This is the life isn't it? Hmm? The bit you dream about all year,
getting away from the rat race, soaking up all the sun and the fun somewhere exotic.
Good stuff.
And with new package tour destinations all the time
and costs going down and so on,
a lot of people can go to places
that they could never have dreamed of going to just a few years ago.
And yet, the whole concept of time-off is a new thing.
It has only been around as long as we have had the world we live in today,
the world back home, you know, working to the clock,
the daily routine, the job prospects, making the money,
the car, the house, all the possessions we all share, as long as we have got a job.
The whole rat race.
All that, like time-off, it’s machine made.
Everything you do, everything around, is mass produced,
everything from your underwear to this cruise liner.
Life today consists of thousands of identical bits made by other people for you to buy.
Just like they buy what you make with the money that they earn from selling you the things they make.
And then, once a year, everybody stops doing it to each other and does it with the tourist industry.
And they are just as mass-produced as everybody else,
just as dependent on the power that we all take so much for granted.
You are not quite sure I am talking about.
Power?
Look at all this in terms of what you couldn't have
if you had to make it and move it with your own bare hands.
The irony is, our modern ability to escape to sunny foreign parts like the Caribbean,
get away from home, started with a bunch of people
who were here in the West Indies, 300 years ago.
The irony is, all they wanted to do, desperately,
was get out of here and go home.
Now, although these 18th century African slaves were doubtless homesick,
they are not the ones I am talking about.
I mean the people who owned these people.
If you were English and you wanted to make oodles of boodle,
you came out here to Malaria, Yellow Fever, Dysentery, Hookworm,
and the most valuable real estate in the world.
One steamy Caribbean island made more profit than all the American colonies, together.
It was sugar cane and slavery that did it. Good job slaves were cheap.
Thanks to the way they were worked, most of them only lasted seven years after they got here.
Sugar producers then were like oil producers now: what they had, everybody wanted
and, like oil producers now, ostentatious expenditure was their thing, made life bearable.
Buccaneers and humidity earned the Caribbean the name “dunghill of the universe”.
And at the bottom of the heap, so to speak, were the Africans.
Brutalised, savagely flogged for the slightest mistake, living at virtually starvation level.
The way to control thousands of slaves was “keep them frightened”.
The planters discouraged riots with a particularly effective trick.
They burnt the rioters’ legs off. But anyway, out of sight out of mind, eh?
After years of gilded hardship, the planter’s dream was to use his profits to buy estates in England
and retire to live surrounded, again,
by labourers destitute and poverty stricken, but English.
Of course, the new sunburnt squires from over the seas passed all this misery
by without a second glance as they rocketed from one set of good times to another.
Their life was one long spending spree, interspersed with huntin’, shootin’, fishin’, parties and booze.
They bought horses and jewels and more land and villages and titles
and more plantations back in the Caribbean and jobs in Parliament and positions at court,
you name it.
Oh, and manor houses and servants too, of course.
And then, about 1700,
having run out of things to buy,
some of these beaucolic buffoons up in East Anglia, started ploughing the ill-gotten gains
into improving the land.
You see, the big problem of the time was livestock.
In winter, when nothing grows, cows have this unfortunate habit of still being hungry.
Well that is okay, you just slaughter them.
Then what do you do for meat the following year?
The new alternative was watermeadows.
You cover your meadow with 1 inch of running water,
keeps off the frost, and the grass grows for the animals throughout the year.
Or better, the new continental wonder root, the turnip.
Grew in autumn, ready in winter, animals loved it.
Another high-tech import was clover,
it put nitrogen in the soil, though they didn't know it.
And it would turn the worst scrub into instant arable.
That's when they started saying somebody was “in clover” when he was well-off.
And then, one of them had a really brilliant idea.
Take a group of fields, and rotate the crops in them:
wheat first, then corn, then turnips, then clover, then wheat again and so on.
Does good things to the soil, gives you four times the yield.
And then, in 1720, came something that nobody could have ever expected.
30 years of incredible weather. Bumper harvests, food prices down, wages up.
The result? What we call the ploughman's lunch.
Actually, a real improvement in the peasants’ diet.
Beer in a glass, white bread, potatoes, fresh vegetables.
Life became just a bit like those ads you see on television for country fresh eggs.
I said, “just a bit”, because, by our standards, life in merry England with its totalitarian landlords
hanging people for stealing a shilling, and no travel without a permit,
wasn't at all like the chocolate-box, Constable-painting view of it we get nostalgic about.
