Britain was the first place in the world to go through what we now call the Industrial Revolution, a transformation of an agricultural, rural society into a manufacturing powerhouse that kicked off the mass migration of ancient carbon from the ground to the atmosphere.
This is Threshold Season 4: “Time to 1.5.” In this episode, we explore the mass acceleration of nearly every process on earth that began in Britain in the 1700s and continues to this day, a multi-century fossil-fuel binge that knocked the climate out of whack.
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Support the show at threshold podcast. okay I’m looking at the smethwick engine I guess it’s the oldest working steam engine in the world I’m in a science museum called think tank in Birmingham England standing in front of a steam engine designed by James Watt in the late
1700s and when I say engine if you picture the thing that you look at when you open the hood of your car uh wipe that image out of your mind this is like it takes up at least three floors of this Museum it extends down below and then it extends high above me
It’s a big hulking piece of equipment with iron rods and pipes and a thick wooden Beam on top rocking back and forth like a seesaw but I didn’t really come here to study study the engineering I just wanted to meet this thing face to face and grapple with what it means
Because the watt steam engine is often credited with launching the Industrial Revolution and the Industrial Revolution launched the climate crisis it all started in 1763 the young Scottish engineer James W realized that the steam engines then in use could be improved by adding a separate condenser this made the engine
Far more efficient and C welcome to threshold I’m Amy Martin and this is the third episode of our season called time to 1.5 we’re investigating what we’re doing and not doing with the time before temperatures rise one 12° C over pre-industrial levels and it’s the last part of that sentence pre-industrial
Levels that led me here Britain was the first place in the world to go through what we now call the indust Industrial Revolution a transformation of an agricultural rural Society into a manufacturing Powerhouse and this is also where we get our first archetypal images of industrial damage Skies full
Of soot children laboring in factories one of the key concepts of the Industrial Revolution is acceleration it was a massive speeding up of almost everything urbanization mechanization transportation production trade consumption and all of those surges were fueled by a radical acceleration of the carbon cycle the processes that began
Here in Britain in the 1700s kicked off a multi-century fossil fuel binge which is now knocking the climate out of whack so the Industrial Revolution is when we started to move fast and break things including the delicate carbon balance that has stabilized our climate for 10
10,000 years or more as we learned in our first episode so we have already crashed through the warmest temperature on Earth since we left the last ice age we’ve already gone through but this revolution also led to unprecedented levels of personal comfort and ease if you like getting clean water from a tap
Flipping a switch and having the lights come on heating your house driving a car eating food from around the world using a toilet or taking a hot shower you have the industrial Revolution to thank you can also give it credit for antibiotics vaccines and much longer
Lifespans and all of this is an ongoing process although we refer to the Industrial Revolution with a definite article in singular form it’s happened over and over in place after place and there are countless new industrial hubs about to emerge are already on their way Vietnam Kenya Indonesia this revolution continues to
Sweep around the planet bringing both prosperity and destruction in its wake this is the central conundrum of our time the Industrial Revolution sped up our ability to meet our needs and fulfill our desires but it also sped up the ruination of our planet so how can we stop doing something that feels like
Advancement and how do we not stop doing something that it’s killing us that’s the Dilemma we’re grappling with in this episode and throughout this season really to get started we’re going to home in on two key developments in the very early days of the Industrial Revolution that set us on this
Paradoxical path to see if there’s anything in those stories that could help us set a new course now this is the thing isn’t it with the Industrial Revolution it’s the speed at which it takes off and the exponential increase in the need for everything a lot of these industrial towns would be
Dirty and filthy and smelly we know we’re modifying the atmosphere in a way that’s detrimental for all living species we need to get emissions to zero now otherwise things are going to be much worse this Village is like the definition of cute Charming really more than cute I’m walking
Through the village of Ironbridge England now about an hour away from Birmingham there’s a lovely Church up on the hill in front of me the river sver is Flowing along next to the brick sidewalk it’s all very English complete with a fish and chips place and something called Ellie’s World Famous
Hand raised Pork Pies as I come around a Bend I can see the structure that gives this place its name a beautiful Iron Bridge arching over the river the world’s first major Bridge made of cast iron it’s just one of many artifacts in this Valley from the very early days of
