76 The Environmental Debate
therefore is certain to be exhausted ultimately;
and wastefulness in dealing with it to-day means
that our descendants will feel the exhaustion a
generation or two before they otherwise would.
Source: Theodore Roosevelt, Address to Congress, December
3, 1907, in Congressional Record—Senate (Washington,
D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1907), pp. 74-76.check the owners of nomad flock which roam
hither and thither, utterly destroying the pas-
tures....
... We are prone to speak of the resources of
this country as inexhaustible; this is not so. The
mineral wealth of the country, the coal, iron, oil,
gas, and the like, does not reproduce itself, and
Document 67: Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., on the Smoke Nuisance (1908)
Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., whose given name was actually Henry Perkins, was the son of Frederick Law
Olmsted, Sr. [see Document 48]. As a young man he worked for his father’s landscape architecture firm. Not
until nearly seventy-five years after the publication of this article did people begin to comprehend the full range
of the impacts of soot (particulate matter) on the health of both humans and their environment.The dweller in a town burning bituminous
coal needs no definition of the smoke nuisance.
The great cloud that hangs over the city like a
pall can be seen from any neighboring hilltop,
and the dweller within is only too well aware
of the splotches of soot that settle on every
object in the city, bedimming buildings, spoil-
ing curtains, injuring books, and increasing the
laundry bill. The direct menace to the public
health in fostering tuberculous conditions by
loading the air with carbon particles to lodge in
the lungs, and by causing housekeepers to keep
the windows shut for fear of the soot that floats
in when they are open, is equaled only by the
mentally and physically depressing effect of the
pall which shuts out the life-giving and germ-
destroying sunshine. Our city parks have mostly
lost their evergreen character, where it existed,
as conifers cannot long endure city smoke. Thus
one treatment of the most pleasing variations in
landscape is made impossible.
There should be complete understanding
of the scientific fact that visible black smoke is
made up almost entirely of unconsumed parti-
cles of combustible carbon, or coal, wasted into
the atmosphere through imperfect combustion.
It is economic waste, in itself; and its emission
creates additional waste.
No really intelligent person now denies the
imperative economic and sanitary need for abating
or suppressing the smoke evil, nor the feasibility
and absolute power of existing authorities to do so
where the will and proper public sentiment exist.
The tearing down of a dangerous house, the
draining of a pestiferous swamp, the cleaning
of a filthy street, or of a back yard, are simple
remedies for simple nuisances. The abolition
of smoke, on the other hand, affects the whole
community, since the production of smoke is
claimed, especially by the careless or the unin-
formed, to be completely bound up with the
material and industrial welfare of a city. The evil
is one that grows with the growth of the com-
munity, and its abatement calls for a large, com-
prehensive and tactful treatment, with thorough
cooperation between the different parties to the
problem. Education of the public, the factory
owners and the firemen to the bad economy and
the wrong of smoke emission is of great impor-
tance.
* * *
The first step in abating smoke is to pass a
law or an ordinance, making the emission of