Many contemporary ecological problems—deforestation, fuel shortages, and both air and water pollution—can be traced back in European history at least 700 years. As Europeans ran short of raw materials and expanded into the rest of the world, these problems recurred wherever they went. Their demand for wood, charcoal, and iron stripped colonies of forests. European demand for gold, silver, copper, zinc, lead, and nickel created extensive mines and open pits, immense slag heaps, and polluted groundwater. European industrial methods, whether exported to colonies (South Africa, India) or voluntarily adopted by other countries (Japan), led to extensive air and water pollution. Europeans’ farming methods, exported to their colonies, brought new areas into production but also dramatically accelerated soil erosion. Plowing land and letting it lie fallow were not destructive practices when applied to the heavy soils of Northern Europe, but they often proved catastrophic in drier regions with lighter soils, such as the western plains of Canada and the United States. In Latin America, Europeans introduced new grazing animals whose hooves loosened the soil in hilly and mountainous areas, accelerating erosion. More recently, intensive use of pesticides and fertilizers has increased agricultural yields, but often at the cost of poisoning the soil and the groundwater. In short, Western technologies have been used to create abundance, but at a high environmental cost. In the twentieth century alone, the United States lost to erosion topsoil that took 1,000 years to form, and it continues to lose topsoil at a rate of 1.7 billion tons a year. In the world as a whole, agricultural land seven times the size of Texas has been destroyed through erosion and misuse. The UN estimates that between 0.3 and 0.5 percent of the world’s cropland is destroyed each year, creating pressure to clear more forests, causing yet more erosion. Clearly, these are grounds for pessimism.
