How bad would ecological damage be with no industrial revolution?

zhropkick

Banned
The Netherlands was pretty agriculturally productive and densely populated, but despite being one of the birthplaces of capitalism it failed to be a birthplace of industrialisation. China is called an example of something called a "high level equilibrium trap" in which things are going alright so there isn't really any incentive to make great improvements to efficiency to industrialise. Obviously the industrial revolution in Europe had been in the making for a long time and wasn't just up to the steam engine, with the metal lathe in France, unique economic conditions and a multitude of other factors coming together to create something great, but let's for a second suppose that didn't happen. For whatever reason Europe pulls a China and stays more or less on the economic and technological verge of industrialisation for centuries more than it did in our timeline.

How bad is damage to the environment? Deforestation was getting very bad in Europe by the start of the industrial revolution. One of the things that motivated digging deeper than before for coal was a shortage of firewood if I remember correctly, I remember reading that poor people would burn seaweed in an attempt to keep warm in places. Pretty dramatic reforestation actually occurred across Europe during the 20th century. Large predatory animals were copping it pretty hard, bears had been wiped out in the UK by the early medieval period and wolves weren't doing too good either. Suppose the industrial revolution doesn't happen for whatever reason, Europeans continue to settle and colonise appropriate parts of the world as they do but end up stuck in the early modern era. What happens to forests and animal populations across the world? In Southern Russia the beaver was almost wiped out at the start of the 20th century and the European Eel is critically endangered, I'm not sure if their populations began to nosedive before or exclusively after industrialisation caused a population boom, but there will certainly always be demand for meat/fur and pretty severe reduction of their populations would have occurred already. If there are no metal lathes and no Savery engines, what does the state of forests and animals look like in ye olde 2019?
 

zhropkick

Banned
Map-of-European-wolf-distribution-showing-wolf-samples-n-177-and-population-clusters.png

Interesting map of the range of wolves in recent times, wolves became extinct in Britain by about the 16th century. I can't imagine we'd have stopped reducing the numbers and range, restricting them to mountain ranges like the Carpathians, the Dinaric Alps and the Appenines at best, as shown here. Then again, I'm not sure why they aren't present in greater numbers in the Alps.
 
GHG emissions would be a tiny fraction of what they have been. Given global warming is by far and away the biggest environmental degradation, this world is far better for the planet, albeit at the cost of vastly more poverty.
 
GHG emissions would be a tiny fraction of what they have been. Given global warming is by far and away the biggest environmental degradation, this world is far better for the planet, albeit at the cost of vastly more poverty.

Maybe, or if you looked at Qing China humanity would get trapped in a high-level equilibrium trap with billions of peasants toiling away on near-Malthusian limits just a few years away from a famine.
 
This probably depends on the specific POD but would agricultural and scientific improvements still continue to happen, just without the framework of industrial/technical advancements? For example, the 17th and 18th centuries saw huge gains in agricultural productivity in many countries. Just the spread agricultural techniques from Britain and the Netherlands will lead to quick growth in both population and agricultural output in Europe.
 
I read somewhere that by industrialising we actually delayed an imminent ice age. So with no industrial revolution the Little Ice Age might have become a full fledged ice age and put an end to civilisation.
 
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