what were the environmental consequences of the industrial revolution

One of
the unfortunate side effects of the great advancements made in the industrial revolution was an
extraordinarily negative impact on the Earth's natural environment. With advances in living
standards as well as medicine, there came a population boom due to increased life expectancy and
reduced infant mortality. With such an increased population came an increased need for goods and
services, and nations burned through natural resources with reckless abandon. Though the spirit
of human advancement and innovation was in the right place, we often approached new and emerging
technologies as miraculous new substitutes for labor without fully understanding the
environmental ramifications.

For instance, the popularized use of coal
devastated the living conditions in cities by producing smog and poisoning water supplies.
During the time of the industrial revolution, human beings were not as acutely aware of global
scale as we are today by being connected with the entire world through the web. It was not as
plain at the time to see that for every bit of coal an individual would burn, hundreds of
thousands of others were doing the same. It was very easy to brush off a small amount of
pollution as "no big deal." Of course, we see the consequences of this today.