In a period of 850 years, between the year 500 and 1350, forests went from covering 80 % of western and central Europe to only covering 50 %.
In some countries, the reduction was more radical, as is the case of Germany, which went from 70 % to 25 % from 900 to 1900. France went from having 30 million hectares of forests to only 13 million between 800 and 1300.
The destroyers of nature
The past was, on an environmental level, the closest thing to Mad Max. Even some paleoclimatologists suggest that a person in the Iron Age polluted more than a person in today's First World. However, if it does not seem that way to us, it is basically for two reasons: we have idealized the past and, above all, Before we were very few people in the world.
If the human beings who lived a thousand years ago were those who live now in numbers, the current environmental problem would be much more serious. Percentageally, then, we pollute less than before. The problem is that we reproduce at a devilish speed: just one hundred years ago we were 1,650,000,000 now we are 8,000,000,000. A thousand years ago, barely 300 million. Two thousand years ago, 50 million.
We all consume more efficiently than before, but there are many more of us. We also eat a lot more, therefore, so the largest source of sulfur for the environment It is no longer coal power plants but agriculture.
Our ancestors simply wasted energy and polluted the environment using very dirty energy sources such as wood. We hunt and extinct megafauna, being forced to develop agriculture, although one type of agriculture, that of ten thousand years ago, so inefficient and riddled with problems that it made us become shorter than we were due to famines and the proliferation of dozens of new diseases.
According to a new study from researchers at the University of London, the colonization of the Americas at the end of the 15th century killed so many people that it disrupted the Earth's climate. Specifically, the huge swath of abandoned farmland that was reclaimed by fast-growing trees and other vegetation was what removed large amounts of carbon dioxide (CO₂).
And of course, we set fire to entire forests, we deforested them completely, we cleared them, because it was the most comfortable way to hunt animals, creating types of forest that today seem Edenic to us but that, in the past, were only the result of the brutal hand of human beings, as you can see in the next video:
Fortunately, technology allows us to find other resources or multiply the efficiency of those we already have, thus accessing more calories, lumens, kilowatts, bits and kilometers.
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The news
A thousand years ago we destroyed forests more than we do now because we cared less about nature (and it wasn't even defined in the same way)
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.