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economic model: export-led growth

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changed formerly inwardly-oriented villages

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led to villages in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, which produced not for themselves but for the rest of the world

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had a dramatic effect on the hinterland regions in particular on the relationship between humans and other animals

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consumers would have a powerful effect on natural environments around the globe

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converted complex ecosystems into homogeneous ecosystems

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dedicated not for many kinds of commodities for their own consumption, but for a single commodity for other people's consumption

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dominated by a single plant or animal species, i.e. the staple commodity, for the consumption of another species, i.e. humans

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this changed the relationship between homo sapiens and other animals and plants

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specialization

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begins with sugar

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the model spreads

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e.g. towns produced only sugar and imported everything else they need

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we often think animals are in trouble when we become to predatory

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we hunt them down and cause their extinction

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this sometimes happens

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but what also happens is the lands that a species require and the sophisticated ecosystems that they need, are eradicated, deforested, or drained, transformed for the production of commodities for other people's consumption

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the human/elephant frontier in China

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Southern China, driving elephants from their habitats

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after 1850, this allowed world population to explode

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1700: 625 million people

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1900: 1.65 billion people

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a 2.5 fold increase

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unprecedented

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2000: 6 billion people

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most dense in China, India and Europe

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but the frontier regions were the areas of the world which were the fastest growing

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a war for land

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Adam Smith called the frontier the wastelands

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sometimes humans paid a high price but almost always eventually won these wars

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Kenya: Masai Land

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once belonged to the Masai people

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they got involuntarily inducted into the British Empire

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was a diversified ecology

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farmers and grazers

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became the subject for commodity production

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coffee plantations

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ranching industries

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grasslands began to be closed

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in droughts, the Masai people and elephants used to move about to search for water

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1910: disease, famine, and a restricted land, the elephant population declined through failure to reproduce

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compounded by hunting of elephants for their tusks

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e.g. 1909 Teddy Roosevelt