Chapter Nine

The First Environmental Campaign

Thirlmere Reservoir Cumbria Lake District England

"Personne, ni les services officiels, ni les sociétés savantes locales ne les avaient mis en garde des évolutions péjoratives possibles

(et déjà entamées pour moi) des eaux de ce lac, du retentissement direct et grave de leurs comportement routiniers à son endroit." [p 142]

9.1 If Science has helped our minds understand why we need to care for the health of the natural world, and Art has given our hearts the motivation to do so, then what has been the result? The environmental movement is a “movement” not just because it has changed individuals’ perception of their relationship with nature, but because it has moved public opinion to take collective political action to protect this natural world. It has generated a series of environmental campaigns. What follows is the briefest of overviews of such environmental campaigns, and with it, at last, an attempt to place the achievement of Dr Servettaz and his colleagues in Annecy within the context these campaigns, and so within the context of the global history of the environmental movement.

9.2Environmental campaigns have come in many varieties, and grown in stature and complexity over time. From small beginnings by individuals to global campaigns involving millions. In 1724 Edinburgh town council bought Calton Hill, making it one of the first public parks in the country. The philosopher David Hume lobbied the council to build a walk ‘for the health and amusement of the inhabitants’, and you can still stroll along ‘Hume Walk’ to this day. On December 12, 2015 in 2016, the Paris Agreement was signed by countries around the world by which they undertook to meet commitments on emissions, adaptation, finance and transparency, and steps to promote carbon trading.

9.3 Whilst there had been a number of environmental initiatives focused on specific issues, for instance preservation of wildlife (e.g. Alfred Newton and protection of seabirds Act) or hygiene, (e.g. The Public Health Act of 1875 which contained a section on smoke abatement from which clean air legislation to the present day has been based.) these were individual actions rather than campaigns, enrolling public awareness and demanding political concessions. Moreover there had never been a campaign based purely on aesthetic grounds. Perhaps the first such significant campaign, involving mobilizing a wide range of public support to effect a significant change affecting the environment was in Manchester and the north of England in the second half of the nineteenth century.

9.4 In her recent history “Dawn of Green” Harriet Ritvo locates the beginnings of the modern environmental movement in Manchester and the Lake District in England during the second half of the 19^th century, and in particular Lake Thirlmere.

9.5 It is no surprise that the acknowledged cradle of the industrial revolution should also be the birthplace of the environmental movement - its lifelong opponent – industrial progress being more or less by definition human exploitation of the environment. And the landscape of the industrial revolution and the environmental movement was mountains, streams and lakes. The industrial revolution began with water powered cotton mills built on the streams running from the hills around Manchester filled with copious rainfall.   And when the city’s economy expanded rapidly it needed an abundant water supply not just to power its machines but to supply its rapidly growing population.

9.6 Unlike nearly every major city in the world, Manchester was not built on a great river – so its water engineers had to do things the hard way. After an immense undertaking lasting nearly 30 years a six-mile chain of reservoirs along the Longdendale Valley near Glossop was completed by a pioneering engineer, John la Trobe Bateman. It was the first major reservoir chain in Europe - but it was not enough. Having exhausted all sources closer to hand, Manchester’s dauntless engineer looked to the lake district for the solution to its water shortage, and in particular to Thirlmere Lake.

9.7 But Thirlmere lay in the Lake District, residence of William Wordsworth, inspiration of the Lake Poets and home of the English Romantic movement. For the first time ever, opposition was raised to industrial progress not in the name of defending jobs against automation, not in the name of health and hygiene, and not in the name of protection of owners’ property rights, but in the name of preserving a beautiful natural landscape. As Ritvo succinctly puts it, “The nebulous new sense of ownership – a sense that citizens of a nation (or, still more expansively and vaguely, members of a supranational cultural community) should have some say in the disposition of significant landscapes even if they help no formal title to the property in question – was both radical and polarizing.”   Ritvo does not add here the even more expansive and vague idea of citizens of “future generations” who have become by the beginning of the 21^st Century the prime community in whose name environmentalists campaign.

9.8 When Manchester City Council formally voted to proceed with the Thirlmere Scheme in the summer of 1877, it prompted a group of more than 60 local citizens to gather at an inn in Grasmere to discuss what to do – the first meeting of what was to become the Thirlmere Defence Association (TDA).   The tireless publicist at the heart of its campaigning was one Robert Somervell who described himself as much the youngest and poorest of the group, but went on to produce “reasoned and engaging pamphlets which succinctly distilled many of the points that formed the bases of more elaborate subsequent arguments by the opponents of the scheme.” (Ritvo). 

9.9 The aim of the pamphlets was to attract public sympathy for the cause during upcoming parliamentary hearing. The first pamphlet, entitled “The Manchester and Thirlemere Water Scheme: An appeal to the public on the facts of the case” concluded with a request that anyone interested in actively supporting it cause should contact Robert Somervell.

