2.4 There had been many environmental initiatives before this.  A century earlier, another doctor, James Ranald Martin, had campaigned to establish the principle of sustainable forestry management in British India.  There had also been numerous campaigns against pollution of the air, beginning with the achievement of the Clean Air act of 1859 in England.  Later, John Muir had campaigned to protect American countryside from damage from urban and industrial encroachment and succeeded in establishing  Yosemite national park.  At the same time there had even been a pioneering campaign to preserve for the geneal public the beautiful landscape of lake Thirlemere in England, although this failed to achieve its objectives.

2.5 Dr Servettaz realized he needed to undertake all these four environmental challenges at the same time.  It would be a huge campaign, perhaps lasting decades and costing eye-watering amounts of money and so it had better be a resounding success. And so he set himself  on that fateful Sunday to embark upon this complex, momentous, comprehensive environmental campaign.

2.6 The only challenges he faced were: the modern environmental movement didn’t exist yet, he was alone, no one he spoke to had the faintest idea what he was talking about, and nothing like this had ever been done before.

2.6 He searched for a new approach – a simpler model that would explain the facts more elegantly – and chose for his model the Sun at the centre of concentric circles of planets – an idea suggested more than a thousand years ago by Aristarchus of Samos. However his approach did not produce more accurate results than the Ptolemaic system he was proposing to replace and though he recorded his observations to the end of his life he couldn’t get them to work sufficiently accurately. Lacking the final proof, and fearing general hostility to his ideas, he only published “De Revolutionibus” on his death bed.

2.7 But Copernicus’ book survived, however, and changed the world, for much the same reason that Darwin’s origin of Species did – because it was too technically competent for the professionals to ignore it.  In addition to presenting astronomers with a comprehensive, original, and quantitatively defensible alternative to Ptolemy, De Revolutionibus was full of observational data, much of it fresh and some of it reliable.”

2.9 This gives an insight into why Dr Servettaz was in the end so successful in his campaign. He did not simply draw attention to what was wrong.  He sought out the books and the little-known reports of the experts, read around his subject, organized scientific analyses of the lake water initially at his own expense and came up with convincing scientific arguments to support his case. He didn’t know everything about eutrophication and much was unknown at the time even to the experts. But he knew enough to put forward a compelling argument “too technically competent for the professionals to ignore.”