13.1 The purpose of this brief summary of the history of the environmental movement is to show where the environmental campaign of Dr Servettaz to save Lake Annecy, fits in. To do this we first need to distinguish it from related endeavours. For instance, many sewerage systems have been built around the world – no city can survive for long without them. But these have generally been initiated by national and local governments as opposed to individuals, and were for the specific purposes of maintaining hygiene for its citizens as opposed to protecting the environment. Moreover, as with the building of roads, transport links, schools and hospitals, notwithstanding that all of these took great efforts and no doubt much public debate, they were all self evidently necessary – they did not require the vision of one individual or an environmental campaign to open people’s eyes to their necessity.

13.2 Similarly, for most of the century from 1850 to 1950, the primary environmental cause was the mitigation of air pollution in cities caused by coal consumption and chemical discharges from great factories. The first large scale environmental laws were Britain's Alkali Acts, passed in 1863, to regulate the deleterious air pollution (gaseous hydrochloric acid) given off by the Leblanc process used to produce soda ash, and the Public Health Act 1875 requiring all furnaces and fireplaces to consume their own smoke. These were a step in the right direction, but the problem was on a vast scale. In 1898 the Coal Smoke Abatement Society was founded by Sir William Blake Richmond, making it one of the oldest environmental NGOs. Sir William was a painter and frustrated with the pall cast by coal smoke which interfered with his view of the scenes he was trying to paint. This was to add an aesthetic dimension to what had previous been a health and safety environmental campaign. But health and safety issues continued culminating in the Great Smog of December 1952 in London. A period of cold weather, combined with an anticyclone and windless conditions, collected airborne pollutants—mostly arising from the use of coal—to form a thick layer of smog over the city. It lasted from Friday 5 December to Tuesday 9 December 1952, and then dispersed quickly when the weather changed. Although it caused major disruption due to the effect on visibility, it was not immediately thought to be a significant event at the time. Government medical reports in the following weeks however estimated that up until 8 December some 4,000 people had died prematurely and 100,000 more were made ill because of the smog's effects on the human respiratory tract. More recent research suggests that the total number of fatalities was considerably greater, at about 12,000. This was the worst air-pollution event in the history of the United Kingdom, and the most significant in terms of its effect on environmental research, government regulation, and public awareness of the relationship between air quality and health. It led to several changes in practices and regulations, including the Clean Air Act 1956.

13.3 The scale of the issue is so vast that the campaign for clean air continues to this day, not just city by city battling the effects of vehicle exhaust gases, but globally tackling the impact upon climate change in the atmosphere, and acidification of the oceans. Servettaz’s campaign for Lake Annecy doesn't amount to a whole hill of beans compared with the scale of the centuries old and on-going campaign for clean air. It was a limited campaign with limited goals, to clean up Lake Annecy. But even within the long history of the fight for clean air, it is hard to find a specific example of an individual campaign that achieved such decisive, measurable success as that at Lake Annecy.

13.4 One of the closest examples to Dr Servettaz’s work took place one hundred years earlier. Another doctor, James Ranald Martin, was a pioneer in promoting a conservation ethic, with three core principles: that the human activity damaged the environment, that there was a civic duty to maintain the environment for future generations, and that scientific, empirically based methods should be applied to ensure this duty was carried out – exactly the same ethic that inspired Dr Servettaz. Martin published many medico-topographical reports that demonstrated the scale of damage wrought through large-scale deforestation and desiccation, and lobbying extensively for the institutionalization of forest conservation activities in British India through the establishment of Forest Departments. Soon the Madras Board of Revenue started local conservation efforts in 1842, headed by Alexander Gibson, a professional botanist who systematically adopted a forest conservation program based on scientific principles. This was the first case of state management of forests in the world. Eventually, the government under Governor-General Lord Dalhousie introduced the first permanent and large-scale forest conservation program in the world in 1855, a model that soon spread to other colonies, as well the United States. This remarkable, and hugely successful campaign was focused upon establishing the sustainability of a key resource, wood, just as Dr Servettaz campaigned for the sustainability of another key resource, clean drinking water, and both doctors based their campaigns on original scientific study. Dr. Martin however was not so much concerned with the preserving the beauty of the forest environment, nor with tackling the problem of pollution. Moreover his task was to persuade an occupying British administration directly to intervene, rather than educating and mobilizing a local population to take action.

