Thomas Hardy speaks about environmental change in his recent book Tess of the D"Urbervilles.
Engines are ruining the countryside, imperfecting it, and turning it mechanical.
The environment in Tess's world is being changed constantly. She is caught up in it all, and is overwhelmed by it.
"I wished to see that the characters were very confused, just as I am, at the particular change that was going on now, with machines".
Machines are a very new invention, and they seem to process things much faster than the human hand can do.
In many ways, they can be bad. "The big red tyrant that the women had come to serve". Machines seem to be like the devil, as is explained in this excerpt from the book.
Farmers usually hire dozens of people around harvesting time, to help them collect the grain. Then they stay to process it, until it is ready to sell.
This year, machines have taken over the jobs that humans usually do, and the humans are just there to help the machines.
"I hate machines," exclaimed Hardy "I hate the way they make so much noise and pour out fire and smoke into the air".
Hardy seems to dislike the engines, and has portrayed them in the book as devils, monsters.
When Tess is at Tathboy's Dairy, and again at Flintcomb Ash, she has encounters with machines. She hates the way the workers now have to serve the machine, endlessly, instead of harvesting themselves.
"I think it would be a lot smarter if we didn't use machines for harvesting," Hardy is still adamant "They don't do the job as well as humans do. They may be faster, but they don't give such good quality as the harvesters do, and there is not as much of the grain at the end, as the machine wastes a lot more, which often, farmers can't afford".
It has been suggested that Tess is portrayed in the book as the environment. Perfect and beautiful. But then when Alec comes along, just as the engines do, she has suddenly lost her innocence and naivety.
