Technological advances in the Middle Ages (500-1500 C.E.) including the wheeled plow, the water wheel, and the horse collar, and steady improvements in the organization of agricul A shepherd watches thick, dark smoke pour from a large chimney at a fertilizer complex at Homs, Syria. Industrialization is usually defined in terms of technology, but it was even more an institutional and social revolution. As in the case of the agricultural revolution, industrialization made us less dependent on biological variety but more dependent on technology to manipulate a few crops and animals. The industrial revolution further removed humans from the constraints of local ecosystems, and the population growth rate continued to increase. The total human population 10,000 years ago was about 4 million as the agricultural way of life became dominant, it mushroomed to 200 million by 3,000 years ago. After the widespread adoption of agriculture, we depended upon far fewer species, and we began our continuing war on biological "pests" that threaten our crops and livestock.Īgriculture brought two new threats to biodiversity: settled communities that made it possible to amass individual possessions and the explosive growth of the human population. Agriculture made our dependence on other species less direct and exacerbated the conflicts between humans and the rest of the biological world. Although the case for hunter-gatherer "harmony" with the natural world can be overstated, the fact that they depended on direct flows from specific kinds of ecosystems gave rise to institutions and technologies that preserved those flows. Hunter-gatherers lived on direct flows from nature within the confines of local ecosystems. The economic organization of these three broad epochs differed dramatically. In terms of the impact on biological diversity, human history can be divided into three broad categories of economies: the hunter-gatherer or foraging economy, which represents more than 95 percent of our time on earth depend ence on agriculture as the primary food source, beginning about 10,000 years ago and the modern industrial economy. Modern humans have inhabited planet earth for several hundred thousand years. The major negative effects of industrialization on biodiversity are: (1) population growth and the consequent destruction of natural habitats, (2) the commercialization of society and the treatment of nature as a commodity, and (3) the increase in income disparity both within and among nations. ![]() The availability of more energy per capita has led to undreamed of material wealth for a significant percentage of the world's population, but it has also put tremendous pressure on land and natural resources. ![]() The major innovation that marks the industrial era is the exploitation of the earth's vast stocks of fossil fuel. The transformation from an agricultural to an industrial society began only about 250 years ago, but its consequences for the natural world are almost unprecedented.
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