The Dawn of Green

Nearly every modern effort to preserve rural land — as well as the environmental movement of today — follows the pattern set by a 19th-century struggle between the city of Manchester, England, and defenders of a lake called Thirlmere, says history professor Harriet Ritvo.

It’s a familiar-enough story. The 1870s Thirlmere Defence[sic] Association wanted to preserve beautiful countryside in England’s Lake District — a landscape that had been made sacred by Lake poets like Wordsworth — against exploitation. Meanwhile, Manchester — “the economic, industrial, and commercial engine of Victorian Britain” — planned to convert the lake into a reservoir and pipe its waters 100 miles away, in order to meet industrial demand for water and increasing standards of hygiene among its burgeoning working class.

What made the Manchester vs. Thirlmere story a prelude to modern environmental struggles was that, for the first time, a strong opposition — inexorably passionate — arose from people all over the English-speaking world who had no financial stake whatsoever in the outcome. The lake’s defenders included politicians, writers, and other educated, influential, and well-connected people, who, along with others throughout Britain at that time, were beginning to consider that the public might have a right to influence the fate of land it did not own.

“Similar oppositions have emerged again and again,” Ritvo says. “Whether it’s more recent arguments over Alcoa’s aluminum smelting project in Iceland, or over the Three Gorges Dam in China, again and again, the same kinds of interests confront each other.”

LESSON OF TOLERANCE

In the end, the forces of municipal progress in Victorian England won out over the early environmentalists. Although Thirlmere’s defenders were able to postpone the expected rubber-stamp approval of the dam project by the English Parliament, they couldn’t ultimately stop the transformation of the lake. The dam was built; the pipeline was completed in 1894; and parties at both ends celebrated the arrival of the first Thirlmere water in Manchester.

End of story? Yes, and no.

“Our retrospective of 130 years on this case,” says Ritvo, “continues to teach us worthwhile lessons — not least of which is tolerance.”

One lesson is, be aware that both sides in conflicts of this nature must base their claims — whether of potential benefit or of potential harm — on prediction.

“You can see this happening right now, in spades, in the climate change argument,” she says. “We have to act now to try and prevent consequences in the future, without knowing whether those consequences are going to happen — or, if they do happen, whether they’ll happen as we expect.

And even if they happen as we expect, will the remedies we suggest have the effect we think they will?”

Another lesson is, understand that even if we correctly predict the future, only by viewing the outcome in the context of its larger surroundings can we determine whether the result was positive or not.

Where Thirlmere is concerned, ironically, some would say that the transformed lake is better off than it would have been had the city of Manchester not intervened all those years ago. There was no question that Manchester needed the water, Ritvo says. But did the defenders lose? A photo of Thirlmere today shows a serene, unspoiled-looking body of water — no longer the dramatic landscape of its pre-reservoir days, but much less transformed by tourism than some other parts of the Lake District.

PATTERN FOR THE PRESENT

The Arthur J. Conner Professor of History at MIT, Harriet Ritvo has written several books and journal articles on British cultural history and human-animal relations, as well as on environmental history. Her study of this struggle, The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and the Victorian Environment, will be published by the University of Chicago Press.

Ritvo was born in Cambridge (Mass.), moved away for a time, then returned to attend Harvard. Except for travel, she has been here ever since. After a start as an English professor, Ritvo switched to history, then to environmental history about 15 years ago. She decided to write about the Thirlmere controversy while designing a survey course on environmental history. Most available readings dealt with American topics; she wanted to supplement them with a European case. “There it was, hiding in plain sight,” she says.

She hopes the Thirlmere story might help environmentalists become more pragmatic in their arguments. As for those whose actions provoke environmental disagreements, she says, “respecting the validity of the opposition — maybe even backing off sometimes — would save a lot of trouble, and create good will.”

Historian Ritvo sees perspective on the past as pattern for the present. “Giving something its historical depth can unveil the difficulty of a problem,” she says. “You can see why compromise happens so seldom. The ideological commitments of the different perspectives are so strong, and often both very compelling.

History helps us understand where opposing positions come from, what their roots are.”

by Laurie Smith-Frailey

On Topic: environment