Comment by Retric
5 hours ago
> Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. We simply weren't efficient enough to fully exploit it.
This is just wildly incorrect. People started running out of trees during the early Iron Age. Woodlands have been a managed and often over exploited resource for a long time. Active agriculture vs passive woodlands vs animal grazing has been in constant tension for thousands of years across most of the globe.
The general point is accurate, don’t take it so literally.
There were more than enough trees until we developed the technology to clear cut in expeditious manner. There were more than enough fish until we developed the technology to pull massive indiscriminate amounts out of the ocean (and/or started polluting our rivers with industry). There was more than enough topsoil until we developed mechanized plows and artificial fertilizer. Etc.
A few hundred years ago or less, a squirrel could get from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River without ever touching the ground. Not possible today. That’s not a push and pull played out over thousands of years, that’s a one-way trend.
People had been hunting whales for centuries, but industrialisation gave them the means and the motivation to do so until near extinction.
Read Moby Dick some time my friend.
the Stepchange show went fairly deep on this topic in their first episode (listened to it recently). https://www.stepchange.show/coal-part-i
> This is just wildly incorrect.
from an global perspective it isn't. Some places sure, like Western Europe, who in some cases had completed enclosure, but remember the new world had only been discovered a few hundred years ago at that point.
Just google maps the north part of South America, even today there are large swathes of undeveloped land across it and back then it was considerably less exploited. At that time it would have appeared infinite, especially to the European industrialists.
> remember the new world had only been discovered a few hundred years ago at that point.
By White people*
we're talking about the fucking industrial revolution, of course this defaults to the European perspective. Unless you wanna spit some new bars about Aztec foundries and train lines connecting meso-america in the 19th century, then the point stands. At that time, the world appeared to the industrialists of the industrial revolution to be infinite. Nor had humanity discovered the terrible side effects of fossil fuels on the atmosphere.
Why are you weirdly making this about race?
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