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May 12, 2010
Forgotten; but not Gone: leftovers from the age of coal.
When the Industrial Revolution began in earnest around 1800, its first cheap fuel was coal and its first important products were textiles. Soon coal mines and mills had become sources of great wealth, but each had its own victims. In America they were the slaves who suddenly became indispensable to cotton agriculture; in England it was the poor, especially children, who came to be preferred for mining coal and working in mills.Each population of victims provoked a humanitarian backlash; abolition movements in England and North America, and literary protests against slavery and brutal labor conditions from Harriet Beecher Stowe, Karl Marx and Charles Dickens. All eventually played roles leading to the increasingly dangerous conflicts of the late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries and are still factors influencing the new struggles of the Twenty-first.
One of many apparent differences was the shift in major energy sources to oil and natural gas; however, both are also products of the Carboniferous Period, simply regarded as “cleaner” and more adaptable to the expanding needs of a growing human population. Inevitably, there’s also a catch: the usual desire to exploit new technology for profit, as exemplified by yesterday’s exercise in finger pointing over a deep-water oil well polluting the Gulf of Mexico, even as the media seems impatient to get on with the latest scandal.
It reminded me of an eerie scene I’d witnessed while driving through Pennsylvania about thirty years ago: smoke pouring out of holes in the ground, left-overs from the days of coal and now, according to Wikipedia, still polluting the environment all over the world, but with little fanfare. I guess, as they say in business, their environmental damage is already "in the market."
I wonder how much more the environment can take and still nourish our species- or if the global Economy will recover from the chaos it may be about to enter.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at May 12, 2010 05:46 PM