Timber depletion in England drove the exponential rise of coal mining.

Evidence

As a consequence of English timber exploitation, coal mining rose exponentially. Between 1540 and 1640, outputs from coal mines increased from a few hundred tons a year, mined by part-time tenant farmers and husbanders, to 10,000–15,000 tons, extracted by hundreds of full-time miners. Coal shipped out of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne to other parts of England rose sixteenfold during this same period. As London needed more and more coal to replace its dwindling supplies of wood, imports increased twentyto twenty-fivefold. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 331

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Supports the ‘Grafting & Growth’ article’s theme of trees as civilization’s load-bearing infrastructure by showing the causal chain from ship timber depletion to fossil-fuel substitution.
• XREF: connects to: London’s seventeenth-century coal smoke already triggered ecological health crises — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 894

Broader Connections

• London’s seventeenth-century coal smoke already triggered ecological health crises #expands (0.82) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 894