When I was growing up every home had coal fires, the cotton mills (and there was a hell of a lot of them) belched out black smoke 24/7, everything was covered in soot and of course there was the smog. We had a river running through the village and within half a mile of it's beginning from a spring it was totally polluted, funnily enough, all through my schooling I only ever new of one person who had asthma.
The countryside was just a quarter of a mile away, farmers kept cattle and sheep, all the sheep were grey, years later I was on holiday near the Romney Marshes and when I saw the white sheep there I realised for the first time that our sheep were actually covered in soot.
Due to the massive profits being made by the cotton industry no mention was ever made of the pollution they caused, the holier than thou reports you hear of other countries polluting the environment make me laugh, they are doing exactly what we did back in the day, putting profit first.
Not content with ignoring the pollution the government of the day decided to offer everyone a free chest x-ray, sheds on wheels arrived and the workers duly took their turn to be bombarded with massive doses of x-rays which resulted in a massive increase in lung cancer many years later, the operators of the device soon started dying due to them getting massive doses all day long, day after day. Modern x-ray machines operate on a minute exposure compared to those early machines, was the mass x-ray an experiment, who knows.
We are told how bad it is when other countries cut down trees, time was when Britain was covered by trees only to be cut down to build ships for a navy capable of conquering much of the world.
So you see, been there done that, then conveniently forgotten.