When we look at this era’s great mistakes this way, an interesting pattern emerges. As industrialized countries advanced and became more prosperous, they first started treating humans better. They stopped enslaving people or making children work and eventually gave up claims to foreigners’ lands. Better treatment of animals was slower to come and in some cases arrived too late to save a species. And better treatment of our planet came last of all. We kept heedlessly plundering and polluting it for almost two centuries after the Industrial Revolution started.
