Renaissance Literature and Our Contemporary Attitude toward Global Warming

Abstract

The manner by which industrial air pollution emerges as an issue of discussion in seventeenth-century England can—as unlikely as it may seem—tell us much about our present attitude toward the causes of global warming. In fact, as I hope to make clear in this essay, we risk misunderstanding these causes if we do not consider a troubling representational challenge faced by Renaissance writers, which, still with us today, may be distorting our understanding of the causes of our present environmental crisis. While human beings have been burning fossil fuels for thousands of years, early modern Londoners, having centuries before deforested the area surrounding their city, were almost exclusively burning a particularly dangerous form of highly sulfurous coal that created in both scope and type a problem that had not been encountered before. As seventeenth-century England was mining three to four times more coal than the rest of Europe combined, much of it burned in London, the scale of the problem was staggering.1 Even at the time, urban air pollution from coal was known to be responsible for the wholesale death of animals and fish (as acid rain deposited sulfur dioxide in waterways), the local extinction of entire species of plants, caustic erosion to buildings, and widespread respiratory disease, which was believed by the most celebrated statistician of the seventeenth century to be second only to the Plague as the leading cause of human deaths in London.