The indusTrial revoluTion^89the rest was in steady decline throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. The transition to a fossil fuel economy, as much as new farming
methods and a fashionable enthusiasm for ‘improvement’, sealed the fate of
many common wastes, providing further encouragement for their enclosure
and reclamation to feed the burgeoning population.
Conclusion
Before the 1860s, the direct impact of industrialization on England’s wildlife
was probably more limited, and less negative, than sometimes supposed.
Towns and industrial areas generally remained small by modern standards,
and were often interdigitated with farmland, market gardens and the like.
Quarries, waste tips, canals, railways and other industrial areas created new
habitats, highly unnatural in character but perhaps no more so than the fields,
woods and wastes of the wider rural landscape. Canals and railways also
served as corridors for wildlife: they provided a degree of interconnectivity
which was the counterpart, in biological terms, of that which allowed
industrialization and (as we shall see) agrarian modernization. But these
same improvements in communications also ensured that coal became the
principal domestic as well as industrial fuel in England. This, together with
other social and agrarian changes, rendered vast areas of woodland and
‘waste’ economically redundant, and thus encouraged their destruction.