Pollution
Monday 31 July 2023
The Remainder
article
POLLUTION is, by all accounts, a scandal. Its Latin origin pollūtiō, composed of por + luō translates roughly into pro + mud, with luō related to lutum meaning soil, mire, mud, loam or clay (long-time readers may remember the loam of lime-fingers). While, for some, this may give a happy image of mud-dwellers living their life, the connotation of pollūtiō is in fact less than ideal, meaning either a literal soiling or a figurative contamination, in particular desecration. This negative sense may become clearer through luō’s relation with luēs which, from Latin, translates to plague, pestilence and epidemic (in the Neo-Latin of renaissance Europe, luēs was the term used for syphilis); or, it’s relation to the Ancient Greek λῦμᾰ (lûma) meaning washwater, dirt and, again figuratively, defilement.
All these senses muddy pollution’s origins, including its adoption into Middle English from Old French around C14th. In Wycliffe’s 1382 Bible – the first full translation of the text into English – the book of Judith recounts the fears of Israel during the threat of war, wherein the people ‘cried to the Lord’:
…lest weren ȝyuen … þe holi thingis of hem in to pollucioun [...lest were given … the holy things of them into pollution]
Here pollution takes on the sense of a desecration of that which is sacred – as in the destruction of a church or holy artefact – to be brought into a state of pollution is to be rendered profane. However, during this same period, pollution also takes on a second, more particular sense in pollutio nocturna described by C17th Dutch anatomist Steven Blankaart as an “involuntary Pollution in the Night, caused by lecherous Dreams” (or, less euphemistically, as the OED have it, an “ejaculation of semen without sexual intercourse”). An early C14th example of this use appears in the work of English hermit, mystic, and religious writer Richard Rolle, particularly his Notabill Tretys off the ten Comandementys:
The sexte cowmandement es: »thow sail be na lichoure.« [...] Alswa here es forbodene all maner of wilfull pollusyone…
The issues of nocturnal pollution and their relation to the sin of masturbation, along with broader questions of piety and even human agency, were challenging for religious scholars throughout the development of the Christian faith. In his essay The Battle for Chastity, Foucault recounts the concerns of monk and mystic John Cassian, born c. 360:
...through this battle against the spirit of fornication and for chastity, the sole fundamental problem is that of pollution- whether as something that is subservient to the will and a possible form of self-indulgence, or as something happening spontaneously and involuntarily in sleep or dreams. So important is it that Cassian makes the absence of erotic dreams and nocturnal pollution a sign that one has reached the pinnacle of chastity.
This sentiment is clearly expressed in Francis Bacon’s utopian tract New Atlantis, written over a millennium later in the C17th, through descriptions of his ideal nation of Bensalem:
You shall understand that there is not under the heavens so chaste a nation as this of Bensalem; nor so free from all pollution or foulness. It is the virgin of the world.
Here, however, the concept of pollution is shifting from specific senses of desecration or pollutio nocturna into more general descriptions of ‘spiritual or moral impurity or corruption’. As with many other words in the English language, the diverse set of spiritual and philosophical senses gradually gave way to increasingly secular and scientific properties in the period leading up to the C18th and the industrial revolution. This is remarkably pronounced in the case of pollution as it swiftly becomes a watchword of resistance against anthropogenic environmental contamination. This shift is demonstrated in diarist John Evelyn’s short treatise Fumifugium – written in 1661 – which sought to address The Inconveniencie of the Aer and Smoak of London, and recounts the proposal of sailing onions down the Thames to remove the plague:
There goes a pleasant Tale of a certain Sir Politick, that in the last great Plague projected, how by a Vessel freight with peel’d Onions, which should passe along the Thames by the City, when the Wind sate in a favourable quarter, to attract the pollution of the Aer, and sail away with the Infection to the Sea…
By the early C19th, the Thames itself was the object of concern, with reports from newspapers and new scientific journals increasingly detailing the effects of pollution on wildlife and drinking water:
We submit to the disgrace of drinking the water of that very river, in a state of pollution, and hesitate to move up to a purer source.
By the mid-C20th this (now anthropocenic) sense of pollution eclipsed those which came before. In 1970 use of the term reached such a fever pitch that a British government agency established in 1863 to monitor pollution issued a statement, reported by the Guardian:
Mr Ireland complains that, since ‘pollution’ became linked with that other fashionable word ‘environment,’ pressure groups and campaigns have sprung up, and he is wasting valuable time answering calls from an alarmed public.1
Use of pollution today is similarly fraught with both material and moral dimensions and yet, despite the urgency of the climate crisis, the word has appeared to decline in popular usage from its late-C20th zenith. Perhaps the ecological complexities of the anthropocene position pollution as too-simple a cause and concept; or perhaps the ‘deindustrialisation’ of Anglophone economies has created a false sense of security (in China, a new term for smog, 雾霾/wumai, had to be invented in the C21st).2 To revive pollution (and therefore our critique of its effects) perhaps we must shake the last vestiges of religious piety from the word, the sense of individual responsibility or chastity which leads to claims of self-indulgence from protestors and polluters alike; or otherwise we might be wise to revive in full the sublime terror of desecration.
This article was written for a monthly column – The Remainder – in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout