On February 4, 1884—140 years ago today—John Ruskin shared with the public the obsession that had haunted him for two decades, in his lecture “The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century.” For 23 years he had been aware of what he called the “plague-cloud,” filling his diaries all that time with gloomy and anxious observations of its relentless presence, and these he now shared with those who filled the London lecture-room, and—because the lecture was well-reported—with the wider public. For all those 23 years he had had little doubt about the cause of this dire change. “It looks partly as if it were made of poisonous smoke,” he had written in 1871 and repeated now; “very possibly it may be: there are at least two hundred furnace chimneys in a square of two miles on every side of me.” Rampant and unchecked industry, he knew, was largely responsible for this darker world. But Ruskin, the supreme moralist of his age, human responsibility for this discernibly fallen world ran deeper than that: he saw in the growing darkness a new fall of humankind. “Remember,” he cried out with the fervor of an Old Testament Prophet,
…for the last twenty years, England, and all foreign nations, either tempting her, or following her, have blasphemed the name of God deliberately and openly; and have done iniquity by proclamation, every man doing as much injustice to his brother as it is in his power to do. Of states in such moral gloom every seer of old predicted the physical gloom, saying, “The light shall be darkened in the heavens thereof and the stars shall withdraw their shining”…I leave you to compare at leisure the physical result of your own wars and prophecies…that the Empire of England, on which formerly the sun never set, has become one on which he never rises.
And in closing the lecture, he exhorted his listeners to change the skies by changing their own ways. Few, if any, did, of course. For now, as often before, his hearers were greatly entertained by Ruskin’s eloquence and imagination—and far less convinced of the truth of his words. Most, apparently, shared the viewpoint of the reporter from the Graphic who attended the lecture. “We cannot swallow the ‘plague-cloud,’’ he wrote. “It no doubt has a real existence—in Mr. Ruskin’s own bodily sensations.”
Discernible climate change, with discernibly human causes, has been with us for at least 140 years. And obstinate climate change denial has been with us for just as long.
Photo by Michal Mancewicz