ABSTRACT
Environmental slavery has been sustained beyond the defunct institution of human slavery, and it has contributed disproportionately to the wealth of capitalist economies while creating a disproportionately negative impact upon the biogeochemical cycles within those environments upon which the descendants of both slaves and native peoples are left to salvage their livelihoods. At the global level, ecosystems are fundamental to life in that they create biophysical feedback mechanisms between the living and nonliving components of the planet, and these feedback loops regulate and sustain local communities, continental climate systems, and global biogeochemical cycle. Many social and environmental problems being encountered in the modern world are the consequences of the prevailing domineering attitudes and activities of a capitalist worldview toward the earth's welfare, these behaviors being relics carried over from the era of New World Slavery. The widely practiced human habit of breaking up the landscape into smaller disconnected parcels has become known as habitat fragmentation.
