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ANSWER:
Long before the Industrial Revolution began, practically no wilderness areas were left in Britain and very few in western Europe. Almost every piece of land was covered with fields, forests, or pastures shaped by human activity, or by towns; yet humans continued to alter the environment. As they had been doing for centuries, people cut timber to build ships and houses, to heat homes, and to manufacture bricks, iron, glass, beer, bread, and many other items. North Americans transformed their environment on a vast scale. The Canadian and American governments seized land from the Indians and made it available at low cost to farmers and logging companies. Settlers viewed forests not as a valuable resource but as a hindrance to development. In their haste to open up the wilderness, pioneers felled trees and burned them, built houses and abandoned them, and moved on. The cultivation of cotton in the South was especially harmful. Planters cut down forests, grew cotton for a few years until the soil was depleted, and then moved west, abandoning the land to scrub pines. In industrializing Europe, raw materials once grown on the landsuch as wood, hay, and woolwere replaced by materials found underground, like iron ore and coal, or obtained overseas, like cotton. Across Europe the expansion of coal and iron mining had dramatic effects on the environment. As the population increased and land grew scarcer, the cost of growing feed for horses rose, creating incentives to find new, less land-hungry means of transportation. Likewise, as iron became cheaper and wood more expensive, ships and many other objects formerly made of wood began to be made of iron.
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