Comment by bryanrasmussen
2 hours ago
I believe running out of trees was always a local issue - there weren't enough trees where you were at because getting trees had to be gotten locally, you didn't go get trees from far away. So yes that was in constant tension, the thing is that the problem of having enough trees turned from a local problem to a global problem, with the side effects of not having enough trees globally that the world needed to maintain the environment humanity first conquered.
I think the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant is a reasonable description, resource depletion was always local before mass industrialization. Being able to exploit the world as opposed to just your local area is also a mark of efficiency.
By local you mean over 5 thousand of miles? Because yes moving wood was always in competition with growing it locally. But pine forests in the far north were untouched because of the low quality of the lumber they produce not the distances involved. All of Africa Europe and Asia ran out of the most valuable natural lumber a fucking long time ago.
> I think the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant is a reasonable description
Very little of the world’s woodland was untouched at the time of the Industrial Revolution and forests in the Americas survived as long as they did largely due to disease drastically reducing native populations. But American forests were on the clock independent from industrial development. I’m not sure exactly your counter argument even is here.
We still can’t reasonably extract most resources from the ocean bottom. That’s ~70% of the world’s mineral wealth just off the table.
So sure we are very slightly better at extracting resources but on the absolute scale it really isn’t that significant pre vs post Industrial Revolution compared to the sum total of human history.