Timeline of history of environmentalism

7th century B.C.

• The Book of Deuteronomy in the Torah states: "When you besiege a city for a long time, making war against it in order to take it, you shall not destroy its trees by wielding an axe against them. You may eat from them, but you shall not cut them down. Are the trees in the field human, that they should be besieged by you?"
• The Book of Deuteronomy also emphasizes that individuals must take responsibility for their own waste to mitigate adverse human impacts on the environment: "Designate a place outside the camp where you can go to relieve yourself. As part of your equipment have something to dig with, and when you relieve yourself, dig a hole and cover up your excrement."

7th century

• 630s — Caliph Abu Bakr commanded his army: "Bring no harm to the trees, nor burn them with fire, especially those which are fruitful. Slay not any of the enemy's flock, save for your food."
• 676 — Cuthbert enacts protection legislation for birds on the Farne Islands.

9th–12th centuries

• Arabic medical treatises dealing with environmentalism or environmental science, including pollution, were written by Al-Kindi, Qusta ibn Luqa, Al-Razi, Ibn al-Jazzar, al-Tamimi, al-Masihi, Avicenna, Ali ibn Ridwan, Ibn Jumayʿ, Isaac Israeli ben Solomon, Abd-el-latif, Ibn al-Quff, and Ibn al-Nafis. Their works covered a number of subjects related to pollution, such as air pollution, water pollution, soil contamination, municipal solid waste mishandling, and environmental impact assessments of certain localities.
• Cordoba, Al-Andalus, had waste containers and waste disposal facilities for litter collection.
• William the Conqueror, a great lover of hunting, established the system of forest law. This operated outside the common law, and served to protect game animals and their forest habitat from destruction. In the year of his death, 1087, a poem, "The Rime of King William", inserted in the Peterborough Chronicle, expresses English indignation at the forest laws.

14th century

• 1306 — King Edward I of England bans the burning of sea-coal by proclamation in London, after its smoke had become a problem.
• 1366 — In september, the city of Paris forces butchers to dispose of animal wastes outside the city.
• 1388 — The English Parliament passes an act forbidding the throwing of filth and garbage into ditches, rivers and waters. The city of Cambridge also passes the first urban sanitary laws in England.

15th century

• 1420 to 1427, Madeira islands: destruction of the laurisilva forest, or the woods which once clothed the whole island when the Portuguese settlers decided to clear the land for farming by setting most of the island on fire. It is said that the fire burned for 7 years.

17th century

• 1609 — Hugo Grotius publishes Mare Liberum with arguments for the new principle that the sea was international territory free to use for seafaring trade. The ensuing debate had the British Empire and France claim sovereignty over territorial waters to the distance within which cannon range could effectively protect it, the three mile limit.
• 1640 — Isaac Walton writes The Compleat Angler about fishing and conservation.
• 1664 — John Evelyn publishes one of the first texts on forestry, Sylva, or A Discourse of Forest-Trees and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesty's Dominions, in response to deforestation in England.
• 1690 — Colonial Governor William Penn requires Pennsylvania settlers to preserve of trees for every five acres cleared.

18th century

• 1710 — Jonathan Swift notes the contents of London's gutters: "sweepings from butchers' stalls, dung, guts and blood, drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud..."
• 1730 — In India, hundreds of Bishnois of Khejarli are killed trying to protect trees from Maharaja Abhai Singh of Marwar, who needed wood to fuel the lime kilns for cement to build his palace. This event has been considered as the origins of the 20th century Chipko movement.
• 1739 — Benjamin Franklin and neighbors petition Pennsylvania Assembly to stop waste dumping and remove tanneries from Philadelphia's commercial district. Foul smell, lower property values, disease and interference with fire fighting are cited. The industries complain that their rights are being violated, but Franklin argues for "public rights." Franklin and the environmentalists win a symbolic battle but the dumping goes on.
• 1748 — Jared Eliot, clergyman and physician, writes Essays on Field Husbandry in New England promoting soil conservation.
• 1762 to 1769 — Philadelphia committee led by Benjamin Franklin attempts to regulate waste disposal and water pollution.
• 1773 — William Bartram, . American naturalist sets out on a five-year journey through the US Southeast to describe wildlife and wilderness from Florida to the Mississippi. His book, Travels, is published in 1791 and becomes one of the early literary classics of the new United States of America.
• 1798 – Thomas Robert Malthus publishes An Essay on the Principle of Population, an evolutionary social theory of population dynamics as it had acted steadily throughout all previous history.