The Industrial Revolution hello how you doing I’m doing well how are you nice to meet as I walk up onto the bridge I meet my guide for the day Dr Matt Thompson he’s the head collections curator for English Heritage an organization that stewards hundreds of historical sites
And although a lot of stories about the birth of the Industrial Revolution start where I started a few minutes ago in big manufacturing cities like Birmingham Matt says if we really want to understand how this process kicked off a better place to start is here in this
Verdant Little Valley in the early 1700s yeah often I think we have a very tight historical understanding of the Industrial Revolution in the aftermath say 1760 to 1830 is the kind of real flourishing of it but whereas I would argue that in reality we’re looking at a
Story that begins much much earlier and and this place I think embodies that narrative it’s a bright September day and our view from the bridge is much more Jane Austin than Charles Dickens we’re looking at a steep-sided Gorge um and uh it’s very very wooded now it’s
Kind of like a almost a sort of pastoral it’s kind of like a a bucolic idle you know but this really is the kind of Heart of industry and this cradle of the Industrial Revolution although it might not look like it right now it doesn’t
Look like it right now so I asked Matt what this Valley would have looked like when it was in its industrial Heyday what you would have seen in the 18th century would have been a lot of masts masts from the many boats moving Goods Up and Down the River sever all up along
Here where the the warehouse is you know there could be two deep you know kind of Mur up there there would have been chimneys there was a lead smelter down there was Cannon being cast there were there were uh furnaces and foundaries there were would have been smoke there
Would have been smell the uh the river itself was kind of polluted glassy stained Waters it would have been a very very different Prospect the heart of all this activity was iron working there’s a lot of iron ore in the land nearby and Matt says people in this area had been
Mining it and using it to make all kinds of products for hundreds of years long before the Industrial Revolution began but in the early 1700s a man named Abraham Darby arrived here with an idea for how to change the iron making process and Matt says we can draw a
Direct line from his Innovation to our current climate crisis it all went down just a few miles away from where we’re standing so we head to Matt’s car to go check it out if you want to oh I’m on the wrong side he gently points out to
Me that I’m getting into his car on the wrong side because we’re in Britain sorry and we’re off and uh this is a little side Valley that we’re going to go up now called C Brookdale and the whole area was called C Brookdale in in you know going back into
S Medieval Times um and aale is a valley yeah yeah yeah yes yeah I that’s fair yeah as we drive up the valley we pass by old buildings connected by small paths leading through the woods so this is where it all happened like in the 18th and 19th century this is where the
Base of operations was of the C Brookdale Foundry you know this this big Innovative industrial complex Matt says this whole Hillside was peppered with places where people worked turning raw iron into finished products cannons and cannonballs hor shoes and Nails pots and Kettles it was a multi-step process he
Says you you start at the top with big lumpy stuff and it becomes more refined right so you roll kind of iron as it were ingots or pig iron what have you at the top and as you go down several different stops down the valley you end
Up with a with a more finished product until at the end of it you’re at the river with a finished product and a warehouse put it on a vessel and take it down the river the river s flowing along below is a key character in the C Brookdale story it’s the longest river
In Great Britain it starts in Wales makes a backward sea through Western England and eventually spills out into the ocean at Bristol connecting this Valley to the rest of the world Matt says the river the iron ore and even the shape of the valley itself are part of
What led to this place becoming so important in the history of the Industrial Revolution here you can almost see the kind of Valley the Dale as a kind of machine of itself with component parts being all of these different uh establishments and installations along the along the length
Of it h but the whole thing works with water gravity uh um and and the raw materials you know it all comes together quite sophisticated stuff really um quite sophisticated stuff we arrive at what today looks like a sort of Park there’s a museum on one
Side and a large grassy area with a big Iron fountain in the middle the skies are blue the hills around us are full of trees and the only sound is from other visitors quietly walking about but Matt says for hundreds of years this place would have been a hive of industrial
Activity hard labor Hot Smoke the constant clatter of wagons coming and going we head to the far end of the site where a series of old brick walls encloses the space the thing that Matt is most excited to show me is a crumbling structure in the middle maybe
20 ft high now protected under a glass shelter it’s called a blast furnace and this is actually the first of several blast furnaces we’re going to meet in this season of our show so I’m going to take a minute to describe what they are and how they
