful to understand that there is a difference between environmental problems that are "tangible" or directly affect our everyday experience, and environmental problems that are "abstract" or refer to imperceptible hazards or hazards predicted in the future.
When we're talking about the early days of environmental awareness, those problems with coal smoke, industrial smog, and dangerous infrastructure all fall into the first category. The push to break dependence on non-renewable energy falls into the second category (except where using non-renewable energy also has a perceptible effect on air quality).
