How did humans get to the brink of crashing climate? A long push for progress and energy to fuel it
deluges, droughts and wildfires, leaders are convening for another round of United Nations climate talks later this month that seek to curb a centuries-long trend of humans spewing ever more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. For hundreds of years, people have shaped the world around them for their benefit: They drained lakes, deforested lands and mined for metals and minerals to grow wealth and economies. They dug up billions of tons of coal, and then oil and gas, to fuel empires and economies.
The allure of exploiting nature and burning fossil fuels as a path to prosperity hopped from nation to nation, each eager to secure their own cheap energy. Over hundreds of years, that impulse has remade the planet's climate, too — and brought its inhabitants to the brink of catastrophe.
Anya Zilberstein, a historian of climate science at Concordia University in Montreal, highlighted Europeans colonizing the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries as major factor of today's climate and environmental crises.
«They bring with them this idea that conquest and then the development of the cultivation of landscapes, like taking down trees, opening up lands to European-style agriculture, that the draining of swamps… will also change the climate, usually for the better,» Zilberstein said.
Jan Golinski, a professor of history at the University of New Hampshire, said Europeans of the time thought that their changes — cutting down forests, draining swamps, plowing land — would change the climate as well, to something closer to their homelands. He said they saw this engineering as positive.