Still, as far as English peasants were concerned, good times were here.
Real luxuries like cottages with walls of stone instead of cow dung,
jobs in the building trades
that were booming because of the spare money around
and the families everybody was having, because they could afford to.
And as the population went up,
so did the demand for equipment and implements and, most of all, for furnishings
and household goods.
Now, if the general riff-raff were making hay like this down on the farm,
think how much the landlords were making.
In no time at all, England had a most unusual cash flow problem.
Too much cash, and not enough flow. No way to move the money around.
Fortunately, however we had recently gone Dutch.
You see, the Dutch had had this amazing new folding stuff for decades.
And what the existence of paper money meant was that they already had a credit system going
and a central bank to make it all respectable enough for people to take this paper promise,
instead of the real thing in gold.
Why were the Dutch so clever? Well, they were running the shop at the time.
Biggest traders in Europe, the Dutch, with entrepreneurs out everywhere from Japan
to South America, bringing home everything from pomegranates to parrots
and selling it all back here in Europe at cutthroat prices.
Your throat.
And in financing all this mercantile marketeering,
the Dutch banks were, of course, streets ahead of everybody else in the fine art of
‘taking a percentage’.
So, on the good old English principle of “if you can't beat them join them,”
in 1688 we invited a Dutchman over to kind of, be King.
And, sure enough, he brought with him the secret that would make England great:
how to live up to your neck in debt.
The first thing he did was to borrow a million
from a bunch of happy investors who set up the Bank of England to do it.
In return, of course, for a fat profit, the right to raise taxes and to print money.
And then, we were away.
You wanted to borrow? Well, new Dutch-type laws made it easy to get a mortgage on your land.
Or you could write IOUs that would circulate just like the new open cheques.
Investment?
With the newly invented Limited companies all you risked was your share.
Oh, and there were the new stocks and shares. And if they were in shipping or property,
well, marine insurance and fire insurance took the risk of that.
Net result? More money going around, lower interest rates, more borrowing,
for more investment, in more companies, so more money going round.
So why was I telling you that on a boat in a Dutch harbour?
Well, the irony is that having pinched their credit system,
generated in the first place by overseas trade from ports like Hoorn in northern Holland,
we then went on to pinch their overseas trade.
Quite took the wind out of their sails, that did.
Nice little pile, that, isn't it? Money from overseas trade. Well, petty cash, really.
Some really rather English things started because of the spectacular loads of filthy lucre
finding its way into this country from India and the colonies.
Things like this: our national taste for tea with sugar.
They both arrived on the English palate from East and West at the same time,
Tea merchants made a fortune.
One of the other English things, was “being something in the city”.
All that commission to be made from insuring ships and new ideas like import/export.
Oh, trade was now quite respectable.
Third thing, stately homes.
See, with no tax on profits, that's what I said, a fellow had enough of the readies to buy himself
a peerage, marry the right girl, invent an ancestral home.
Mid 18th century, a lot of these went up,
as the material wealth of certain Indian princes went down, you understand.
Anglo-Palladian was all the rage, architecturally.
We’d call it “conspicuous consumption”, I think. Care to see some?
Well, here we are, and, as you are no doubt thinking, yes, most of them bought it by the yard.
This is what you get when money is no object.
As a matter of fact, now, was when modern house layout began.
Dining rooms, sitting rooms, lavatories, that kind of stuff.
Library. They didn't read much, but you had to have one.
Anyway, John Locke, philosopher, 18th century influential, and bore.
He is the fellow who made sure every Englishman's home was his castle.
Revolutionary idea, that the King couldn't grab your stuff any time he felt like it,
they could everywhere else. Not England.
Here, the government could hang you,
but it couldn't touch your property or stop you passing it on.
“And,” said Locke, “that being the only purpose of government,
to protect your property rights, the only sane kind of deal was a social contract,”
note the trading vocabulary, “between you and the government
to allow everybody to pursue their own enlightened self interest”.
A kind of mutual ‘hands-off’.
Well, the stately home owners loved it
and, since anybody with the wherewithal could buy into the upper crust,
that attitude encouraged ambition and drive.
We British became really rather dynamic back then. For a bit.
Which left only one fly in the economic appointment,
when you have ploughed all your money into agriculture and slaves and colonising and trade,
and all you got all for your effort was even more money. What then?
Well, I said that everybody could buy into the game. Not quite.