Work you can think of a blast furnace sort of like a presto changjo machine a tool for turning Metals mined out of the earth into hot liquids which can then be molded and shaped into whatever you want a soup late will say or a beam for a skyscraper that process is called
Smelting that’s what happens inside a blast furnace it’s a chemical process that happens at very high temp temperatures and it separates metals like lead and silver and iron from the rocks or ores they’re found in naturally blast furnaces were first created almost 2,000 years ago in China
And super sized versions of them are still widely used today but until Abraham Darby came along most blast furnaces ran on charcoal and that’s a totally different thing than coal Coal the stuff that we dig out of the ground charcoal is made from wood and you need
Need a whole lot of it to get a blast furnace hot enough to smelt iron so in Darby’s day making things out of iron meant chopping down a lot of trees in the early 17th century there’s complaints writers talking about how terrible it is that the trees are all
Being cut down and Kent to feed the whe iron industry you know um so people are really aware of this idea of deforestation you know for industrial purposes in like 400 years ago enter Abraham Darby he arrives here in coldbrook in the early 1700s aiming to
Make a living producing iron a lot of other people are doing the same thing which means there’s a lot of pressure on the local Woodlands but Abraham has an idea he’s going to run his blast furnace on Co probably the biggest single Innovation to my mind would be the fact
That Abraham Derby the first when he arrives here in the very early 1700s he comes up with a commercially viable way of using coal in the production of Iron Coal from the ground not charcoal coal from the ground that people have been doing it before people had experimented
For quite some time but it always been a challenge to make it commercially viable Abraham Derby did manage that he got the recipe right basically and he did so right here in 1709 he started by roasting the coal which drives off impurities and concentrates it into a form called Coke
And you use Coke instead of charcoal there loads of advantages first one is there’s loads of coal in the ground here right Abraham Darby didn’t invent or discover Coke what he did was figure out how to use it in a blast furnace for industrial purposes people knew you
Could make it um but what he did is he put that little bit extra in that just tipped it over so whereas previously it was experiments there were always experiments whereas now there was a a a marketable product you know he could do it he could do it was cheaper it was
Easier it was here it was on site Matt and I walk into the shelter protecting the structure and up a set of stairs to a platform where we can look right down into the big gaping hole at the top so you can see you can see the
Furnace here so this is where the magic would happen right this is where the and it is magic isn’t it you know you’re taking things that are literally dug out of the Hills just over there and then you turn it into something like that incredible cast iron Fountain there you know so you
You’re going from rocks to that to Art essentially that’s yeah and that is that there is a magic in that you know and by switching fuels from wood to Coal Darby was able to make that magic happen faster and more efficiently and it took quite a while for other people
To adopt it but then of course in the end everybody did it was going to make you know it’s like archaic using charcoal cook pots were one of the main products to come out of this Iron Works in the early days and they’re a good example of the process of acceleration
That defines the Industrial Revolution before Darby cook Poots were usually imported from other parts of Europe which made them very expensive but using his new coal fueled process Darby was soon able to create highquality cook Poots faster and more cheaply than his competitors making them affordable for a
Whole new group of people and as more people got them more people wanted them which required more iron and more coal you know you hardly need a picture drawing do you where does that line go of the use of coal in in Industry you know if you do need a picture drawing
Look up the Keeling curve that’s the steadily upward trending line tracking the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere before we started burning fossil fuels on a mass scale the Earth had about 280 parts per million CO2 in the air in 2021 we had around 416 parts per million and the difference between
Those two numbers 280 and 416 is us our cars and air conditioners and furnaces and our industrial processes large scale industrial use of mineral fuel I mean you absolutely can put that here that’s the that’s the Legacy Abraham Darby’s world might seem very far away now but his technology is still
With us the process has been tweaked but we are still concentrating coal into Coke and burning it in Blast furnaces especially in the production of Steel and the emissions produced by Darby’s furnace and every one of its successors are still with us too because once carbon is released into the air in
The form of carbon dioxide it sticks around for 300 to 1,000 years there’s no single moment when the countdown to 1.5° of global heating began but if I was forced to choose C Brookdale in 1709 would be a top Contender once Darby figured out how to
