Despite the epic levels of hoopla, public health campaigns for immunization are not new.

The very first systematic inoculation campaign in the New World was fought against smallpox. Smallpox, also known as variola had been a worldwide plague for centuries and various efforts at inoculation had been attempted over the years. These included various efforts to introduce mild infections in healthy patients.

With the systematization of public health procedures came more formal campaigns to disseminate information on treating and preventing the disease.

In 1702, concerned about a possible outbreak of Smallpox in the city of Boston, Benjamin Elliot reprinted a typical pamphlet of information on the disease. Thomas Thacher had authored A Brief Rule to Guide the Common People of New-England How to Order Themselves & Theirs in the Small-pocks, or Measels following a previous epidemic in the city 1676-1677. The pamphlet outlines the disease’s causes, symptoms and treatment, as best understood at the time of publication.

However, epidemics would continue to resurface and a variety of efforts followed in response, at the urging of figures from Cotton Mather to George Washington.

The definitive event in the American campaign against Small pox came in 1800 with the entry into the field of Doctor Benjamin Waterhouse. A professor at Harvard’s new school of medicine, Waterhouse began championing the inoculation research of Dr. Edward Jenner of England. Jenner had discovered that controlled infection with a mild case of cowpox offered immunity against the more serious, related disease of smallpox.

Waterhouse began by testing the method on his own children and servants. Weeks later, he began widely publishing accounts of his success in preventing infection. The aggressive dissemination of Waterhouse’s writings and smallpox samples around the country prove a turning point, launching a century and more of efforts to eradicate the disease, including both government initiatives and public information campaigns.

Inoculation, enforced by the government in Europe, encountered greater obstacles in the freewheeling United States–made greater by reported infections with actual cases of smallpox. Harper’s weekly printed a sketch by Sol Eytinge, “Vaccinating the Baby,” on February 19, 1870, along with the following caption:

We trust the hint conveyed indirectly by this picture may not be lost upon families where this necessary precaution against a loathsome disease has been neglected. The sanitary superintendent of the Metropolitan District of New York, in a recent report, called attention to the fact that this disease has become fearfully prevalent throughout the West, especially in California, and that great precaution will be necessary to keep it from spreading through New York.

Eventually, the vaccine proponents could announce success. In the twentieth century, after worldwide vaccination campaigns the WHO finally declared the eradication of the disease in 1980, considered one of the major victories of modern medicine. Around that time, vaccination for smallpox also ended.

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The solution proposed by city leaders in 1877 involved the damming of Lake Thirlmere, 100 miles away, to create a reservoir for the city of Manchester. Before long, supporters of the lake responded, forming the Thirlmere Defense Association.

Harriet Ritvo, author of the recently published The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism, argues that the conflict that resulted between these two parties constitutes the first battle of the modern environmental movement. Industry versus a cadre of activists attached to the lake for its environmental beauty and significance but without particular personal attachments to the area.

In the 1870s, Lake Thirlmere remained bucolic, relatively pristine and undeveloped. It lay at the heart of England’s Lake District, the crown jewel of England’s walking culture.

Essayist Rebecca Solnit has written in “Of Walking Clubs and Land Wars” that, whether or not the taste for the country evolved because or independently of dense cities like Manchester, it had assumed a lasting importance in British life:

Walking has a resonance, a cultural weight, [in Great Britain] that it does nowhere else. On summer Sundays, more than eighteen million Britons head for the country, and ten million say they walk for recreation…The American magazine Walking is nothing but a health and fitness publication aimed at women…but Britain has half a dozen outdoor magazines in which walking is about the beauty of the landscape rather than the body.

The early environmental advocates of this era fought to preserve these landscapes and they pleasure they took from them.

In contrast, a supporter of the Manchester dam, John Bateman, criticized the Thirlmere activists’ “sentimental idea that it was sacrilege to invade the precincts of the lakes for any such utilitarian purpose as giving a supply of fresh water to famishing thousands of the manufacturing districts.”

In the end, the Manchester argument won. The Thirlmere Defense Association could only delay the dam project, which won final approval in 1879 and was complete fifteen years later.

In the years since the damming of Thirlmere, Ritvo has argued in interviews, debates like this one have shifted. More information about environmental impacts newly overpowers arguments over utility versus aesthetics. However, beneath current environmental disputes, over water supplies in California or climate change, she sees familiar outlines.

Ritvo told MIT’s Spectrum: “Giving something its historical depth can unveil the difficulty of a problem. You can see why compromise happens so seldom. The ideological commitments of the different perspectives are so strong, and often both very compelling. History helps us understand where opposing positions come from, what their roots are.”

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Today, a lot goes into counting tree rings, as we can tell from the back and forth over the statistics and ‘tricks’ of Climate-gate. Rep. Ed Markey has remarked efforts to understand what happened with the important record of historical temperature at the controversy’s heart risk devolving into a ‘Siberian tree ring circus.’

However, the science at stake has relatively humble beginnings in the work of one sort of unlikely character by the name of Andrew Ellicott Douglass, an astronomer pouring over tree samples as early as the turn of the last century.

Douglass had established himself at the University of Arizona Tuscon to pursue his personal ambitions of discovering the effects of sunspots on the earth’s climate. To do this, first and foremost, he needed to establish an accurate record of historical climate to track alongside the 11 year cycles of our sun.

It was as a part of these studies that Douglass began looking more closely at the trees of the American Southwest. Others had guessed the growth patterns of trees might store information on historical weather patterns. Douglass’s work would firmly establish links between weather and tree growth across climate regions, based on the year-to-year variation he found in the moisture-stretches, sensitive trees available for study in Arizona.

At point, the history of science and the science of history—or how we learn about very old things using the scientific toolkit neatly overlap.

In Norway this month, you could pick up a journal called Viking : tidsskrift for norrøn arkeologi. In the latest issue, as Swedish archaeologist Martin Rundkvist has helpfully translated, two northern researchers Niels Bonde & Frans-Arne Stylegar, have published the dates obtained for two Viking ships buried below-ground centuries ago using the science of dendochronology—more commonly known as tree-ring dating.

For ships built and put to rest this long ago (770 and 780 AD respectively) arriving at an accurate date of origin with systematic precision is not an intuitive science. Trying to date something that’s been buried underground for over a thousand years, you’re not just counting rings to find the ages of the trees that make up your find. You need to know when the trees that make up those ships, or those ornaments, or those house beams stopped growing and producing more rings.

An extraordinary 1919 edition of Douglass’s Climactic Cycles and Tree Growth, beautifully illustrated with images of the old-growth trees that produced his data explains the next step of his methodology. Douglass called cross-identification “the most fundamental and essential feature of the method of studying tree-growth.” The patterns of ring growth within trees corresponded to weather patterns year to year—higher rainfall had allowed for greater growth—but more interestingly, he had found that the same time periods in different trees from the same regions matched up.

Dendrochronological dating draws on a comprehensive chronological map constructed from samples of living and dead tree samples.

Douglass could attempt to date his first archaeological ruins not long after he developed his theory—reviewing wood samples from ruins left by Anasazi Native Americans in the Four Corners region. In the end, after decades spent ironing out gaps in his tree-ring chronology, Douglass made more headway with this methodology than in finding any links to sunspots. In the end the world of archaeology claimed him for his inadvertent contribution.

In something of a return, besides our Norwegian ship archaeologists, the tools Douglass developed have become key to establishing records of long-term climate change. Make of ‘climate-gate’ what you will, environmental scientists continue combing through tree rings and cores of arctic ice.

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