7.2: How did we get here?

Industrialization, Extraction, and the Great Acceleration

Humans have changed environments for thousands of years. We have cleared forests, diverted rivers, irrigated deserts, domesticated species, built cities, hunted animals to extinction, transformed landscapes, and moved plants and animals across continents. So what exactly changed? Scale. And much of that change begins underground.

We Learned to Burn Ancient Sunlight

Coal, petroleum, and natural gas contain energy produced from ancient organic matter transformed over geological time. Industrial societies learned to access those concentrated stores of energy and use them at extraordinary scale. That changed almost everything. Coal powered factories, steamships, and railroads. Petroleum transformed transportation, warfare, agriculture, manufacturing, and global trade. Natural gas became central to electricity generation, heating, fertilizer production, and industry. Fossil fuels allowed societies to mobilize energy far beyond what contemporary forests, animals, wind, and flowing water could provide. Everything became accelerated, production, transportation, urbanization, extraction, and eventually, emissions accelerated too.

Industrialization Did Not Happen on an Empty Map

It is tempting to tell the Industrial Revolution as a story of ingenious machines appearing in Britain and then spreading around the world. The machines mattered. So did empire. European industrialization developed within global systems containing colonial land, enslaved and coerced labor, plantation production, extracted minerals, overseas markets, and global commodity chains. Cotton grown through enslaved labor in the Americas fed British textile production. Colonial territories supplied raw materials and provided markets for manufactured goods. Industrialization, capitalism, empire, and extraction became deeply intertwined. That history matters because environmental inequality did not begin with contemporary climate negotiations. For centuries, powerful states and companies have been able to obtain resources from distant places while locating many of the environmental and social costs of extraction elsewhere. Globalization expanded the distance between consumption and consequence.

1750 to 1945: Fossil Power

The early industrial era dramatically increased the use of coal, mechanized production, transportation networks, mining, and urban industry. Later, oil transformed mobility. Automobiles, aviation, mechanized warfare, industrial agriculture, petrochemicals, plastics, and global logistics became increasingly dependent on petroleum. Environmental problems expanded with them. Cities struggled with air pollution and sewage. Industrial waterways became contaminated. Mining transformed landscapes. Forest extraction accelerated. Colonial administrations reorganized land and agricultural systems around export production. Yet the scale of what came next was even larger.

After 1945: Fast Forward

Researchers use the term Great Acceleration to describe the dramatic increase in many forms of human activity and Earth-system change after the mid-twentieth century. Population grew. Global GDP expanded. Fertilizer consumption surged. Dam construction increased. International tourism expanded. Motor vehicles multiplied. Urban populations rose. Paper production, telecommunications, transportation, and consumption all accelerated. At the same time, atmospheric greenhouse gases increased, tropical forests declined, marine fisheries came under mounting pressure, and human influence over ecological systems became increasingly visible (Steffen et al., 2015). This does not mean every person suddenly became equally responsible for planetary change. Far from it. The Great Acceleration was profoundly unequal. Industrialized societies consumed much more energy and material per person than poorer societies. Wealthy households consumed more than poor ones. Corporations controlled enormous production networks. Colonial and postcolonial economic relationships shaped where resources were extracted and where commodities were consumed. That distinction becomes critical when we decide what to call our era.

Welcome to the Anthropocene?

The term Anthropocene has been used to describe a proposed geological epoch in which human activity has become a major force altering Earth systems. Atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen helped popularize the term in the early twenty-first century (Crutzen, 2002). The concept is powerful because it makes an enormous claim: Humans are no longer simply living on Earth. Collectively, human activities are changing Earth systems. But the word also produces an immediate problem. Which humans? A subsistence farmer and a billionaire with multiple homes do not have equivalent environmental footprints. A Pacific island community and an industrial petrostate did not contribute equally to historic greenhouse-gas emissions. A worker assembling electronics and a corporation deciding how millions of those devices are designed do not hold equal power over production. So some scholars argue that Anthropocene can make humanity sound more uniform than it actually is.

