Impact Of The Industrial Revolution

The industrial revolution was responsible for making manufacturing processes faster and efficient, allowing for greater product output in less time. One example is the revolution of the textile industry. Before the advent of the hydraulic power loom, cloth making was a household task usually performed by women. With mills using technology and water power to their advantage, they drastically improved textile output, such as Theodore Steinberg's example of the 28 mills along the Merrimack River in Lowell, Massachusetts that produced roughly 50 million yards of cloth annually (169). The impact of this industrialization was a changing in mindset. The "commodification of nature" assigned a value on land and the environment based on their profitability. This mindset still generally prevails today. An example being continued reliance on fossil fuels due to their utility and lucrativeness and the dismissal of the potential damage they can cause.

These technologies provided an avenue for trade that ultimately turned the inland subsistence economies into market ones. The environmental impacts of steamboats included vast amounts of deforestation and the destruction of wildlife as humans populated the riversides to fuel and service the steamboat industry. The making of railroads caused environmental damage in itself as the clearing of landscapes was necessary to build track. On top of that, railroads relied intensively on resources like coal, timber, iron, and firewood which needed to be logged or mined (161). Transportation continues to be an industry that requires a large amount of resources and this has environmental consequences. The preeminent fuel sources are still fossil fuels which not only contribute to climate change, but are often extracted in ways dangerous to the