Use coal to smelt iron it was a short leap to doing the same thing with lead and silver and tin and copper once it’s caught on then of course yeah you know coal becomes the fuel and then you see an exponential increase really in the amount of use and an exponential
Increase in the need for everything else in the production process so that’s not just kind of materials and fuel it’s also what it needs in terms of people human resource you know human capital that goes through the roof this is the thing isn’t it with with the Industrial Revolution it’s the
Speed at which it takes off and the exponential increase in the need for everything in the same way as you see the shift almost over a within a generation you know of people living in small rural settlements or Market towns and then this incredible explosion of cities in terrible conditions you know
And and you see a a rural population suddenly within an what we would kind of recognize as an urban environment huge changes and kind of that psychologically that must have had an impact well it did have an impact and it impacted this little Valley too three generations of darbies kept this
Furnace burning strong and their success meant that this area became clogged with coal smoke Matt says one writer described it this way this idea that if a man was to sort of fall asleep and just be transported to the to the furnaces around here and then wake up he
Would think he was waking up in hell and that all these people working around him were demons you know because there were flames and fires everywhere Abraham Darby III ran the Iron Works in the late 1700s and it was his idea to build the cast iron Bridge as a sort of
Advertisement for the skill and techniques developed here and it worked people came from all over the world to see the bridge and Marvel at its beauty and strength but not everyone came away with the story that The darbi’s Wanted told a writer named Anna Seward came to visit
And wrote a poem called cold Brookdale the the second line is Oh violated colbrook and in it she pictures industry as the Cyclops the Cyclops was the assistant of Vulcan at the forge you know so Cyclops represents industry effectively having a a sort of battle with all the niads dryads you know kind
Of you know tree Spirits water Spirits fairies all these sort of stuff with of the natural environment and she talks about the sort of sulf furious air and the the glassy oil stained Waters she sees a landscape that is being despoiled by by by by industry you know in the
End Cyclops wins you Know and cyclops was just getting started if Anna Seward found the changes at C Brookdale worthy of grieving imagine what she would make of Chernobyl or just any ordinary industrial city today our transformations of this planet are stunning the physical stuff we have made now weighs more than all living biomass on
Earth it’s nearly impossible to find places on land or sea where the noise of our own activity doesn’t intrude and since the Industrial Revolution hundreds of species of plants and animals have been lost forever with many more teetering on the brink according to the international Union for
Conservation of nature 133% % of bird species are at risk of Extinction today one qu of the world’s mammals 40% of amphibian so this is another thing that has accelerated since the Industrial Revolution the extinction rate of course it would have been impossible to foresee all of this when
Abraham Darby started burning coal in this furnace in fact as we walk away Matt tells me early industrial processes were still very much governed by nature for example water power it was essential to the smelting process in the early 1700s so Darby couldn’t have set up his
Iron Works just anywhere he needed to be close to the stream that still flows through this site today you had to be where the water well simple as that water told you where you could smelt iron and also when Matt says in the late spring and summer as the rainfall
Dropped off here it became harder and harder to keep the furnace going they’ let it go out and they’d maybe carry out repairs Reign it do this that and the other so over the summer it would be out of blast and that same time a lot of the
People who might have been working in the furnace would perhaps be needed on the Harvest you know so you can see you know this idea of Industry actually intimately entwined with the environment that we see around us including the weather and Seasons you know but all of that was about to change
Soon the idea of timing industrial processes Around The rhythms of the Earth would seem old-fashioned and then be forgotten altogether and this place would go from being called C Brookdale to Ironbridge instead of being defined by three natural features Cole Brook and Dale it’s now defined by what humans did and made Here we’ll have more after this short Break welcome back to threshold I’m Amy Martin and we’re in England for this episode investigating how the Industrial Revolution and thus the climate crisis got started and we’re about to head to Birmingham to explore the story of the inventor James Watt you’ve heard of him even if you don’t know it remember Back
To the Future 21 Jatt 1.21 jigs what the hell is a jig yes James Watt made such an impression on the world that he has a unit of power named after him the Watt in just a minute we’re going to talk about why he gets so much credit and
Maybe some blame for launching the Industrial Revolution but first I want to pause here and get a little meta on you I want to call attention to how I’m telling this story we started out with Abraham Darby and his Blast Furnace now we’re moving to Watt and his steam
