Industries fueled the Industrial Revolution. Image: ShutterStock
The Industrial Revolution marked a major turning point in Earth’s ecology and humans’ relationship with their environment. The Industrial Revolution dramatically changed every aspect of human life and lifestyles. The impact on the world’s psyche would not begin to register until the early 1960s, some 200 years after its beginnings. From human development, health and life longevity, to social improvements and the impact on natural resources, public health, energy usage and sanitation, the effects were profound.
It wasn’t that the Industrial Revolution became a stalwart juggernaut overnight. It started in the mid-1700s in Great Britain when machinery began to replace manual labor. Fossil fuels replaced wind, water and wood, used primarily for the manufacture of textiles and the development of iron making processes. The full impact of the Industrial Revolution would not begin to be realized until about 100 years later in the 1800s, when the use of machines to replace human labor spread throughout Europe and North America. This transformation is referred to as the industrialization of the world. These processes gave rise to sweeping increases in production capacity and would affect all basic human needs, including food production, medicine, housing, and clothing. Not only did society develop the ability to have more things faster, it would be able to develop better things. These industrialization processes continue today.
The Industrial Revolution and Population Growth
Source: United Nations Population Division, Briefing Packet, 1998 Revision of World Population Prospects; and World Population Prospects, The 2006 Revision.
The most prolific evidence of the Industrial Revolution’s impact on the modern world is seen in the worldwide human population growth. Modern humans have been around for about 2.2 million years. By the dawn of the first millennium AD, estimates place the total world human population at between 150 – 200 million, and 300 million in the year 1,000. The population of the United States population is currently 312,000 (August 2011). The world human population growth rate would be about .1 percent (.001) per year for the next seven to eight centuries.
At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the mid 1700s, the world’s human population grew by about 57 percent to 700 million. It would reach one billion in 1800. (Note: The Black Plague reduced the world population by about 75 million people in the late 1300s.) The birth of the Industrial Revolution altered medicine and living standards, resulting in the population explosion that would commence at that point and steamroll into the 20thand 21st centuries. In only 100 years after the onset of the Industrial Revolution, the world population would grow 100 percent to two billion people in 1927 (about 1.6 billion by 1900).
During the 20th century, the world population would take on exponential proportions, growing to six billion people just before the start of the 21stcentury. That’s a 400 percent population increase in a single century. Since the 250 years from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to today, the world human population has increased by six billion people!
Human population growth is indelibly tied together with increased use of natural and man-made resources, energy, land for growing food and for living, and waste by-products that are disposed of, to decompose, pollute or be recycled. This exponential population growth led to the exponential requirements for resources, energy, food, housing and land, as well as the exponential increase in waste by-products.
Awakening to the Implications of Unsustainable Growth and Dependence on Limited Resources
There were many indicators that the Industrial Revolution propelled the world human population into an era of living and production at the ultimate expense of the human condition. It also impacted the resources that had been taken for granted for the entire prior history of humankind. There had always been more resources than the demand for them.
Rachel Carson
It would take just one person in the 1960s to make the general public aware of the cause and effect of human outgrowth from the Industrial Revolution. Rachel Carson took on the powerful and robust chemical industry in her globally acclaimed 1962 book, Silent Spring. In it she raised important questions about humans’ impact on nature. For the first time, the public and industry would begin to grasp the concept of sustainable production and development.
It was the fossil fuel coal that fueled the Industrial Revolution, forever changing the way people would live and utilize energy. While this propelled human progress to extraordinary levels, it came at extraordinary costs to our environment, and ultimately to the health of all living things. While coal and other fossil fuels were taken for granted as being inexhaustible, it was American geophysicist M. King Hubbert who predicted in 1949 that the fossil fuel era would be very short-lived and that other energy sources would need to be relied upon.
Hubbert predicted that fossil fuel production, in particular oil, would reach it s peak starting in 1970 and would go into steady decline against the rising energy demands of the population. The decline in production started in the United States in 1971 and has spread to other oil producing nations as well. This peak production is known as “Hubbert’s Peak.” By the time the world began to heed Hubbert’s prediction, the use of fossil fuels – so heavily relied upon to fuel the Industrial Revolution — had become so firmly interwoven into human progress and economy, that changing this energy system would drastically alter the very way we have lived our lives. It will happen, but it will take time, continued ingenuity and vast economic incentives to transform dependence on this fuel that fostered the growth and prosperity launched by the Industrial Revolution.
The Era of Sustainability: The Next Revolution
Sustainable development factors. Source: Creative Commons
Looking back at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, it is difficult to realize how what took place then is having such complicated and vast effects today. This is the principle of environmental unity – a change in one system will cause changes in others. Certainly, the seeds of progress – and the ramifications of that progress – were planted then. And with the very same mechanisms and effects that brought about both the progress and the indelibly connected results of that progress to our ecology – the good, the bad and the ugly – over the last 250 years, we are entering a new era of sustainability. That is the next revolution.
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