Was there any opposition in Great Britain during the Industrial Revolution to the use of coal or the burgeoning iron industry in regards to environmental concerns?

by Old_Man_Eloquent
agentdcf

I'm afraid I have very little time at the moment to do anything other than say "Mostly no, but a little bit of yes," and recommend a few books:

Peter Thorsheim, The Invention of Pollution--THE work on this topic, a cultural history of air pollution. The short story is that "pollution" was not even really a category of thing until after 1875 at the very earliest.

(Peter?) Brimblecone, The Big Smoke--older work, longer time frame but still useful

James Winter, Secure From Rash Assault--interesting book though deeply flawed; he argues that Britain's environment during the industrial revolution was "secure from rash assault," not exploited in the same ways that, say, the United States was. This is technically true though I think it misses the main point that the environments that fed Britain's industrialization were global, not local.

There was, of course, some resistance to the "satanic mills," though I think we should be very careful about attributing to that resistance a kind of nascent environmentalism. Instead, the resistance was more to economic exploitation, violations of the older "moral economy" occasioned by industrialization, and the perceived unnaturalness of the industrial city in total. For a good primary source on this, see Charles Dickens' descriptions of Coketown in Hard Times. The "environment" as a thing in need of protection and preservation is not a big deal in Britain until the late nineteenth or even early twentieth century.