All Roads Lead to Rome...

It's ironic that the advances the human race has made on the road to 'modernity', or the world in which whatever date is current, have almost always been environmentally destructive in one way or another. In advancing the prospects of our species in whatever way, we have always - and until very recently often unwittingly - jeopardised the very environment that supports and enables our continued existence. Most of us imagine that the tipping point of mankind's influence on the quality of the environment was the advent of The Industrial Revolution. But no: I was reading a piece in today's Guardian newspaper about the pernicious influence of the metal smelting of the the Roman era in the Europe of the Pax Romana, that two-century period of relative political stability that came to an end in AD180, leading, ultimately to the fall of the Roman Empire.

It seems that the Romans contributed some half a million tonnes of lead pollution to the atmosphere in that period; the facts of and the impact of which are only now beginning to be understood by scientists, here in the second quarter of the twenty-first century, two thousand years after the event. Given our current knowledge of our contemporary contributions towards climate meltdown and some politicians seeming intent on further poisoning the only planet we have, the news [to me, at least] that one of the most advanced - and still lauded - classical societies in human history actually kicked off one of the worst periods of atmospheric pollution in human history, certainly before, and comparably to after, their time, is kind of a jolt to the system. We didn't understand then, and we wilfully ignore now, the self-immolating effects of our own 'progression' in this world. Which is worse: plain ignorance or wilful ignorance?