Reclaiming the Air  Courtesy of NOAA Central LibraryOn February
4, 1884, John Ruskin delivered a lecture titled The Storm-Cloud
of the Nineteenth Century. Ruskin, who was one of those all-
knowing Victorians, had noticed a distinctly new plague-cloud,
which had never before been described. Neither modern
meteorologists nor sharp-eyed poets, from Homer to Wordsworth,
had mentioned the wind of darkness with its malignant
quality. Ruskin reported that for 53 years he had made
constant and close observation of the sky and that only
beginning in the late 1870s had he experienced the pitch dark,
with no blackness  but deep, high, filthiness of lurid, yet not
sublimely lurid, smoke-cloud [of] dense manufacturing mist he
was now seeing. The wind was of the bitterest, nastiest,
poisonous blight dimming the sun and turning his kitchen garden
into one miserable mass of weeds gone to seed, the roses . . .
putrefied into brown sponges, feeling like dead snails; and
half-ripe strawberries all rotten at the s