Engine this is a very familiar template individual genius invents new technology that changes Our Lives the genius is almost always a man and white and his invention is almost always framed in a narrative of progress there are endless examples Eli Whitney and his cotton Jin Alexander granell and his telephone Elon
Musk and his Tesla we tell ourselves this story over and over these men and their machines made our lives better no further questions it’s neat and tidy it goes down as easy as a fairy tale there are are reasons for this narrative but there are also some very
Good reasons to question it so let’s just keep our eye on that as we explore the life of the man whose last name is on all of our light bulbs James Watt James Watt was born in 1736 in grck in Scotland and he showed at an early age considerable skill in making things
And repairing things Dr Malcolm dick is the director of the center for West Midlands history at the unity University of Birmingham and he says watt didn’t grow up in poverty but he wasn’t rich either wat seems to have been a quite a sickly child um so a lot of his education was
At home watt never studied at University but his mechanical skills allowed him to get a job at one he worked at the University of Glasgow about 300 miles north of Birmingham and his job was to make and repair scientific instruments and through that work he was introduced
To a model of an early steam engine a newom steam engine these engines were designed by a man named Thomas newom and some of their parts were actually manufactured by the Darby’s in C Brookdale they were fueled by coal and produced steam power which was used to pump water out of the
Bottoms of coal pits so the miners could keep digging previously that water had to be hauled out by hand so these engines were a big leap forward but they were also really expensive to run because they consumed massive amounts of coal James Watt was asked to repair a
Model of a newcoming engine at his job at the University and after studying it he went on what has become a famous walk through a park in Glasgow in May 1765 that’s when he had an idea for a significant Improvement in the engines design he developed what was called a
Separate condenser in essence that was a device that prevented the machine cooling down between the Beats of the steam engine as it moved up and down and what got really interested in in in this he made a prototype and discovered his design was three times more efficient
Than newcoms for every ton of coal burned in Watts engine you could do three times as much work to be clear watt wasn’t trying to burn less coal because of environmental concerns he was just trying to make a machine that worked more efficiently and he succeeded
Now that brought what into the notice of other people including members of something called the lunar society which was a group of individuals who met on the first Monday after the full moon uh hence the name lunar Society in each other’s homes this was the Birmingham version of something that was happening
In many European cities at the time the salon The Physician arasmus Darwin grandfather of Charles was a member as was Joseph Priestley a religious denter and discoverer of oxygen and nine other gases the lunar Society was a group of inventors and manufacturers thinkers and political writers with a keen interest
In the natural world and the important topics of the day they had visits and correspondence with Thomas Jefferson Benjamin Franklin and Anna Seward who wrote the poem about C Brookdale they were people who were brought up if you like in what we call the Enlightenment and they absorbed many
Progressive ideas including the belief that you could improve the World by investing in it and exploiting its resources and Manufacturing products they believed that things were getting better and by testing out ideas on each other and helping each other make connections Malcolm says the lunar Society played a significant role in the
Birth of the Industrial Revolution we’re actually talking at the home of one of their most dynamic members Matthew Bolton so we’re at Soho house which is one of the few surviving 18th century buildings in Birmingham Bolton was the son of a prosperous Birmingham manufacturing family and he frequently
Hosted the lunar Society here and malcol says the surviving records from Soho House show that Matthew Bolton knew how to throw a party they drank Port uh they drank wine and fact Soho House is an extensive Sellar and you can imagine it being filled with all kinds of
Goodies I visited Soho House on a warm bright afternoon but as Malcolm and I talked I was picturing a moonlit night 250 years ago with members of the lunar Society wandering around these grounds philosophizing and maybe discussing the quirky Scots man named James Watt who had a clever new design for a steam
Engine Watt and Bolton got to know each other Bolton was able to offer wat a partnership watt had an abundance of ideas and technical skills but to unleash his full potential he needed things he didn’t have money manufacturing space skilled workers customers for his products he needed
Capital and a frontman and he found those things in Matthew Bolton watt moved down to Birmingham from Scotland joined the lunar society and soon the partnership of Bolton and Watt was up and running Bolton was the extrovert he was good at dealing with politicians and Aristocrats and um selling Goods that
