Industrialization and its early impacts
A brief and incomplete snapshot of the transition over time
(see Foster’s “The Vulnerable Planet” for more).
Foster says the story of environmental degradation that triggered conv.
and presv. movements is best understood by looking at how these interact:
1. Population increase
2. Increased accumulation and consumption of “stuff” as wealth increases
(more stuff = more resources used to make it)
3. Energy and “throughput” (waste) associated with the technology used.
All three have changed over time, as seen in our env. history
I = P *A*T
Echohistorical periods
Periods in which human activities have led to relatively uniform
changes in nature as ways of socially organizing and production evolve.
E.G. matches transformation of landscapes, air, water qual.
Foster MOVs 1, 2,4, 5 show transition
Dates are approximations only, and changes not exactly at the same time
Eotechnic era traces through
Starts with the end of pre-10,000 BP Hunter-Gather period of living
relatively w/n nature’s limits with a MUCH smaller population
Development of Agriculture 10,000 years ago (in the U.S.)
2000 BP Evolution of tributary societies around the world made certain
regions responsible for specific crops and at times overworked the land.
At times whole regions stripped of forest & ecosystems (e.g. Rome) and
people became peasant slaves tied to rulers and nobility’s land.
Soil exhaustion, deforestation, overgrazing lead to great famines and
epidemics
Roman empire maps
earth.g
Sumerian, Indus valley (Iraq), Greek, Phoenician, Roman and Mayan
civilizations all collapsed in part due to environmental factors
e.g. salt crust from irrigation regimes
1400s-1700s Mercantile stage of capitalism and age of “discovery”
improve life in some areas due to environmental degradation in far away
places.
Science serves the goal to stretch nature’s limits and move products long
distances rather than rely on just local resources.
Slavery in the U.S. made much of this domination of nature possible
through cheap labor for cash-crops. MONOCULTURE prominent.
Markets and soil use use helped drive capture of W. U.S. native lands.
Animals too
(not many fossil fuel driven machines yet!)
Colonialism, environment and development
East India Company ruled India backed by English military with conquests
beginning in the 1600s and stretching to late 1800s -- when the English military
took over after rebellions.
They wanted cheap natural resources and labor (“inputs”), and to force their
products on locals by taxing their own textiles etc. so that English goods would
have a competitive advantage.
Changing India to an export economy hurt nutrition and ecology.
Robert Clive, 1st Baron Clive, became the first British Governor of Bengal.
English monoculture environmental impacts spread to India
Noting how our expanding consumption was impacting nature and people
around the 1900s, some pushed for development w/n nature’s limits...
E.G. buffalo
J.B. Foster says conservation started in the late 19th century because
people were concerned that free market-based (capitalist with little
regulation) economies were depleting resources without a conscience
(e.g. gold rush).
FOSTER MOV 3
Conservationists wanted land to be valued for more that one particular
economic value at a specific time.
Like e.g.?
What is this and how does it represent “limits?”
But what is conservation and what is preservation?
Conservation
Sensible and careful use of natural resources by humans, often including
an effort to try to reduce pollution. People who adopt this view often are
trying to avoid “risks,” and they often use science to help them (forests
and seahorse breeding).
Pinchott
FDR
In response to such concerns and human-centric conservation approaches
Preservationists
Person concerned primarily with setting aside or protecting undisturbed
natural areas form harmful human activities (e.g. Muir).
What do you know about the industrial revolution(s) / development?
What did it represent to you coming into this class?
Is this era over everywhere?
Paleotechnic era
Industrial revolution(s) starts late 1700s-1800s in most of the West/North
Adam Smith’s pin factory
Implications for env. health, wealth, and env. of modern city (50 percent),
disease, dirty
Era begins in the early to mid-1700s in “backward” England, and the
mid-1800s in the U.S., with a fairly rapid decline in the early 1900s.
The process is uneven and does not occur everywhere in the world.