19th century

• 1820 — World human population reached 1 billion.
• 1828 — Carl Sprengel formulates the Law of the Minimum stating that economic growth is limited not by the total of resources available, but by the scarcest resource.
• 1828/1830- Thomas Carlyle introduces the use of the term "environment" in its modern sense.
• 1836 — Ralph Waldo Emerson publishes Nature.
• 1845 — First use of the term "carrying capacity" in a report by the US Secretary of State to the Senate.
• 1848 — Henry David Thoreau publishes Civil Disobedience.
• 1849 — Establishment of the U.S. Department of Interior.
• 1851 — Henry David Thoreau delivers an address to the Concord Lyceum declaring that "in Wildness is the preservation of the World." In 1863, this address is published posthumously as the essay "Walking" in Thoreau's Excursions.
• 1854 — Henry David Thoreau publishes Walden; or, Life in the Woods.
• 1859 — Publication of second edition of William Elliott's Carolina Sports by Land and Water, an early example of the hunter-as-conservationist, a phenomenon which became increasingly important for conservationism.
• 1860 — Henry David Thoreau delivers an address to the Middlesex Agricultural Society, entitled "The Succession of Forest Trees," in which he analyzes aspects of what later came to be understood as forest ecology and urges farmers to plant trees in natural patterns of succession; the address is later published in Excursions, becoming perhaps his most influential ecological contribution to conservationist thought.
• 1862 — John Ruskin publishes Unto This Last, which contains a proto-environmental indictment of the effects of unrestricted industrial expansion on both human beings and the natural world. The book influences Mahatma Gandhi, William Morris and Patrick Geddes.
• 1864 — George Perkins Marsh publishes Man and Nature, the first systematic analysis of humanity's destructive impact on the natural environment and a work which becomes "the fountain-head of the conservation movement."
• 1865 — William Stanley Jevons publishes The Coal Question raising concerns about the sustainability of coal energy.
• 1866 — The term ecology is coined in German as Oekologie by Ernst Haeckel ' in his Generelle Morphologie der Organismen. Haeckel was an anatomist, zoologist, and field naturalist appointed professor of zoology at the Zoological Institute, Jena, in 1865. Haeckel was philosophically an enthusiastic Darwinian. Ecology is from the Greek oikos, meaning house or dwelling, and logos meaning discourse or the study of.
• 1869 — Samuel Bowles publishes Our New West, an influential traveller's account of the wilds and peoples of the West, in which he advocates preservation of other scenic areas such as Niagara Falls and the Adirondacks.
• 1872 — The term acid rain is coined by Robert Angus Smith in the book Air and Rain.
• 1873 — International Meteorological Organization is formed.
• 1873 — Friedrich Nietzsche develops the notion of a lifeless earth without redemption or replacement in his essay "On Truth and Lies in the Non-Moral Sense," and introduces the image of nature without humanity in a manner that not previously been made explicit.
• 1874 — Charles Hallock establishes Forest and Stream magazine sparking a US national debate about ethics and hunting.
• 1876 — British River Pollution Control Act makes it illegal to dump sewage into a stream.
• 1879 — U.S. Geological Survey formed. John Wesley Powell, explorer of the Colorado River a decade earlier, will become its head in March 1881.
• 1883 — Francis Galton coins the still controversial concept of eugenics in his book Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development.
• 1889 — The Extermination of the American Bison by William Temple Hornaday, described by a contemporary scholar as the first important text of the American wildlife conservation movement, is published. The book argues for the protection of the small number of bison in Yellowstone National Park.
• 1890 — Yosemite National Park Bill, established the Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks in California.
• 1891 — Oscar Baumann, Austrian explorer of East Africa, publishes an eye-witness account of the extreme drought period 1883–1902 called Emutai by the Maasai.
• 1892 — John Muir, ', founded the Sierra Club.
• 1895 — Svante Arrhenius presented to the Stockholm Physical Society the paper “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground.” It is the first scientific work concerning the influence of a rise in carbon dioxide on atmospheric warming. He used previous studies by Josef Stefan, Arvid Högbom, Samuel Langley, Léon Teisserenc de Bort, Knut Ångström, Alexander Buchan, Luigi De Marchi, Joseph Fourier, C.S.M. Pouillet, and John Tyndall.
• 1895 — Sewage cleanup in London means the return of some fish species to the River Thames.