Was not what what was good at what was a different personality we we might say today that he had maned depression he had moods that went up and down we often read in his letters about him not being to do anything he gets very depressed certainly he was devoted to his first
Wife who who died and that’s another reason why he moved down from Scotland because you know I I I I I think the atmosphere was too difficult for him and the Luna Society provided support not only from Bolton but also from arasmus Darwin who was a superb doctor in terms
Of dealing with uh anxious patients so was he watt’s doctor he was watt’s doctor so here’s James Watt poised on the precipice of becoming a world famous inventor one of the prototypes for the genius Sparks progress narrative but he didn’t get here alone in fact we may
Never have heard of what if it weren’t for the people who were propping him up promoting his Endeavors drawing him out of his workshop and his Melancholy and into the world that’s not to take anything away from watt it’s just to recognize that he needed people who believed in him and supported him
Because we all do whatever progress Humanity can claim has always been a group project we shouldn’t forget the role of the women in the families watt had two wives his first wife was extremely important I think in getting him through some initial difficulties his second wife was extremely well organized and provided an
Environment of sort of stability uh where he could get on with his work without being distracted by um having to wash the dishes or or make food or sweep the floors or manage the servants more importantly so with what working away undisturbed on his designs and Bolton providing the money and the marketing
Savvy word began to spread there was a new steam engine that did everything the newcoming engine could do and more but using a lot less fuel soon everyone wanted one you got hundreds of machines being produced for all kinds of purposes initially the tax stle industry the
Spinning and then weaving used it people started setting up steam engines in all kinds of places they’ve never been tried before using agriculture for threshing corn for example and then they were used in Mills to grind the grain into flour steam engines become very common to pump sewage away imagine how transformative
That was they have a remarkable range of applications and perhaps the most remarkable thing of all was the way Watts engine broke the bonds tying industry to Nature or at least that’s what it seemed to do as Matt Thompson described in C Brookdale early industrial processes were governed by natural processes they
Were embedded in specific Landscapes Abraham Darby the first could only run his Blast Furnace if that particular stream was flowing but watt’s steam engine could be run anytime night or day summer or winter as long as you had coal this was a radical New Concept power became portable and constant and Industrial
Processes began to detached from The rhythms and requirements of the earth people began to imagine that they could sever themselves from the rules of nature but there was a catch watt’s Innovation combined with Darby’s and many others kicked off a mass Mass migration of carbon from under
The ground to up in the air Planet Waring gases that have been locked away in the Earth’s crust are now circulating in our atmosphere knocking the climate that sustains us out of balance so we actually never did break free from the laws of nature we’ve just been temporarily ignoring Them in the mid 1770s with the American colonies revolting against the British crown Bolton and Watt started selling their new steam engines later parts for some of those engines were manufactured by the Darby’s in C Brookdale and this is a classic feature of the Industrial Revolution different Innovations
Intersect and help each other to grow one of the great ironies of watt’s story is that his steam engine burned less coal than its predecessor but that very efficiency made it wildly popular which led to a huge increase in Coal use when watt died in 1819 more coal was
Being burned than ever before well exactly uh it contributes to what we call pollution pre-industrial Revolution cities were polluted but you’ve got it on a larger scale and you’ve got coal being used in manufacturing and you’ve got all sort of chemicals being produced from different processes as well pouring into the
Atmosphere so a lot of these industrial towns would be dirty and filthy and smelly the air in many places became so polluted that It produced acid rain Malcolm says the stone walls of some beautiful old Cathedrals started to get worn Away by the toxic air and although there were definitely more things for
People to buy at a price more people could afford the process of making those things wasn’t pretty if we went into a 19th century town or factory we would see dirt smoke um a lot of people being injured um probably a lot of people looking sick
Women who would be doing a lot of sort of semiskilled um and lowly paid work um we’d probably be quite horrified to see the reality of that you you do have recreated factories but obviously they don’t create everything they can’t necessarily create the sort of atmosphere um the smells or the injuries
People had or people coming in with infectious diseases or the brutality that might exist as far as punishments were concerned if we want to get a glimpse of the horrors of industrial labor in the absence of protections for workers and the environment we don’t actually have
