Hannah Oberlander
February 15, 2013
Mosely presents a balanced approach in The Environment in World History
highlighting both the history of human-induced damage to the earth as well as the
history of human conservation efforts. He methodically targets the areas of hunting,
forests, soils and irrigation, and how cities have effected the environment. Mosely
suggests that the combination of textual records and scientific data about the
environment attract historians and research experts from a wide variety of
disciplines. I was impressed with the relevancy of the material presented in The
Environment in World History, because many of the environmental concerns that are
popular today among political and scientific promoters of conservation base their
reasoning on similar patterns that started during the Age of Sail.
The agents of environmental change hinge on population growth,
technological advance, economic expansion, and cultural attitudes toward nature.
To some extent with the human population increasing, a degree of environmental
damage was inevitable—no matter how much conservation measures were
consulted, since humans need the earth for basic survival needs. I appreciated that
Mosely offered solutions to the environmental damages he exposed to reverse and
conserve wild game, forests, and soils.
Mosely was honest by exposing that no one people group was the “perfect
example” of how to treat the environment. He revealed that even hunter-gatherer
people groups overkilled, and evidence shows that Native Americans had
considerable waste when stampeding bison off cliffs or into box canyons.
I learned that the first pieces of international legislation that limited hunting
began early on during the Victorian Era in an effort to control the European sport
hunting that was occurring, especially in parts of Africa. I am grateful to find out
that more than 10% of earth has been set aside as wildlife sanctuaries and bio
reserves that protect wildlife from being upset by humans. I thought it was ironic
and perhaps hypocritical to learn that the United States President, Teddy Roosevelt,
credited for setting up five national parks is the same man known for bagging 512
head of big game on a hunting trip to Africa in 1909.
I discovered that the two major factors that led to deforestation were wood
extraction and agricultural expansion. I had not realized that forests were both
devastated by the lumber needs for construction, shipbuilding, and furniture
making and also cleared to plant crops and pasture for grazing. I learned that
pioneers considered tree size to be a major indicator of whether the soil would be
beneficial to farm on. Plantation agriculture devastated forests particularly in the
tropical regions of the Americas. I can connect this new knowledge with teaching
my 4th graders about how the cash crops of tobacco, sugar, and coffee in the New
World is directly linked to the decline of this region’s natural resource, forests.