20th century

• 1902 — George Washington Carver writes How to Build Up Worn Out Soils.
• 1903 — March 14, US President Theodore Roosevelt creates first National Bird Preserve,, on Pelican Island, Florida
• 1905 — The term smog is coined by Henry Antoine Des Voeux in a London meeting to express concern over air pollution.
• 1906 — Antiquities Act, passed by US Congress which authorized the president to set aside national monument sites.
• 1908 — Muir Woods National Monument was established on January 9 and now governed by the National Park Service.
• 1909 — US President Theodore Roosevelt convenes the North American Conservation Conference, held in Washington, D.C. and attended by representatives of Canada, Newfoundland, Mexico, and the United States.

1910s

• 1910 — Gifford Pinchot publishes The Fight For Conservation.
• 1913 — US Congress enacts law which destroys the Hetch Hetchy Valley.
• 1913 — Ludwig Klages delivers the lecture "Man and Earth," an early and sustained meditation on extinction that begins to conceive of mass-extinction.
• 1916 — US Congress creates the National Park Service.
• 1918 — The Save the Redwoods League is founded to protect the remaining coast redwood trees. Over 60% of the redwoods in California's state redwood parks have been protected by the organization.
• 1919 — The National Parks Conservation Association is founded.

1920s

• 1920 — Theoretical Biology by Jakob von Uexküll. Uexküll's work becomes important to the theory of embodied cognition, and thus begins formally to erode the notion of a better resurrected world after death and/or 'the apocalypse'/extinction in the west.
• 1921 — Thomas Midgley Jr. discovers lead components to be an efficient antiknock agent in gasoline engines. In spite of the well known toxic effects, lead was in ubiquitous use. It was first banned from use in Japan in 1986.
• 1922 — The Izaak Walton League is founded.
• 1924 — The death of English textile worker Nellie Kershaw from asbestosis was the first account of disease attributed to occupational asbestos exposure.
• 1927 — Great Mississippi Flood.
• 1928 — Thomas Midgley Jr. develops chlorofluorocarbons as a non-toxic refrigerant. The first warnings of damage to stratospheric ozone were published by Molina and Rowland 1974. They shared the 1995 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their work. Since 1987 world production is reduced under the Montreal Protocol and banned in most countries.
• 1929 — the Swann Chemical Company develops polychlorinated biphenyl for transformer coolant use. Research in the 1960s revealed PCBs to be potent carcinogens. Banned from production in the US 1976, probably 1 million tonnes of PCBs were manufactured in total globally.

1930s

• 1930–1940 — The Dust Bowl, widespread land degradation due to drought in the North American prairie.
• 1930 — World human population reached two billion.
• 1933 — Legislation on Animal rights adopted, Germany.
• 1933 — Establishment of the Civilian Conservation Corps as part of the New Deal programmes initiated by U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt which resulted, amongst other environmental successes, in over 2.3 billion trees planted in the U.S.
• 1933 — Convention Relative to the Preservation of Fauna and Flora in their Natural State signed by Belgium, Egypt, Italy, Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Union of South Africa, the United Kingdom, British India, Tanganyika and Portugal.
• 1934 — Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act.
• 1934 — A Foray into the World of Plants and Animals is published by Jakob von Uexküll. This book is an attempt to popularize the theory of embodied cognition that Uexküll begins to develop in Theoretical Biology
• 1935 — Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act.
• 1936 — The National Wildlife Federation is founded.
• 1939 — The insecticidal properties of DDT discovered by Paul Hermann Müller, who was awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for his efforts. The first ban on its use came in 1970.

