Going, Going,…
Posted on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
By ahedgehog
By Stuart Pimm, Doris Duke Professor of conservation ecology
This century will surely be remembered as the time the Earth bit back—not that Mother Nature hadn’t been a little testy before now. In the fourteenth century, plague spread more easily as the population both grew and became more concentrated in urban areas. When Europeans began to travel widely to other parts of the world, they took diseases with them to vulnerable continents—smallpox to the Americas, for example. And, there were plenty of regional examples of cultures, some sophisticated, that declined precipitously, abandoning long-occupied sites where people had abused the ecological services nature had supplied them.
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