Straws In The Wind

The quest to create a decent world to maintain a clean environment and to nurture a self-renewing inheritance to pass on to future generations is not unique to the twentieth-century. Rather as Ronald Zupko and Robert Laures show in this fascinating study of medieval environmental attitudes and regulations it has been the recurring dream of men and women for centuries.The history of the medieval towns of northern and central Italy opens a window onto the concerns of urban elites throughout the medieval world regarding the environment and quality of life. In Straws in the Wind the authors demonstrate that legislative efforts to control the environment were neither haphazard nor accidental. Rather they were rational responses to perceived needs often based on a valuable store of knowledge inherited from their Roman forebears.Zupko and Laures describe who these early environmentalists were what motivated them how they shaped the environmental programs they devised and how they implemented and enforced these regulations. The book examines the efforts of town officials often acting independently of powerful regional papal and imperial authorities to provide their citizens with the best possible urban quality of life?within the limits of their knowledge experience and technology. Moreover Zupko and Laures reveal evidence of grassroots support for the protection of resources and for the preservation of air water and the aesthetic qualities of the urban environment. The results of these efforts when compared to those of the modern environmental movement were very modest merely ?Straws in the Wind.? Nonetheless they were the harbingers of the future.