1940s

• 1947 — Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act
• 1948 — World Conservation Union or International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources is an international organization dedicated to natural resource conservation. Founded in 1948, its headquarters is located in Gland, Switzerland.
• 1949 — First known dioxin exposure incident, in a Nitro, West Virginia herbicide production plant. Extensively used by the British during the Malayan Emergency and the US during the Vietnam War 1961 – 1971 as Agent Orange. Production ban in the US on some component from 1970.

1950s

• 1951 — Nature Conservancy is an environmental organization founded in the United States.
• 1954 — The first nuclear power plant to generate electricity for a power grid started operations at Obninsk, Soviet Union on 27 June. The first substantial accident happened on 10 October 1957 in Windscale, England.
• 1955 — Air Pollution Control Act
• 1956 — Minamata disease, a neurological syndrome caused by severe mercury poisoning.
• 1958 — Mauna Loa Observatory initiates monitoring of atmospheric Carbon Dioxide levels. The time series eventually became the main reference on global atmospheric change.

1960s

• 1960 — World human population reached three billion.
• 1961 — World Wildlife Fund registered as a charitable trust in Morges, Switzerland, an international organization for the conservation, research and restoration of the natural environment.
• 1962 — Rachel Carson publishes Silent Spring.
• 1963 — The Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty is signed by the U.S., the U.K. and the U.S.S.R.
• 1964 — Norman Borlaug takes position as the director of the International Wheat Improvement Program in Texcoco, Mexico. The program leads to the Green Revolution.
• 1965 — In the Storm King case, a judge rules that aesthetic impacts could be considered in deciding whether Consolidated Edison could demolish a mountain, a landmark case in environmental law.
• 1966 — National Wildlife Refuge System Act.
• 1967 — Environmental Defense Fund founded.
• 1968 — The Apollo 8 photograph Earthrise.
• 1969 — National Environmental Policy Act including the first requirements on Environmental impact assessment.

1970s

• 1970 — Earth Day – April 22, millions of people gather in the United States for the first Earth Day organized by Gaylord Nelson, former senator of Wisconsin, and Denis Hayes, Harvard graduate student.
• 1971 — The international environmental organisation Greenpeace founded in Vancouver, Canada. Greenpeace has later developed national and regional offices in 41 countries worldwide.
• 1972 — The Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm, Sweden 5 to 16 June, the first of a series of world environmental conferences.
• 1973 — OPEC announces oil embargo against United States.
• 1974 — Chlorofluorocarbons are first hypothesized to cause ozone thinning.
• 1975 — Energy Policy and Conservation Act.
• 1976 — Dioxin accidental release in Seveso, Italy on 10 July, killing animals and traumatizing the population.
• 1977 — Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act.
• 1978 — Brominated flame-retardants replaces PCBs as the major chemical flame retardant. Swedish scientists noticed these substances to be accumulating in human breast milk 1998. First ban on use in the EU 2004.
• 1979 — The Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution is established to reduce air pollutant emissions and acid rain.

1980s

• 1980 – Superfund
• 1981 — Lois Gibbs founds the Citizens' Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste
• 1982 — Coastal Barrier Resources Act.
• 1984 — Bhopal disaster in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.
• 1985 — Rainforest Action Network founded.
• 1986 — Chernobyl, world's worst nuclear power accident occurs at a plant in Ukraine.
• 1987 — World human population reached 5 billion.
• 1988 — Ocean Dumping Ban Act.
• 1989 — Exxon Valdez creates largest oil spill in US history.