Some Nordic countries arguably skip this phase. (Though they can’t
escape their neighbor’s acid rain.)
What materials were needed
to sell in this store and what
were the ecological impacts?
Transition from wood to metal-based production and consumption
Craftsman to templates and ornate to high volume (US)--consumption up
Transition to economy/governance (including military) that led us to
today’s free trade and capitalistic path that drives globalization
(Adam Smith deified but misunderstood)
Resulting in social organization that revolves around nurturing the
“technics” that make this economy and capital accumulation possible.
? e.g. think Ford? Assembly lines and machines for MASS production
and resource use feeding it.
Lack of regulation and bureaucracy leads to pollution of air and streams
-Cholera, typhoid, etc. in the U.S.
-Open sewers (later a river catches on fire)
-Black lung and lung cancer
-Cost of cleaning buildings etc.
Lag: Occupational health and environmental agencies late
neotechnic creations in the U.S. (EPA 1970!!)
• Industrialization spurs
urbanization of nation
(factories need people)
• Late 19th century rural
migration to urban
areas
• Immigrants from rural
U.S., freed slaves from
South, and Eastern &
Southern Europe
Transformation of movement and speed:
-Transportation and adoption of the steam engine from an earlier period
-Bigger is more efficient (automatically “better” -- economies of
scale in the workplace and in transportation)
-Mechanism and use of metal key
-Mines as the origin of the modern RR
- Do you want Pentium II?
Some examples of advances
-Tools were refined and increased in number
-Mass production of clothes, and in some cases, food
-Travel improved for some classes -- 1819 the Savanna crossed
the Atlantic in 26 days, in 1866 it dropped to 7 days 20 hours
-Screws and other parts made more reliably and in a standardized way
• Cities grow around
industry; rapid and
haphazard growth
• Lack of sanitary
infrastructure or
organization
U.S. METRO MAP
U.S. POP MAP
• Slums develop for
immigrants, poor, and
workers
• Unhealthy environment
Picture of early slum
• Sanitary Movement
tackles sanitary
infrastructure with
some good results in
places
• Industrial disease
rampant in all
industries; unregulated
• ‘Phossy Jaw’ disfiguring disease
afflicting matchmakers
- phosphorous matches
banned in 1912
• Infant mortality rates
up 300 percent vs. rural
in some urban areas
Hull House – Settlement House Chicago, Ill
• Progressive Movt in
1890s: social
reform, gov’t in the
public interest
• Settlement Houses
offer place for
interaction in poor
communities
• Alice Hamilton
investigates
industrial disease
A classic study: John Snow
The “father of medical geography and/or epidemiology”
In the mid-1850s, there were two major theories about the transmission of cholera. Dr.
Snow used techniques which would later be known as medical geography to confirm that
the transmission of the disease occurred by swallowing contaminated water or food and
not by inhaling infected air.
Dr. Snow knew that he had identified the transmission method for the "cholera poison."
This "poison" was later identified as the bacterium VIBRIO CHOLERAE .
Cholera leads to an infection of the small intestine which results in extreme diarrhea
which may lead to massive dehydration and death. The disease can be treated by giving
the victim a lot of fluids -- either by mouth or intravenously (into the blood stream).
Cholera
a common disease
in the U.S. up to the
1800s and early 1900s.
Changes mostly understood and celebrated as “progress”
Mumford wrote:
“... paleotechnic reached its highest point, in terms of its own concepts
and ends, in England in the middle of the nineteenth century:
its ... triumph was the great industrial exhibition in the new Crystal
Palace at Hyde Park in 1851: the first World Exposition,
an apparent victory for free trade, free enterprise, free invention, and free
access to all the world’s markets by the country boasted already that it
was the workshop of the world.”
pp154-155
Technics, social organization, and economy demand dramatic energy
transformation -- thus the birth of high carbon consumption -- a finite
resource.
Brueghel the
Elder, Jan
[Flemish, 15681625]
?Impacts on environment and public health?