Or the Capitalocene?

Environmental historian Jason W. Moore and others have used the term Capitalocene to shift attention from humanity in general toward capitalist systems of production, extraction, labor, and accumulation (Moore, 2016). The point is not that one word is unquestionably correct and the other is wrong. They ask different questions.

Anthropocene: What have humans collectively done to the Earth system?

Capitalocene: Which historical economic systems organized that transformation, and who benefited most from them?

Other scholars emphasize colonialism, racial capitalism, plantation economies, patriarchy, or particular modes of industrial development. The vocabulary matters because explanations quietly contain theories of responsibility. If “humanity” caused the crisis, perhaps humanity needs to consume less. If fossil-fuel systems caused the crisis, perhaps energy systems need to be transformed. If corporate political power obstructs change, then corporate regulation becomes central. If colonial extraction helped create today's inequalities, questions of repair and redistribution enter the conversation. Same planet. Different diagnosis. Different prescription.

History Does Not Give Us an Excuse. It Gives Us a Map.

Understanding how industrialization created environmental problems does not mean deciding that everything terrible today is simply the fault of something that happened two centuries ago. History is useful because systems have path dependence. Once roads, cities, industries, electricity grids, laws, subsidies, housing patterns, and transportation networks are built around a particular energy system, changing them becomes difficult. That is why simply announcing “stop using fossil fuels” does not instantly reorganize the world. There are power plants to replace. Workers whose livelihoods depend on industries. Governments whose revenue depends on oil and gas. Communities organized around mining. Transportation networks designed around cars. Companies with enormous investments. Consumers accustomed to particular lifestyles. Energy transitions are therefore technological transitions, but they are also political, social, geographic, and economic transitions. And transitions generate conflict.

Population: More Complicated Than “Too Many People”

Environmental conversations have a habit of eventually arriving at population. If more people need food, housing, transportation, water, electricity, and consumer goods, it seems logical to assume that population growth must be one of the central causes of environmental pressure.

There is truth in that argument, but it becomes misleading remarkably quickly.

The global population grew dramatically during the twentieth century as mortality declined and life expectancy increased, yet the demographic story of the twenty-first century is becoming far more uneven. Fertility rates have fallen across much of the world, population growth is slowing globally, many societies are aging, some countries are beginning to shrink, and much of the remaining population growth is concentrated in particular regions, especially parts of sub-Saharan Africa. The United Nations projects that the world population will likely peak later this century rather than continue growing indefinitely (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs [UN DESA], 2024).

Demographers describe much of this change through the demographic transition, the long-term movement from societies characterized by relatively high birth and death rates toward societies with lower birth and death rates. Countries do not move through this transition at identical speeds, however, which means globalization is connecting societies experiencing very different demographic realities. Japan, South Korea, Italy, and other aging societies confront shrinking workforces and expanding elder-care needs, while younger societies face the very different challenge of creating sufficient education, housing, infrastructure, and employment for rapidly growing working-age populations.

Population also interacts with urbanization. More than half of humanity now lives in urban areas, concentrating enormous demands for housing, transportation, water, energy, food, and waste management while also creating opportunities for more efficient infrastructure and public services. A rapidly growing city built around automobiles and fossil fuels will create a different environmental footprint from an equally large city organized around dense housing and mass transit.

This is why population cannot be separated from consumption, technology, inequality, and power. A person born into a high-income, carbon-intensive economy may consume far more energy and materials over a lifetime than someone born in a much poorer country. Treating environmental degradation as simply a problem of “too many people” can therefore obscure enormous differences in resource use and historical responsibility.

The better Global Studies question is not simply How many people are there?

It is: How are population, consumption, technology, wealth, infrastructure, and access to resources interacting, and who has the power to shape those patterns?

Population matters. But numbers alone never tell the whole story.

From History to Governance

We now know how the problem became global. The next question is whether humans can cooperate well enough to manage resources and risks that cross borders.That brings us to one of the most famous arguments in environmental thought, and one of its most important rebuttals.