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Even hunter-gatherers have HUGE impact on the environment. They often set fires to clear underbrush in forests (making hunting easier) or wildfires in grasslan
by rmah 10y ago
Even hunter-gatherers have HUGE impact on the environment. They often set fires to clear underbrush in forests (making hunting easier) or wildfires in grasslands to drive herds of animals (again for hunting). They move around and introduce new plants, they divert streams, they drain swamps, etc, etc. pre-industrial man was responsible for the extinction of dozens (if not more) species. The idea that man's impact on nature is recent is laughable. We have been shaping our environment for tens of thousands of years.
Thing is, other animals do this too. The canonical example is beavers and their dams. But recent detailed study of ecosystems have shown that the impact of wolves is astounding. The same is probably true for most other species.
There is no "balance of nature". Nature is dynamic and ever changing. Man is a part of that dynamic. Our advantage is that we are aware of our impact and can manage it.
Wealth from industrialization allows societies to take steps to clean up previous damage. The rivers and lakes of wealthy nations are cleaner now than at any time in the last 100 years. The US and western europe have more forest cover now than in 1900. The air is MUCH cleaner too. All that requires the wealth that industrialization brings. Poor people are simply too worried about feeding their children to demand that there are pretty forests and parks to go camping in.
- mschuster91 10y ago> Wealth from industrialization allows societies to take steps to clean up previous damage. The rivers and lakes of wealthy nations are cleaner now than at any time in the last 100 years. The US and western europe have more forest cover now than in 1900. The air is MUCH cleaner too. The price of cleaned up Western countries is that the dirty stuff (mining rare earth metals, mining for coal and iron, ore processing, lots of chemical production processes, producing oil) shift from Western countries into poorer countries. Africa suffers from massive pollution due to uranium mining, China has a truckload of environmental problems, and India isn't far behind.
- clock_tower 10y ago> Rivers Rivers are doubtless cleaner than they were 400 years ago, too; it's enormously valuable that we can now treat human waste properly. Dunghills, referenced all the time in historic texts (like Luther's "snow on a dunghill" image), were literal piles of human feces. Imagine where they went when it rained, and remember how a lot of waste was just dumped onto streets, into water, and so on; 50 million people dumping raw sewage into rivers or storing it in heaps, will pollute the environment much more severely than 1 billion people with plumbing, running water, and centralized sewage-treatment plants.