Impact of European Expansion on the Environment :: Environment Environmental Pollution Preservation

Impact of European Expansion on the environmentTechnology has facilitated the transportation of a mass of people from one discussion section of the world to another. This massive human travel, either it be the exploration, colonization, or peck of the early European nations or the contemporary infrastructure of trade, tourism, or globalization, has adverted the environment and the humans involved. This paper focuses on the era of European working out to examine the effect of human travel on the environment and humans. The Europeans were not only responsible for the actual exploitation of natural resources in the places they discovered, just now they withal took diseases, new technologies, and non-native whole caboodle and animal species which had a tremendous impact on the native human race as well as the environment.The hunger for more natural resources and the need to trade for exotic goods were the briny causes for European exploration and colonization. Even though relig ion was used as a pretext for European expeditions, gold was the real motive (1). Cippola nurture explains that, Through the idea of mission and crusade the conquistadores succeeded where the medieval merchants failed and were able to sink the antithesis between business and religion that had plagued the conscience of medieval Europe(2). Cipolla also discards Malthusian pressure as a possible cause for European expansion. Devastating and recurrent epidemics were constantly keeping the population growth in check and no population pressure of any relevance was felt up in Europe till the second half of the eighteenth snow (3). By eliminating these two powerful driving forces as the motivation for expansion, Cipolla claims that European expansion was basically a commercial venture (4). This expansion, being a very aggressive commercial venture, has some effect on the environment. The Europeans use the natural resources of the places they discovered. Excessive mining for natural res ources and deforestation for shipbuilding are examples of environmental damages caused by European expansion (5). As the expansion spread throughout the world and the European Empires grew bigger and stronger, so did the pressure put on the environment to sustain this expansion.In step-up to the actual exploitation of the natural resources of discovered nations and the harm to the environment associated with it, the Europeans brought with them diseases and introduced non-native plant and animal species that had catastrophic effect on to the native human population and the ecosystem, respectively. Even though the Europeans ventured into all the continents, the Americas were the ones that were greatly affected by the diseases that traveled with the Europeans.