Fortunately for the rest of this programme, one rather earnest bunch couldn't.
This is the earnest lot I was talking about,
the Dissenters: free churchmen who wouldn't sign loyalty oaths
and got the book thrown at them.
They couldn't meet in public, study at university, hold municipal office,
go to Parliament, join the army, preach within 5 miles of a city
because they were considered to be potentially dangerous revolutionary fanatics.
They were, however, allowed to have babies.
The end and design of infant baptism,
by which rite the parents, solemnly dedicate their offspring to the service of God
and to Jesus Christ whom he has sent,
is to impress on the minds of the parents, a sense of their duty towards them,
in their innocent and helpless age.
There was one other thing, the Quakers, Baptists, Unitarians, Presbyterians and
Congregationalists were free to do.
They could indulge in the one thing the snob English gentry considered beneath their dignity.
They could go into industry. So, one thing you could be sure of,
this kid was going to grow up wanting to do better than his tradesman father.
..that, as soon as he becomes capable of learning, you will instruct him in the Christian religion,
according to the best understanding and abilities you are indued with.
By the middle of the 18th century, the Dissenters were doing alright, considering.
In small time jobs in local commerce, though some of them, Quakers,
had gone to Pennsylvania to get away from the prejudice and lack of religious freedom.
I baptise thee in the name of the Father,
and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
The Dissenters had one thing going for them, though.
They had an inexhaustible amount of optimism and a dedicated urge to succeed.
Let us pray.
Almighty God,
However, with the road to power and position blocked,
you wouldn't have thought the poor kid had a prayer.
But that is reckoning without these extraordinary people.
Thanks to the way their talents had been channelled, they were almost single handedly to turn England
from a bunch of sea-faring farmers, into a nation of technocrats.
And, thanks to the priority Dissenters gave education,
leading England into the greatest revolution ever was going to be child’s play.
On the basis of ‘if you can't join them, beat them’,
the Dissenters set up their own academies all over the country, like this one at Ackworth in Yorkshire,
and started training their kids for the only job left open to them,
that of entrepreneurial millionaire tycoon, ready and willing to profit from the fact
that they were surrounded by potential customers with more money than sense,
A) because the Dissenters religion didn't oblige a tycoon to wait for his reward in heaven
and B) because these places were turning out the 18th century equivalent
of the Harvard Business School graduate, onto the greatest bull-market the world has ever seen.
And not a competitor in sight.
The secret of their success?
A religion that put profit next to piety.
A workaholic attitude towards life and, above all, an educational system that was without equal.
In their classrooms, they had learned what the real world was just desperate for:
maths, foreign languages, engineering, accountancy, commerce, and the latest science.
With up to date equipment and experimental learning techniques.
And everything, taught in English, not Latin.
With the universities from which the Dissenters were excluded
turning out clerics whose idea of a balanced equation was “how many angels you could get on the head of a pin”
these academy boys moved in on the manufacturing industries without opposition.
And, backed by a nationwide Dissenter old-boy network,
determined to keep it in the family,
by 1760 or so,
they were a regular underground movement.
Dissenters had most of the mining concessions in the country,
and here in the English woods, was where they started their revolution.
With coalmines nobody wanted, until a Dissenter called Abraham Darby found a use for them.
People couldn't make enough household utensils to satisfy rising demand
because, until Darby solved the problem,
there just wasn't enough wood around to burn to heat the furnaces,
to smelt all the metal, to make all the goods.
Coal had impurities that produced bad metal, so Darby burnt them out and used the coke.
And that is when things really took off, because England was an island built on coal.
The fuel crisis was over. Just as well, they were running out of trees.
These coke-fired Dissenter furnaces produced cast-iron everything:
boxes, grates, hearths, shears, sickles, pokers, rakes, kettles, frying pans, ladles,
weights,
and the reason they make pots of money,
pots.
I said the fuel crisis was over. That left another crisis,
one that really stymied any would-be millionaire businessman
because it kept his business well away from the markets, and up in the hills.
Any business that needed power.
These water mills, making anything you needed to bang, grind, draw, saw, spin,
anything but hot metal, ran their mill-wheels in mountain streams.
That is why they were up in the hills, and so was all the industry.
Especially textiles.
And producing up in the hills meant your deliveries weren't going to be exactly hot foot.
This was another reason why industry stayed small-scale.
What was the point in producing tons of goodies,
if all it was going to do was fall-off in the mire down some packhorse trail
while racing to market at speeds between 3 miles an hour and stop?
