No it was not - animal power was.

It is VERY improbable that animal domestication pre-dates forced labour.

Equating renewable energy with slavery is breathtaking stupidity.

Equating renewable energy with slavery is breathtaking stupidity.

Because...?

Actually it is breathtakingly brilliant and very funny, you foolish toad. The luddite atavistic roots of the eco-statists are obvious and they can only get what they want by making us all slaves.

Slavery? Isn't that a bit optimistic?

Odd that slavery lingers on in some oil-rich countries.

To be sure: all muscle work is renewable energy, whether by animals, slaves or free laborers.
And yes, the "greens" want more muscle work and less burning of fuel.

Some "Greens" have a genuine concern about such things as the emission of C02 from the burning of oil and coal, and do NOT want to return us to, at best, slavery and, far more likely considering how many people industrial civilization supports, mass starvation.

James Lovelock, the father of the British environmentalist movement, suggested a way of telling people like himself (who do not support slavery and mass starvation) from "greens" who do wish to destroy industrial civilization.

Ask them whether they support nuclear power.

Sadly it turns out that most Greens are the bad sort of Green.

I've long wondered why the campaign to abolish slavery got into high gear in the mid-eighteenth century, i.e., around the same time the steam engine was invented, and were these two events related.

and do NOT want to return us to, at best, slavery and, far more likely considering how many people industrial civilization supports, mass starvation.

Of course they do not want. They are dumb enough not to realize the inevitable consequences of the policies they promote.
They basically want what all socialists want: stasis, no growth, no new anything.
Mass starvation (or slavery) is not the immediate result of their policies, it's rather gradual impoverishment.

You may be prosecuted for failing to separate your rubbish into whatever categories are currently fashionable. In Hertfordshire you are supposed to wash-up the tins and bottles that are left for recycling.

While this doesn't constitute slavery, it's clearly a step in that direction.

Where would we get the idea that environmentalists would embrace distasteful things like slavery or child labor in the name of conservation?