To try to imagine England in the 18th and 19th centuries all we need to do is look up factory conditions in China or Cambodia right now instead of learning from the Grim history of early industrial Britain we seem to keep repeating it and this takes us back to the notion
That the Industrial Revolution was all about progress led by individual Geniuses and their machines the full story has always been way too messy to fit into that nice clean narrative take the city of Birmingham sometimes described as the first modern industrial city so Birmingham was really an important place
There were links between Birmingham and The Wider world it was already a global City in the 18th century its trade extends Ed not just to Europe but to North America the Caribbean Africa there were links with the slave trade Britain had been involved in the slave trade since the
1500s but as with everything else the Industrial Revolution accelerated the speed and scale of slavery and its brutality Malcolm says guns made in Birmingham were sold to people who were enslaving other human beings in Africa iron wear made in this part of England maybe even in C Brookdale was also sold
To enslavers think shackles and chains but that’s really just the surface layer here the industrialization of Britain and later the United States was utterly intertwined with slavery take the iconic British textile trade as just one example by 1860 almost 90% of the cotton textiles coming out of British factories were made with cotton
Grown and picked by enslaved people in the US sugar tobacco and other early industries were also made profitable through slavery so from the very beginning the Industrial Revolution was never only about progress it brought both increased comfort and increased misery simultaneously as we built we destroyed as we Advanced we also regressed things
Got better and worse and everything in between all at once and they still are the transition from combustion engines to electrical Vehicles is happening and that’s a big win for the climate but some of the coal balt used in those electric vehicles is being mined by people including children who are
Working in horrible conditions in the Democratic Republic of Congo clearly we need to get more electric vehicles on the road as quickly as possible but if human rights are being abused in order to make that happen can we call it Progress this is the poisoned Apple at the heart of the fairy tale of endless advancement it celebrates achievement but doesn’t reckon with the costs it’s a story in which some people get to prosper while ignoring how their increased Comfort depends on the suffering of other people and the destruction of other
Places not only is this unjust it’s unsustainable because eventually there are no other people or other places there’s just us here together so I think what the climate crisis is showing us is that we need a new definition of progress rooted in the understanding that our advancement is
Completely bound up with the health of the Earth and each other I’m back in cold Brookdale walking alone through the forest that’s just behind Abraham Darby’s Blast Furnace this place this quiet little Natural Area this is as much a part of the Industrial Revolution as as the furnace that’s just behind
Me everything around me here helped to birth the Industrial Revolution the woods the stream the iron ore the coal the river we tend to edit nature out of this story and focus almost exclusively on our own Ingenuity but actually everything our species has accomplished has been a collaboration with the
Natural world and our continued survival depends on our ability to keep that collaboration going I think it’s worth paying attention to the fact that the so-called Industrial Revolution was really an industrial Evolution and like all forms of evolution it emerged out of Prior forms and I guess maybe where I’m going
Or where I’m arriving is I think that’s actually hopeful I don’t know it feels to me then like there’s much more potential for it to continue to evolve as our human needs and awarenesses Evolve to solve the climate crisis we don’t only need different forms of energy we need different stories different guiding myths we need to revise our concept of what it means for us to advance now there’s an awareness that we have the potential to do great damage and I think that awareness can
Matter if we want it to What If instead of trying to break the planet’s rules we applied our intelligence toward understanding them and figuring out how to live well within them together what if we spent the next 300 years defining progress as something that improves human lives and
Contributes to the health of the Planet I don’t know what that world would look like but I hope someday somebody gets to find Out I’m Justine calling from conquered New Hampshire reporting for this season of threshold was funded by the park Foundation the high stakes Foundation the pleades foundation news match the Luellen Foundation Montana public radio and listeners this work depends on people who believe in it and choose to
Support it people like you join our community at threshold podcast. org this episode of threshold was produced and reported by me Amy Martin with help from Nick mot and Erica janic the music for this season of our show is by Todd sick the rest of the threshold team is Eva
Kaa Talia Farnsworth cholal La wall Casey Simpson and Denine wey thanks to Sarah sneath Sally Deng Magie contas Hana KY Dan careno Luca bores Julia Barry Cara Cromwell Katie defusco Caroline CTS and Gabby pamon special thanks to Adam Reed and David nine For for