And this was the express service. There were no roads worth mentioning.
So, what with this stick-in-the-mud approach to transportation,
and industry scattered on isolated mountainsides all over the place,
the business of getting business to do more business
was something of an uphill task.
Still, for the Dissenters with no option but industry, uphill or not,
it was money.
Well, here we are in the back of beyond, that's anywhere north of London in 1760 or so,
you are one of those small-scale Dissenter industrialists,
you look around and what do you see? I will give you a clue.
Not enough of this stuff around, for a start. Ready cash.
But at the same time, miles and miles of untapped supply-and-demand country.
On the one hand, all those hooray-henrys with their left-over wealth from overseas trade,
slaves, rents, land improvement, and on the other, local councils wanting money to build new bridges.
All over the country, industrialists were short of the wherewithal to expand,
tradesmen were desperate for collateral to buy new stocks and people were looking for mortgages.
Well, as they say in these parts, it was just a matter of finding a way to let the dog see the rabbit.
Let the demand get at the supply.
Well, sure enough, a way was found, by the Dissenters to give them credit,
or to give other people credit, which is what happened.
Because, where no upright, establishment English gent would have dreamt of taking banking to the provinces,
that wasn't beneath a certain Quaker called Lloyd.
This one, I mean. Followed hotly by another called Barclay.
By 1770, there were 10 banks outside London.
Now, if all went well, industry would no longer have lie around waiting for everything to go via London.
Now the idea was that spare money in East Anglia could, for instance,
be directly available for investment in the Midlands, where small villages like Manchester
were only waiting for the cheque to arrive.
And that was the operative word. Waiting.
Because, until somebody did something about the state of the roads,
waiting was all anybody was going to be doing.
Well, guess who did do something about the state of the roads?
Yes, the Dissenters.
They formed companies to finance gangs of Irish labourers to cut routes across country following lines on a map.
Navigators, they were called, or “navvies”.
In ten years, they had done 500 miles, along which you could take stuff on a ride as smooth as silk.
The Dissenter engineers built a transportation network
that could take any amount of traffic you wanted to move on it.
At one stroke, they had bridged the gap to high-level production.
Their road carried 400 times what a packhorse would.
Because it wasn't a road.
You could take up to 80 tons on a barge,
80 tons of those boring, bulk supplies without which, high standards of living don’t happen.
And with genius engineering like staircase locks,
you took your limestone, fertiliser, bricks, salt or whatever
up-hill and down-dale, with ease.
In mid 18th century, thanks to the canals,
things started moving around the country like never before.
Non-stop, that is. Deliveries that had once taken months, now took only days.
Now, canals may look very quaint and snail’s-pace to you.
But I will have you know, that in their time, they kicked the 18th century economy into high gear,
they gave the country new engineering skills, and they made a noise like money.
You see, if you owned a bit of land with a coal mine on it and you used your agricultural revolution
profits to cut yourself a canal to the nearest city, then bingo.
Like His Grace the Duke of Bridgewater who did just that that in 1759, bingo, as I said,
you were knee-deep in loot.
I mean, look at it from a cash register point of view. In the old days: it rained,
the roads got muddy, the transportation costs went up. Now?
The more water the better. So, like the Duke,
you moved coal to Manchester for 1/6 the previous cost,
but you sell it for one half the previous price, get it?
And was it ever a seller's market?
millers, bakers, brewers, potters all those guys who needed the fuel
to make the stuff to sell to the growing city crowds.
Plus, of course, the irresistible novelty of the way your canal could now bring to simple city folk,
exotic goods and materials from foreign parts, like the next county.
All this, and the only word you were hearing from the customer is “more, more”.
Well?
In no time at all there was a canal network stretching out from Birmingham,
connecting coal fields, cities, ports. Everything looked super-colossal
except for one, dull thud.
Those moron industrialists up on the hills, who wouldn't come down because that's where their water-power was.
And there were millions to be made, if only you could solve their problem. But how?
And all the time, life and profits were slipping by.
It was enough to make a, good, honest Dissenting entrepreneur turn to drink.
In a way, the problem of lack of power for industry was solved by turning to drink.
This drink. Scotch. Cheers.
See, by 1761,
the recent union of England with Scotland, that opened up enormous markets to the Scottish producers,
had the whisky distillers here in the Highlands desperate to cash in,
by getting output up, and costs down.
And when these canny 18th century Scotsmen talked about “profit from whisky”,
the most heated arguments were about heat.
