Comment by Retric
2 hours ago
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.
>By local you mean over 5 thousand of miles?
maybe, "local" is a function of a lot of things, it is only fairly recently in human history that the "global" functions the way that "local" did centuries ago, meaning that it is cheap enough to source things from across the world that it does not need to be made in the next village.
>> 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.
things seemed appeared abundant prior to one event, soon after that event the thing no longer appears abundant, there's a correlation is the point, not a causation, but
>American forests were on the clock independent from industrial development.
sure, the Native Americans would have used up their forests if they had kept growing and not been killed off by disease brought by Europeans. Nonetheless they had been killed off, the world appeared infinite, because all you needed to do when you ran out of wood in one place is go to another place to source it, hurray, but now that is no longer the case. We have ran out of places to go get more wood.
As noted I said I felt the phrase "the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant" uttered by the original poster in this subthread is a reasonable description, and I mean obviously that is dependent on the impressions of the people of the time, and from my readings it seems like this was more the feeling than oh noes, we are running out of wood.
Although we got into a side track on wood, because that is what the first response to the OP was, that wood was always a problem, which that some natural resources were constrained still does not really disprove the phrase "the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant" since the word nearly can be seen as a cheat, and really what it means is that the world felt infinitely abundant at one time now it does not.
>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.
see, it sounds like you still feel like it is closer to infinitely abundant than dangerously used up. All we need to do is up our extraction game, at least were minerals are concerned.
NOTE: I think maybe the world feeling infinitely abundant thing is actually an American thing, this has been remarked by others in the past, that the first European settlers felt this was a world that had not been touched because in comparison to Europe it was under-exploited in many areas, it was big and had everything, and there is a whole part of American frontier myth that as soon as one area got settled and used up all you had to do was to pack up your stuff and move west and get a bunch of resources to use up, like locusts, or maybe just colonizers.
In this case the OP's idea of writing this up is that really what they are dealing with is not how the world was - infinitely abundant - but how it felt to people coming from one overly exploited area to an under-exploited one. They believe there is a narrative of economic constraints and results playing out, and that the two situations were analogous, but the source of the analogy - the world before the industrial revolution - was perhaps not as the analogy would have it but really how a memetic framework of exploration and conquest had interpreted the world.
Sorry my note went overly long, but that sometimes happens when I write what I think just as I'm thinking it.