Developments which led to the ‘modern’ world include the agricultural revolutions, both the early shift from hunter-gatherer to agrarian societies, and its later manifestation in 17th–18th century Europe, and the major industrial revolution which followed the latter. From one perspective, these revolutions made greater resources available to more people and thus spurred population growth. From another perspective, population growth itself drove such developments as resources for any particular way of life became depleted.
These remain contentious areas of debate for historians, with accounts perhaps owing something to shifting ideologies about human development and what constitutes ‘progress’. But from either perspective some key environmental changes have arguably been of humanity’s own making, prompted by insufficient resources to supply a population’s way of life at any one time.
Recent thinking has suggested that three major factors (population growth; technological development; increasing consumption) lie behind our damaging impact on the planet1. A slightly more nuanced perspective suggests that it is neither technology nor consumption per se which is at fault, but the adoption of a particular form of economic system that uses ever-increasing consumption as its basis for growth, leading to high levels of resource depletion – which are incompatible with the large and growing population of planet Earth.
From this perspective, human history is the story of increasing numbers of people, the development of increasingly invasive and disruptive forms of technology by some societies, and increasing levels of consumption by those societies. The economic and cultural practices of some societies are a fourth (and compounding) feature underpinning present problems.
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