ABSTRACT
Many of the environmental problems that pose an enormous challenge to humanity now, and for the future, are deeply rooted in the past. From the fifteenth century onwards economic expansion, technological innovation, population growth and increasing urbanisation have seen humans transform the earth to an unprecedented degree. Overseas colonialism, especially the advance of European empires after 1492, reordered the world’s ecology. Wholesale introductions of domesticated species such as wheat, barley, rice, cattle, sheep and goats by European colonisers created ‘neo-Europes’ in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere. The diffusion of high-yielding New World crops throughout the Old, together with plantation-grown coffee, tea, sugar and cacao, also improved food supplies and laid the foundations for a sustained rise in the world’s population. But the spread of commercial enterprise and monocultural agriculture around the globe had devastating long-term environmental consequences, including deforestation, species loss and soil erosion. Natural resources were often ‘mined’ to exhaustion as traditional constraints on their use broke down at the frontiers of expanding European and non-European empires. The dominant attitude towards nature in early modern Europe was perhaps best expressed by the English philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon, who announced, ‘The world is made for man, not man for the world.’
