Ramin Skibba in Undark: In Amrith’s view, all history is environmental history. And that includes both environmental effects on societies and those societies’ impacts on the environment. He cites evidence, for example, suggesting that a “medieval warm period” spanned most of Europe and parts of North America and western Asia through the 13th century. The period’s benign climate and rainfall, he argues, allowed societies to clear land, expand cultivation, build cities, and grow their populations. He also assesses the rise and fall of the Mongols, who swept across Asia quickly before being thwarted by limited grasses for their horses, intense snowstorms and earthquakes, and deadly plagues that the Mongolian expansion helped spread.
In his analysis, the colonial expansions of the 15th through the early 20th centuries transformed the global distribution of power and wealth while devastating both Indigenous populations and the natural world through deforestation and other ecological harms.
He highlights in particular the pivotal role of the early 15th-century Portuguese settlers on the island of Madeira. The settlers razed forests for single-crop sugar plantations, exhausted the land, and then moved on. “Madeira’s ruin marked a new phase in the history of human exploitation: a tightening of the knot that ties human suffering to the destruction of other forms of life,” he writes.
Around the same time, the European colonial powers initiated the slave trade, which deprived the enslaved of their freedom as well as their vital links to their land and food sources. He details how Christopher Columbus and other Iberian conquistadors brought with them both war and deadly diseases that wiped out most of the Aztecs and Incas. And he cites the paleoclimatologist William Ruddiman, who speculated that the era’s large-scale depopulation and the reforesting of denuded landscapes may have played a role in the minor planetary cooling event in the 16th century called the Little Ice Age. Thanks to European settlers, many habitats vanished and species declined across the world, including whales, land mammals like sables, and numerous birds.
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