## Metadata - Author: [[Sunil Amrith]] - Full Title: The Burning Earth - Category: #books ## Highlights - As people struggled for breath, they saw in smoke the hope of a better future. Anti-smoke activists in Manchester had a difficult time mobilizing support so long as smoking chimneys were a symbol of progress. “Thank God, smoke is rising from the lofty chimneys,” the Irish writer, William Cooke Taylor, wrote from Bolton in 1842, because its absence “indicates the quenching of the fire on many a domestic hearth, want of employment to many a willing labourer, and want of bread to many an honest family.” There could be “permanently smokeless cities,” thought William Nicholson, smoke inspector of Sheffield—but who would want them, he mused, when “a smokeless country, with its purer air, clear skies and more sunshine would be a country of universal poverty.” Witness, here, the birth of an idea so powerful that it has reverberated around the world for almost two centuries: the idea that the degradation and sacrifice of nature is the necessary price of a human freedom from want. ([Location 1498](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTXN6D6K&location=1498))