Nature

&

Industrial

America

Key Features of the Gilded Age

• Rapid economic growth caused my mechanization and industrial production.

 

• Mass immigration from Europe to provide labor for new industrial economy.

 

• Large social unrest due to unprecedented environmental and economic conditions.

Questions to  Consider

• How did a new industrial economy impact the natural world?

 

• How did Americans react to these new economic and environmental changes?

 

• How did the industrial economy fundamentally change American ideas about nature?

George Perkins

Marsh

1801 - 1882

"The object of the present volume is: to indicate the character and, approximately, the extent of changes produced by human action in the physical conditions of the globe we inhabit; to point out the dangers of imprudence and the necessity of caution in all operations which, on a large scale, interfere with the spontaneous arrangements of the organic or the inorganic world... [and] to suggest the possibility and the importance of the restoration of disturbed harmonies and the material improvement of wasted and exhausted regions..."

 - George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature (1864)

Extraction

Gold Rush

Iron Ore

Logging

Peshtigo

Fire

October 8, 1871

Urban Nature

Waste

Chicago

Reversing the

Chicago

1900

River

Alice

Hamilton

1869-1970

"It was while I was living in Hull-House and working in bacteriological research that the opportunity came to me to investigate the dangerous trades of Illinois - not those where violent accidents occurred, but those with the less spectacular hazard of sickness from some industrial poison...

 

...The employers could, if they wished, shut their eyes to the dangers their workmen faced, for nobody held them responsible, while the workers accepted the risks with fatalistic submissiveness as part of the price one must pay for being poor."

- Alice Hamilton, Exploring the Dangerous Trades (1943)

Boone &

Crockett

Club

John

Muir

1838-1914

Questions

• Why did Muir think it so important for people to go into the "wilderness?" How might it benefit people?

• How did Muir interpret the industrial transformation of North America? Who poses the greatest threat to wilderness"