Environment of North America after 1500
Hunting Passenger Pigeons, about 1800 AD
The story of the environment of North America after 1500
AD is one terrible change after another. Shortly
after 1500 AD, most of the people living in North America seem to have died
of diseases they caught
from European people who had been trading with them. By 1700 AD almost nobody
lived in North America. As a result, these people's farms went back to forest,
the acorns and berries they had gathered
fell to the ground, and the animals they had hunted
lived. For some kinds of animals and plants, this made a huge difference.
Passenger pigeons, for instance, which seem to have been rare in North America
before 1500, quickly became the most common kind of bird in North America.
There also seem to have been a lot more buffalo by the 1800's than there
had been in the 1500's.
Because nobody was clearing the underbrush in the forests, it grew up everywhere, and although it was easy to walk through the forests in 1500, the same forests became an impassable wilderness of brambles in the 1800's. Animals who needed to be able to walk freely through the forests suffered, and moose elk from the 1800's were smaller and unhealthier than the moose and elk from the 1500's.
Because nobody was clearing the underbrush in the forests, it grew up everywhere, and although it was easy to walk through the forests in 1500, the same forests became an impassable wilderness of brambles in the 1800's. Animals who needed to be able to walk freely through the forests suffered, and moose elk from the 1800's were smaller and unhealthier than the moose and elk from the 1500's.
Then many people came from Europe and (by force) from
Africa to live in North
America. You would think that they would solve this problem and bring everything
back into balance again, wouldn't you? But the new people just saw an empty
land with thousands of buffalo and billions of birds, and they thought you
could never use it up. So instead of taking care of the environment, as
they would have done at home, the settlers just went ahead and used as much
of everything as they wanted, or just wasted it - they thought there was
always more where that came from. By 1900 there were lots of people living
in North America again, but there were no more passenger pigeons, and almost
no more buffalo. Most of the big trees - the oaks and chestnuts that had
nuts people could eat - had been cut down for firewood or to build houses
and fences, or just to clear the land for farmers' fields. Most of the streams
had no more fish in them. There
were almost no wolves.
Early Oil Rig in Virginia
Then about 1900, just as these new people were beginning to realize that
you could, after all, use up all of the great resources of North America,
and starting to set aside land for national parks, they discovered how to
use oil to run machines. Everyone was very excited by this, because these
new machines made everyone's life a lot easier. But the oil rigs, and burning
the oil in the machines, also polluted the environment of North America.
By the 1950's and 1960's, rivers were greasy with oil, birds were dying
because of too much oil and other pollutants on their feathers, and even
people were having trouble breathing when they went outside. Again, people
began to realize what they had done, and they tried to clean things up a
little. They made new laws to control the pollution from the oil.
But by the 1970's, scientists were beginning to realize that all the pollution from the oil had also caused an even more serious problem - global warming. The smoke and gases from the burning oil (and gasoline, which is made from oil) were hanging in the air and keeping the heat of the earth from escaping into space as it usually does, like a big blanket over the earth. So the earth was getting gradually hotter and hotter, just as if you would if you stayed under a big blanket all the time. That problem has not been solved, and the earth is still getting warmer and warmer under its blanket of smog. And most of that smog comes from North America.
But by the 1970's, scientists were beginning to realize that all the pollution from the oil had also caused an even more serious problem - global warming. The smoke and gases from the burning oil (and gasoline, which is made from oil) were hanging in the air and keeping the heat of the earth from escaping into space as it usually does, like a big blanket over the earth. So the earth was getting gradually hotter and hotter, just as if you would if you stayed under a big blanket all the time. That problem has not been solved, and the earth is still getting warmer and warmer under its blanket of smog. And most of that smog comes from North America.
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