Humans have been doing destructive things to our environment for millennia, which means that it is completely possible for us, at our level of civilization that we have today, to be destructive of the environment as well, except on a much larger and more devastating scale.
Let me give you a couple examples.
Ancient Sumer and the Fertile Crescent – This area is today part of modern-day Iraq in the Middle East, and if we look at the land today, it is very, very different than it was about 5,000 years ago. Back then, the soil was very fertile, and the land was covered with cedar forests, which was why the area was called the Fertile Crescent. But then things changed.
As the ancient Sumer civilization took root, they cut down the forests to use the wood for various reasons, such as building structures and homes. Besides, they needed the land for agricultural reasons – that is, to grow crops like wheat. So, over time, all the cedar forests were cleared, and the forest lands disappeared. That was the first act of environmental destruction to the area.
After the forests were cut down, the ancient Sumer civilization, and then the Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian civilizations afterwards, used the water from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, through complicated systems of aqueducts and channels, for irrigation purposes. The point was to water the ground, the fertile soil left over after cutting down the forests, and use it to grow crops – like I said, usually wheat.
All of this sounds great, doesn’t it? It does in the short term. In the long term, though, over a long period of time, it really wasn’t great at all, but precisely the opposite. Like all irrigation water, there was some natural salinity in it, and this salinity started to build up in the soil. The salt in the soil got so bad that wheat could no longer grow, so the farmers back then, about 4,000 years ago, switched over to barley, which could handle those salts in the soil.
Eventually the soil got too salty for even barley to grow. In fact, it got so salty nothing could really grow in it. This was the second act of environmental destruction. If you look at this land today, the land is dry and arid, and is considered to be desert, with the occasional salt marsh.
The land today, because of the human influence on the land, and the destructive nature of what we did to the land, looks very, very different than it did about 5,000 years ago.
Easter Island – At one time, when Polynesian settlers first inhabited the island around 1200 AD, it was full of forests. Because they needed to clear land for cultivation, the wood for building homes, for moving their giant stone statues called moai, for cooking, and other things, eventually they cut down every last tree on the island, which caused a great ecological change. Before they cut down all the trees on the island, about 1600 AD, the population was about 15,000 strong – a little over a century later, when first European contact was made in 1722, after the tremendous upheaval on the island brought about by the environmental change, there were only 2,000-3,000 people left on the island. Due to European diseases, slave raiding expeditions, and emigrations to other Pacific islands, the population of the island reached a low of 111 people in 1877. Today, the population and some of the ecology has partially recovered due to outside help, and today there are over 7,000 people living on the island.
Even so, if you look at Easter Island today, it looks very different than it did about one thousand years ago, before the first Polynesian immigrants arrived there and settled down. The forests are gone, and the island is covered in grasses, with the occasional tree here and there.
Conclusion
These are just a couple of a multitude of examples of how humans have caused environmental destruction. So, if anyone tells you that we are not capable of having a negative impact on the environment, they’re just plain wrong and haven’t looked at the evidence of history.
And, if we have been capable of effecting our environment in detrimental ways even in the ancient past, when our technologies were primitive, before we had our modern technologies, and before we had a worldwide civilization, then that would mean that we are in fact even more capable today of negatively affecting our environment in detrimental ways. And if the climate and the environment are inextricably linked to each other, then that would mean that we are capable of impacting our climate, too.