9.10 The TDA whose most eminent supporter to date was the critic John Ruskin, began to attract distinguished adherents from much further afield, university professors, headmasters, bishops, a prominent architect and renowned landscape painter, as well as social reformers Robert Hunter and Octavia Hill. Their campaign led to a parliamentary debate urging the unprecedented claim that “the one mountain region in England is … the property of Englishmen: any injury to that beauty in which its value consists is a greater and more irreparable loss to the nation as a whole, than it is to the landowners in the district.” Such “vague and nebulous” assertions failed to have any impact on the parliamentary legislation that resulted, and Manchester was allowed to proceed with its Thirlmere scheme.   By 1894, after six years of hard labour by hundreds of navvies to create the 96 mile new river into the city, the Thirlmere Aqueduct delivered its first sparkling stream of water to the fountain in front of Manchester Town Hall.

9.11 Ritvo’s conclusion to her Thirlemere story is illuminating. “The basic structure of the Thirlemere debate has been replicated in controversies about many other settings threatened with similar transformation during the last century and a quarter.

9.12 This consistency has posed particular problems for preservationists, because they have been the most frequent losers. Like re-enactors on the Cavalier side in the English Civil War, of the Confederate side in the American one, they have become accustomed to noble defeats. Yet they still seem reluctant to address some of the issues that tripped up the TDA. Acknowledging that both Thirlmere in particular and the Lake District as a whole had pasts that were checkered and volatile, rather than static and pure, would have confronted the lake’s defenders with a series of difficult questions. What are the indications that preservation is appropriate and necessary? What is the ideal past condition at which restoration should aim? If some changes have taken place in the past, on what grounds should other changes be prevented in the future? Such notions as “pristine wilderness” and “unspoiled countryside” are emotionally powerful, but the claims inherent in those appealing and evocative labels are often belied by evidence provided by the threatened landscapes themselves. Of course it is more difficult to answer a series of questions to which the answers are likely to be complex and ambiguous than it is to stand by a slogan or a credo. Absolute positions are more compelling than nuanced or intermediate ones - easier to articulate though more difficult to defend. Every individual’s convictions are his or her own business, and strong commitments can be admirable. But in the realm of political action they can also be dangerously misleading, inclining the people who hold them to equate the strength of their position with the strength of their feelings. The defenders of Thirlmere made a big splash, but they never stood a chance, and the same was true of the defenders of the Hetch Hetchy Valley. The same is still too often true of environmental advocates, and of the causes they champion.”

9.11 Fortunately for Lake Annecy Dr Servettaz, Mayor Bosson, seem to have been the exception to Ms Ritvo’s rule, as were Dr Edmondson and James Ellis at Lake Washington. They confronted a series of difficult questions “What were the indications in their lakes that preservation was appropriate and necessary? Eutrophication. What was the ideal past condition at which restoration of the lake should aim? Oligotrophy. If some changes had taken place in the past (increased discharge of untreated sewage directly into the lake) on what grounds should other changes (more sewage discharge) be prevented in future? On the grounds of saving the lake. They answered these questions clearly and with conviction. Dr Servettaz’ convictions were not just his own business, he spend a decade sharing them with those around him, debating, persuading and convincing. His strong commitments were indeed admirable, as were those of his friend and colleague, Mayor Charles Bosson. And in the realm of political action in Annecy these strong commitments were not only not dangerously misleading, they were vital to ensure the successful prosecution of this hugely complex and expensive infrastructural project over nearly two decades to its final conclusion. Dr Servettaz and Dr Edmonton did indeed equate the strength of their position with the strength of their feelings – because their feelings were strongly grounded in scientific understanding, and a meticulous study of the facts of their case.

9.12 There is an interesting footnote to the Thirlmere story which Ms Ritvo did not include. One consequence of Manchester’s spectacular hydraulic engineering success delivering fresh water, was the question of what to do with all the resulting waste water. Initially the water simply drained into the river Irwell which soon became a polluted mess. When in the same year, 1894, scientists at Davyhulme sewage farm installed some experimental filters it was the beginning of sewage treatment as we know it today. But the scale of the problem defied solution until the research of Manchester University scientist Gilbert Fowler and Davyhulme engineers Edward Ardern and William T Lockett led in 1914 to the discovery of activated sludge, the space saving biological treatment process that is now used all over the world. It was an engineering breakthrough that rewrote the book on urban planning, meaning cities could grow bigger than ever before without sacrificing sanitation.

9.13 And the example set by Manchester is being harnessed to this day by SILA the water authority for Lake Annecy, who have developed and operate some of the most modern technologies for treating wastewater to be found anywhere in the world.

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