You will see what I mean in the distillery, down there.
The thing that got the distillers all steamed up about making this wonderful golden stuff,
was the cost of boiling the raw materials to start the distilling process.
How much fuel, at what expense? Because nobody had money to burn.
And the other problem was exactly how much water you needed
to condense the vapours back into the magic liquid.
It was a Glasgow University professor called Joseph Black who found the answer.
Because he said he used to wonder why a hot sunny day didn't melt all the snow on the hills around here.
Obviously, because it took a lot more heat than you would expect
to melt ice.
So, he took some, and left it for 10 hours,
together with the same amount of near-freezing water,
and as the water rose fairly quickly to room temperature,
the thermometer showed it was warming at a rate of 14°F every hour.
Now, to do the same, melt and get up to room temperature,
the ice had to be left for all 10 hours.
So, at the general warming rate that meant that the ice had absorbed
10 times 14°, 140° of heat.
But the thermometer in it had only gone from freezing to room temperature.
So obviously, when the ice changed to water,
there was a lot of heat involved that didn't show on the thermometer.
Hidden heat.
So, did the same thing happen when you went from water to steam?
Black put two identical amounts of water over the same slow fire.
This one, from cold to boiling, heated up at a rate of about 40° an hour.
By the time this one had all boiled away in steam,
it had absorbed no less than 810° of heat.
Well, that was it, bar the shouting.
Black was able to come up with figures that would show how much fuel you would need,
for how long, to vaporise how much liquid,
and then how much water you would need to condense that steam back into liquid.
Black’s little experiment had two results. One: it made the distillers happy,
and two: it changed the entire world.
The fellow who made Black's experimental gear was another Dissenter called James Watt,
who used Black's figures to perfect the engine that would drive us all into the machine age.
Because it brought industry down out of the hills.
And with typical Dissenter know-how, Watt didn't sell his steam engine,
he charged his buyers one third of the fuel savings it made them, every year.
In 1781, Watt’s assistant invented a way to use the push-pull action of a steam piston
to turn a wheel, and industry no longer needed water-power to drive its machine belts.
The new factories, with their coal-fired steam engines, went up in the growing coalfield towns.
Growing, because industrial expansion sucked in thousands from the countryside
to stand hour after hour over the new automatic cotton-weaving machines.
They even shipped orphan children in from London,
to meet the insatiable demand for industrial labour of every kind.
In the new mills and factories they started, for the first time ever,
doing the kind of work we would call work. I mean: repetitive,
every day of the week, with Sundays off and regular wages.
And they also started doing it at night, too, thanks to a new French lamp that lit the place up like noon.
So, with machines that never tired or made a mistake 24 hours a day,
and plenty of light to see by, production could go round the clock, too.
Shift work was invented.
Steam made an almost incredible difference, in 1800,
one factory installed a 100 horsepower engine.
It did the work of 880 men, ran 50,000 thread-winding spindles,
created jobs for 750 people, and turned out 226 times more product
than they had before steam.
People from villages who had never looked at a clock were
worked like machines themselves. In unspeakable conditions,
for regular wages.
And there was a new kind of customer, too. Living in the new suburbs.
The up and coming middle classes had an appetite for possessions that couldn't be satisfied.
Thanks to a fellow who practically invented the idea of “keeping up with the Joneses”.
He was Josiah Wedgewood, potter to the Royal family.
You knew that because it was on his bills, letterhead, catalogues, ads and wherever else he could get it.
Whatever he made vases, medallions, ornamental work,
he made people want it for snob reasons.
Even tableware. That's why the biggest seller, this stuff, was called ‘Queensware’.
You and the Queen eating off the same plates, get it?
By the end of the century, Wedgewood had exhibitions in London.
Invitation only, gentry only, ads in all the posh papers,
travelling salesman with free delivery and money back guarantees,
clients everywhere from China to the USA,
and the first steam-powered factory going night and day to keep up with demand.
By the time he had finished, if you didn't have Wedgwood,
you were nobody.
And for the first time ever, that kind of middle-class thing started to matter.
Because consumerism had arrived.
Our modern expectation of continually rising standards of living started
with the 18th century industrial middle class.
And in the increasingly crowded cities, with new paved streets and gaslight,
there was a new kind of building called a “shop”, with plate glass windows
persuading you that what had been luxuries, like cutlery or table linen,
were now the decencies of life. And the decencies?
Well, they were now absolute bare-necessities, weren't they?
