A lot of the environmental destruction, caused by the Industrial Revolution was reversed in the later 20th century, and made possible by the wealth produced by that revolution. The smogs and “pea-soupers” that still existed in the 1950's, disappeared in the 1960's, as Clean Air Acts were introduced. In the 1950's, as a child, every night, the sky above our street turned red, and the air was full of a choking sulphur, as the coke oven doors were opened at the nearby Birchenwood Gas and Coke Works. In other directions, a similar red glow filled the sky from the furnaces at the Goldendale and Shelton Iron and Steel Works, several miles away.
Across towns and cities in the industrial North and Midlands, buildings were a uniform black colour that we all took to be their natural state, until the soot was sand blasted from them, revealing their bright, sandstone features. A similar effect on people's lungs had no doubt taken place over all that previous time, until the Clean Air Acts reflected the fact that, now, much more efficient, and cleaner, North Sea Gas, was able to replace coal and coke.
In the following decades, rivers and canals that had died were cleaned, with fish returning to rivers they had not been seen in for a century, and canals became locations for a range of leisure activities. On the site of the previously mentioned Birchenwood Gas and Coke Works, which was, also, the site of an associated coal mine, iron works, and brickworks, had the distinction of being the most polluted land in Europe. My grandad worked at the pit in the 1920's and 30's, and, as kids, we would roam the area, walking across the fields up to Mow Cop. We would play on the various chunks of slag, dotted across the land that we called “Red Rock”. Another slag heap near the house where my mother grew up, was called “Starvation Banks”, because, during the '26 strike, and 1930's, they would go to pick any bits of coal they could find there.
In the 1960's, I saw the starvation banks reclaimed and trees planted on it. Similar transformations took place at other former colliery slag heaps throughout the city, for example, what is now Hanley Forest Park. Later, Birchenwood, itself, was reclaimed, being turned into a new housing estate, leisure and amenities facilities and so on.
A similar process is seen, now, with the Amazon, as inefficient methods of agriculture lead to extensive rather than capital intensive cultivation, to meet the demand. The result is the reckless cutting down and burning of rainforest, to quickly open up land for such agricultural production.
Duhring's claims about the large landed proprietor subjugating nature by first subjugating slaves, was a fiction.
“The very reverse is the case. Where he makes his appearance in antiquity, as in Italy, he does not bring wasteland into cultivation, but transforms arable land brought under cultivation by peasants into stock pastures, depopulating and ruining whole countries. Only in a more recent period, when the increasing density of population had raised the value of land, and particularly after the development of agricultural science had made even poorer land more cultivable—it is only from this period that large landowners began to participate on an extensive scale in bringing wasteland and grass-land under cultivation—and this mainly through the robbery of common land from the peasants, both in England and in Germany. But there was another side even to this. For every acre of common land which the large landowners brought into cultivation in England, they transformed at least three acres of arable land in Scotland into sheep-runs and eventually even into mere grounds for deer-hunting.” (p 226-7)
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