Depending on the train schedule, we might see a train crossing one of the fields during our walk.
In 1712, Thomas Newcomen developed the first steam engine. His single coal burning engine, which he used to drain water from coal mines, operated much more cheaply and efficiently than the alternative – it replaced five hundred horses. The rest is history: Suddenly, instead of turning handles and cranks with their own muscles or with the muscles of their animals ... men and women could exploit the earth’s storehouse of fossilized energy to do the turning for them. First coal, then oil, then natural gas allowed for everything we consider normal and obvious about the modern world, from making fertiliser to making steel to making electricity. These in turn fed all the subsidiary revolutions in transportation and chemistry and communications, right down to the electron-based information age we now inhabit. Thus, because of its newfound usefulness for efficiency and economic growth, the environment became married to the economy without consent. After three hundred years of this marriage, the environment is a shadow of its former self and its accelerating sickness is almost past the point of recovery (from Deep Economy by Bill McKibben).
