Perhaps the most significant environmental event of this era was the European discovery of the Americas, and the resultant Columbian Exchange of people, goods, and diseases between the New and Old Worlds. Foods like the potato, introduced to Europe from the Americas, had a huge impact on food production and population increases. In the Americas, entire landscapes were stripped to build plantations that grew cash crops like sugarcane, coffee, and tobacco. As mentioned in chapter 3, these agricultural practices degraded the topsoil and reduced vegetative cover, which led to flooding and mudslides.
The raising of cattle and pigs dramatically changed the landscape as forests were cut to provide grazing land. The introduction of feral pigs to the New World may have contributed to the transmission of diseases in the North American regions initially explored by the Spanish. The introduction of horses to the Americas had a significant impact on some American Indian tribes as they adopted more nomadic lifestyles—for example, some tribes used horses to track and hunt the massive buffalo herds which grazed on the Great Plains.
An early awareness of resource conservation can be seen in the Tokugawa Shogunate’s laws which restricted timbering operations and mandated that new trees be planted when old ones were cut, and in Louis XIV’s forestry program intended to manage France’s timber resources. Although these programs were economically motivated, the idea that a nation’s natural resources be managed by the government would play an important role in the development of environmental management programs in the future.
Climatically, the Little Ice Age, a multi-century period of cooling in Earth’s temperature, dramatically affected human society. Although no consensus has been reached on the precise timing of the Little Ice Age, the period is conventionally considered to have lasted from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. As temperatures fell, growing seasons shortened and some types of crops, particularly grains in the north, failed completely.