1990s

• 1990 — National Environmental Education Act.
• 1991 — The Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty was signed 4 October. The agreement provides for the protection of the Antarctic environment through five specific annexes on marine pollution, fauna, and flora, environmental impact assessments, waste management, and protected areas. It prohibits all activities relating to mineral resources except scientific.
• 1992 — The Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro from June 3 to June 14, was unprecedented for a United Nations conference, in terms of both its size and the scope of its concerns.
• 1993 — The Great Flood of 1993 was one of the most destructive floods in United States history involving the Missouri and Mississippi River valleys.
• 1994 — United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification.
• 1995 — Scotland's Environmental Protection Agency is established.
• 1996 — Western Shield, a wildlife conservation project is started in Western Australia, and through successful work has taken several species off of the state, national, and international Endangered Species Lists..
• 1997 — July, U.S. Senate unanimously passed by a 95–0 vote the Byrd-Hagel Resolution, which stated that the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol that did not include binding targets and timetables for developing as well as industrialized nations.
• 1999 — World human population reached 6 billion.

21st century

• 2001 — U.S. rejects the Kyoto Protocol.
• 2002 — Earth Summit, held in Johannesburg a United Nations conference.
• 2003 — The world's largest reservoir, the Three Gorges Dam begins filling 1 June.
• 2004—The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2004 to Wangari Maathai for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace. Peace on earth depends on our ability to secure our living environment.... Maathai combines science, social commitment and active politics.
• 2004 — 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami affects countries surrounding the Indian Ocean, killing nearly a quarter of a million people.
• 2005 — Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma cause widespread destruction and environmental harm to coastal communities in the US Gulf Coast region.
• 2006 — Former U.S. vice president Al Gore releases An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary that describes global warming. The next year, Gore is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for this and related efforts.
• 2007 — The IPCC release the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.
• 2007 — The MT Hebei Spirit oil spill was a major oil spill in South Korea that began on the morning of 7 December 2007.
• 2009 — Power Shift 2009 – The Energy Action Coalition hosted the second national youth climate conference to be held at the Washington Convention Center from February 27 to March 2, 2009. The conference aims to attract more than 10,000 students and young people and will include a Lobby Day.

2010s

• 2010 – Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill reveals the vulnerability of fossil fuel infrastructure.
• 2011 — United Nations designates day that world human population reached 7 billion.
• 2011 - At the Fukushima nuclear power plant, the gigantic wave surged over defences and flooded the reactors, sparking a major disaster.
• 2014 — The IPCC release the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report,
• 2015 - The Paris Agreement is signed; the goal is to keep global warming below 2 degrees.
• 2016 - President Trump, who describes climate change as a "hoax", starts a series of attacks on environmental protection regulation. Consistent with a previous promise to dismantle the EPA, he selects Scott Pruitt, who made a career of attacking the EPA and lobbying for oil companies, as EPA administrator.
• 2018 - The IPCC releases a special report, warning that a 1.5 degree global warming could have disastrous consequences.
• 2018 - Greta Thunberg starts a school strike for climate, sitting outside the Swedish Parliament.
• 2019 - Earth Day and National Cleanup Day organize the first coordinated cleanup event held in all 50 States and US Territories

2020s

• 2020 - the COVID-19 pandemic inspires stay-at-home orders, resulting in a modest decrease in production.
• 2020—The hottest year ever recorded wraps up the hottest decade ever recorded.
• 2020—The use of Personal Protective Equipment and Masks and disposables has exploded due to COVID-19.
• 2021 - Dutch court rules oil giant Royal Dutch Shell must reduce its GHG emissions with 45% by 2030 compared to 2019 emissions.
• 2021 - Western North America heat wave with temperatures reaching up to 49,6C.
• 2021 - President Biden rejoins the Paris Accord and reinstates essential environmental regulations.
• 2021 - European floods caused by heavy rain fall impacting multiple countries in Western Europe.
• 2021—IPCC's 6th report states that the science of climate change is irrefutable and that irreversible changes have already occurred.
• 2021—Japan announced it will release 1.25 million tons of treated wastewater contaminated by the wrecked Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant into the Pacific Ocean. The government said it is the best way to deal with tritium and trace amounts of other radionuclides in the water.
• 2022 - In West Virginia v. EPA, the US Supreme Court limits the ability of the EPA to regulate carbon emissions.