13.5 The campaign in the UK to save seabirds from extinction was initiated by a remarkable individual, Alfred Newton, was successful in introducing an Act of Parliament in 1869 and led to the successful safeguarding of sea birds. However, it appears the purpose of this campaign was not so much to protect a species but to protect sailors. In foggy weather when the coastline and coastal rocks could not be seen, the presence of shoreline seabirds was a wonderful alarm bell to sailors to warn them of approaching land. No birds, more shipwrecks, and goods and sailors lost.

13.6 The Thirlemere campaign was closer to that of Dr Servettaz in Annecy. It was intitiated by a few remarkable individuals, involved a large scale raising of public awareness, lasted a number of years, and was directed at a new, and purely environmental cause – safeguarding a beautiful area of nature for the enjoyment of locals and tourists alike. However it was much more limited in that a) it was aimed at preventing a large scale infrastructure investment as opposed to demanding one b) it was limited to just one of the four main goals of the environmental movement, preserving the beauty of the landscape. But most of all it was entirely unsuccessful in its stated goal. Thirlemere was turned into a reservoir after all and the campaign only achieved delay and additional expense for all involved.

13.7 Muir was another remarkable individual and his campaign to preserve vast tracts of Nature for the enjoyment of future generations was hugely successful. Moreover it led to the creation of the Sierra club and so left a contribution to which lasted long after his lifetime. In fact two of the most influential modern environmental campaign organisations – Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, both sprung up as offshoots of the Sierra club. Muir’s spirit continues actively to this day.

13.8 However, even this example is limited. Muir set out to prevent industry and urban development from encroaching on an undeveloped Yosemite. His aim was to stop infrastructural investment other that the minimum required to mark out and protect the area. And, as with Thirlemere there was just one of the four environmental goals, the preservation of the beauty of nature for future generations.

13.9  The Kinder Scout Mass trespass was certainly a mass campaign taken up to open the eyes of government to the importance of access for ordinary people to beautiful landscapes. In this it was not dissimilar to the Thirlemere campaign. But there were three rather important differences: a) it involved an even longer period of sustained campaigning stretching to decades b) it involved raising a much wider public awareness c) it involved actions of non violent civil disobedience and finally, d) it was hugely successful and achieved its stated goals. Nevertheless its stated goals were relatively limited for an environmental campaign – no infrastructural investment or large scale financial expense was demanded, and it had one goal, as with Thirlemere and Yosemite – access for all to landscapes of natural beauty.

13.10 Unlike Thirlemere, Dr Servettaz’s campaign was aimed not at prevention but at rectification. His campaign did not protest against, but actually required large scale, expensive, time consuming, legally and politically complex infrastructural investment. And unlike Thirelemere, Yosemite and Kinder Scout, his campaign encompassed not one, but all four environmental goals a) preserving the beauty of nature for future generations, b) preventing urban and industrial waste from polluting the landscape c) ensuring the sustainability of the drinking water supply from the lake and d) preventing damage and destruction to the lake surroundings, in particular the Roselier reed beds, vital breeding ground for migratory birds as well as for several of the lake’s most important fish population. His goal was the most complex of environmental goals - to enable an urban population to live in harmony with Nature, to manage the beautiful environment in which it is fortunate enough to be located, wisely and for the long term.

13.11 Accordingly, based on this albeit limited history, there are reasons for concluding that Dr Servettaz’s campaign to save Lake Annecy, and its counterpart campaign to save Lake Washington, were together the first significant, successful, comprehensive environmental campaigns in history.