But all this new spending power created new jobs and that
meant more training and that meant more illiterates had to be taught to read and write.
And with the presses available, that meant, in the long run,
the voice of an entirely new group of people beginning to be heard.
They were, not surprisingly, the workers.
And, basically, what they were saying was “No. Regular wages wasn't enough
when you lived in stinking slums with factory bosses who felt no responsibility towards you,
other than as machine fodder to be worked until you dropped”.
They started coming together for support and protection,
in clubs and societies that would one day turned into trades unions.
And an ideology that would stand for one side of the split in society that the industrial revolution created:
between capital and labour, master and man, management and workforce,
whatever you want to call it.
A split, essentially created by the machines, that changed the meaning of the word “work”,
back in that 18th century world we still keep alive in industrial museums like this one.
The split, we don't need a museum for. It's alive all over the world,
thanks to the other steam engine that exported our industrial revolution to everybody else,
on the railways.
The railways started very modestly. In 1825,
the first 27 miles of track carried a few daredevils on a joyride.
But, basically, the railway was there to do what canals did,
only faster, to carry bulk supplies.
And then, in no time at all, there were railways all over the British Empire.
Or was it railways that made the Empire happen?
Either way, we were laying lines up the jungle, here in Jamaica,
as early as 1843. The Imperial goods trains removed the wealth of the colonies to England
extremely efficiently.
But the thing that really sent the steam engine people off the rails,
because they were all ready to haul freight and nothing else, was the way the public wanted to go for a ride.
It was as if, after centuries of being stuck down on the farm,
they just couldn't resist the thrill of rocketing off to anywhere at 25 miles an hour.
So, while the population shot up, thanks to the general improvement in wages and diet,
because now, of course, the trains were bringing fresh food into the cities every day,
people started doing something else new.
They started marrying people from the other end of the country for the first time.
Fortunately for all, in-breeding was out.
The railways really made the modern world happen.
Because they separated the consumer from the producer,
so that today you and I couldn't survive alone even if we wanted to.
They united the country because they brought the papers with the national news in them,
and the new postal services that let people talk to each other long distance.
They boosted business with trainloads of raw materials, consumer goods and salesman.
They set all the clocks to the same time.
Whatever the weather, they delivered all the bits necessary to make a standardised world,
like a nationwide conveyor belt. But above all, they started a kind of “industrial feedback”.
They carried coal, to smelt iron, to make railways, that burned coal,
to carry coal, to smelt iron, and so the spiral went up and up.
All the industrial production figures go off the top of the graph in the middle of the 19th century.
And then, as a result, here we are, back in the tourist paradise of Jamaica where we began,
among the sugar plantations that helped to start it all off.
In a world health, wealthier, more diverse, more mobile, more optimistic than ever in history,
because each one of us leads a life that would have taken dozens of servants and a small fortune,
before this all began.
Thanks to the Dissenters and the landowners and the colonial buccaneers
and the Industrial Revolution they helped to make possible, we don't need servants.
Thanks to machines we have the muscle power to change the shape of the planet.
That good weather back in 1720 and the Industrial Revolution started the population growing,
matching the way the production figures were going, faster and faster upwards.
Today, the population depends on finding more raw materials for production,
every day.
In Jamaica, for instance,
one quarter of the country is being scraped away because it contains Bauxite.
You make aluminium from it.
Worldwide, we are pulling out of the ground: 2 billion tons of oil,
3 billion tons of coal, 750 million tons of iron,
820 million tons of copper-ore, and so on.
And that's in one year.
Makes you wonder how much more there is to come.
Of course, the other side of the coin is that if you live in a fun world, you have got to pay for the ride.
The “onward and upward” style of Western life, the good times, the ‘throwaway’ philosophy
that goes with building a new model every year, so that everybody can keep their jobs,
and they can increase their standard of living, is really a 19th century way of doing things.
That's what the industrial revolution gave us, the desire for more, bigger, better, cheaper, faster.
And back then,
there was hardly anybody around to make much of a dent in the raw materials they started to dig up
to turn into amazing luxuries, or “bare-necessities” as we would call them now.
Today, whole countries rely, almost totally, on the raw material that they have that we want.
Chrome, copper, gold, silver, tin, platinum, or, in this case,
Bauxite.
And you see, it is easy enough to get that. Sure, we can alter the shape of the planet with our new found industrial muscle.
We can turn it into a giant hole in the ground.
Then what?