In the neotechnic phase some lessons arguably were learned, thus,
enabling reforms through a stronger role for governance and regulation.
A greater emphasis on quality of life is reflected in the following period.
I disagree that we moved out of the other phase unless we transition
from fossil fuel use and less reliance on finite resources -- pollution
just moved (steel and 3rd world dumping)?
Governance ensured some places followed a somewhat different path.
Romania
Relatively abandoned industrial
age core of Baltimore
Eotechnic, Paleotechnic and Neotechnic phases altered most of the
“West” or “Global North” by 1938.
Mineral extraction KEY to such transformations….
But how does mineral extraction from earth feed such changes?
Lots needed for transformation, but what are mineral resources?
A concentration of naturally occurring material in or on the Earth’s crust
that can be extracted and processed into useful materials at an affordable
cost.
Gold and coal
Gold landscape 3-d panorama
Smelting
After gangue (waste material) is removed heat and chemicals are used to
separate metal from other elements in the ore.
Without proper regulation land, vegetation, water and air can be
impacted horribly (superfund sites).
http://www.epa.gov/superfund/sites/npl/npl.htm
http://www.epa.gov/superfund/action/process/denphoto.htm
Other processes are quite toxic too e.g. use of cyanide, or even use of
mercury to extract gold,
(wherein one teaspoon in a 2.5 acre lake can make fish unfit for
consumption esp. when pregnant).
A look beneath the surface!
Some are point sources and some not -- we address this again in a later talk
Subsurface
Mine Opening
Surface Mine
Runoff of
sediment
Acid drainage from
reaction of mineral
or ore with water
Spoil banks
Percolation to groundwater
Leaching of toxic metals
and other compounds
from mine spoil
Leaching
may carry
acids into
soil and
ground
water
supplies
Our situation today:
- Over 500,000 mines on the U.S. landscape, most in the West, cleanup
costs into the billions of dollars -- IF we clean up.
- Land subsidence and collapse breaking sewer lines, gas mains, tilting
houses
- Wind and water erosion has polluted 40% of Western watersheds!
- Acid mine drainage (& acid rain) major problem (Bloomsburg on Map)
? “Unaccounted for costs” in this selection of energy source in
places like the Ruhr and Lille in Germany, W. Pennsylvania? Legacy?
Benjamin Franklin and alternative sources eschewed (not in all of Europe)
-- cooking oil in LV and coconut oil in Fiji.
=s
http://www.footprintnetwork.org/gfn_sub.php?content=maps_page
and look at the Board
For Marx the results were:
-Competition that ripped families apart
-Depressed wages
-Failure to educate
-Lengthened hours (4 hour LA commutes!)
-Recreation reduced
-Speeded up motion
-Stupefying and repetitive work-a goal of “machine-like” precision
(think Ford)
-Youth lost
Some argue that certain multinational companies are making the same elite to
elite/corrupt deals to make their gains and grab resources and dominate.
This is the part of globalization critics say is focused on economic domination.
How should we cope with the legacy?
How much forest is left in England?
How is the water quality in the U.S. -- over 40 percent impaired?
What is air quality like in Vegas, Honolulu, LA, NY, etc.?
Can you still eat the fish and shellfish in the streams or bays in Manila?
Are the cancer rates higher near toxic dumps in New York?
These are things that hit the headlines every day. They are relevant to
your life!
Can there be too much development? I.E. point of diminishing return,
or the wrong style of development ?!
As you will see -environmental science can be used to explore these questions
In very recent times -- only a few decades ago, science started to
ask TOUGH questions
about the future and the ability to sustain and export this lifestyle
without permanently destroying the earth’s ecology and people’s health
To understand those questions you need to know some definitions
Is it ALL bad news?!
Life expectancies, environmentalists get jobs, people love “stuff” and
wealth and freedom has increased in some areas through this Smith
style high production and mass consumption.
ROSTOW PPT
End industrialazion impacts presentation