What Do Lessons from the Industrial Revolution Have to Tell Us Today?

A historical reversal of direction underway?

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The nineteenth-century influenced the social-political and economic development of human life on earth in vibrant living color. Not! The nineteenth-century industrial revolution produced dreary over-crowded unsanitary conditions for human life, at its best.

While eleventh-century walls raised humanity out of fighting for survival to living for prosperity, the nineteenth-century steam power saved hours in production labor and sank humanity into a dank swamp of pollution and over-population. Even the baroque city, which Lewis Mumford detested for its hollow core, had its saving graces. If most of the population in a baroque city lived in squalor, the wealthy still created a healthy balanced living style for themselves, not so in the industrial revolution. The idea of a healthy relationship between humanity and nature was erased in the cities during the industrial revolution.

There is no more horrifying depiction of living condition…