243
votes
Did the ancients or other pre-industrial civilisations engage in unsustainable practices?
History is fact littered with civilisations engaged in unsustainable practices. Some of the worst offenders have long since collapsed, but the ecological damage they caused or contributed to often ...
- 97.2k
99
votes
Did the ancients or other pre-industrial civilisations engage in unsustainable practices?
It is difficult to be completely sure because of the lack of written records, but some claim that the collapse at Easter Island was rather brutal.
But it seems clear that:
By that time [of the ...
- 12.4k
85
votes
Accepted
Did the ancients or other pre-industrial civilisations engage in unsustainable practices?
Most ancient agricultural practices deplete soil to some degree, but are just fine when population does not exceed certain limits. There are some examples of ancient cultures exhausting natural ...
- 8,782
54
votes
Did the ancients or other pre-industrial civilisations engage in unsustainable practices?
For the list, read Collapse by Jared Diamond. The short answer is that yes, premodern cultures definitely experienced man-made environmental disasters.
Perhaps the number one cause of these was ...
- 14.1k
34
votes
Did the ancients or other pre-industrial civilisations engage in unsustainable practices?
When Iceland was first settled at the end of the ninth century, much of the land on or near the coast was covered in birch woodlands.
“The people that came here were Iron Age culture,” Dr. [...
- 441
30
votes
Did the ancients or other pre-industrial civilisations engage in unsustainable practices?
Already in prehistorical times, it seems that the arrival of Human was the cause of major changes in ecosystems. Even before the rise of agriculture, the use of fire is supposed to have had a huge ...
- 5,800
29
votes
Did the ancients or other pre-industrial civilisations engage in unsustainable practices?
The first immigrants in Northern America killing all the horses and other large fauna. Shame, it could all have turned out entirely differently if they hadn't.
Supporting evidence:
archaeologists ...
- 685
26
votes
Why was the Aeolipile not put to practical use in classical antiquity?
From the standpoint of the ancient Greeks, the aeolipile is a technological dead end. As an engine in its own right, it's useless for more than toys/temple wonders: it produces negligible torque, and ...
- 8,524
26
votes
Did the ancients or other pre-industrial civilisations engage in unsustainable practices?
There is a bunch of information available about deforestation problems in Japan. See this article for an introduction: Japan - How Japan Saved its Forests: The Birth of Silviculture and Community ...
- 7,450
25
votes
Did the ancients or other pre-industrial civilisations engage in unsustainable practices?
The Loess Plateau was flat and densely wooded as recent as less than 2000 years ago. The massive deforestation and the resulting soil erosion was entirely caused by human activities. Nowadays the ...
- 866
23
votes
Accepted
Why was the Aeolipile not put to practical use in classical antiquity?
Edit: the original question title was about Greece, which is what I've tried to answer below.
Because it wasn't Steam Engine Time.
It didn't coincide with an obvious need for locomotion, and the ...
- 14.1k
22
votes
Accepted
How was the linen weaving trade learnt in 18th century Scotland?
Weaving generally had been a fairly common occupation during the medieval period in Scotland. The skills were taught to apprentices, who may or may not have been related to the master weaver. This ...
- 77.2k
21
votes
Did the ancients or other pre-industrial civilisations engage in unsustainable practices?
It's arguable whether it's "unsustainable" (any extraction of non-renewable resources is), but the common ancient mining technique of hushing resulted in near-complete destruction of landscapes, or at ...
- 311
19
votes
Did the ancients or other pre-industrial civilisations engage in unsustainable practices?
A lot of good answers- nearby me there is an example of a Native American culture whose unsustainability probably contributed to their collapse.
The Cahokia Indians built a city near modern day St. ...
- 397
15
votes
Why was the Aeolipile not put to practical use in classical antiquity?
This question seems to imply that the invention of steam power (in any form) is an automatic precursor to an industrial revolution. I don't believe that this is the case.
The Industrial Revolution in ...
- 4,772
15
votes
Accepted
Was there a president that wanted to "Make America Farm Again"?
I don't know about "make America farm again" since it happened so early in American history, however Thomas Jefferson was a fan of having a primarily agrarian economy, seeing urbanization as a threat ...
- 333
15
votes
Did the ancients or other pre-industrial civilisations engage in unsustainable practices?
Yes, absolutely.
It's a bit hard to proof for real pre-historic influence, but humanity as such has definitely changed things on the planet even before the industrial time.
Extinct species
Humanity ...
- 331
14
votes
Accepted
How did people apply for university in the 18th century?
Universities in Europe changed little during the early modern period and, in many respects, resembled the institutions of the late medieval period.
At the beginning of the sixteenth century, ...
- 108k
14
votes
Did the ancients or other pre-industrial civilisations engage in unsustainable practices?
I'd recommend 1491 by Charles Mann for anyone interested in this topic. Humans have extensively engineered their environments even before adopting agriculture. East Coast North American tribes ...
- 141
14
votes
Did the ancients or other pre-industrial civilisations engage in unsustainable practices?
How Aboriginal burning changed Australia’s climate
For thousands of years, Aboriginal Australians burned forests to promote grasslands for hunting and other purposes. Recent research suggests that ...
- 490
13
votes
Accepted
Where did the demand for textiles during the industrial revolution come from?
The Industrial Revolution resulted in massive gains for worker productivity. The textile industry in particular was a leading and early driver of the industrialisation process. In fact, the importance ...
- 97.2k
13
votes
Did the ancients or other pre-industrial civilisations engage in unsustainable practices?
According to Russian scientist Sergey Zimov, the disappearance of grasslands in Siberia was not due to Climate Change, but due to overhunting in prehistoric times.
The theory is that humans killed ...
- 3,653
13
votes
Accepted
What were "prison-bars" (some sort of "amusement" or "athletic exercise")?
A description can be found in The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland (Part 1 of A Dictionary of British Folk-lore), by Alice Bertha Gomme (1894):
Barley-break, or The Last Couple in ...
- 38.5k
11
votes
What percentage of the British Empire's economy was profits from the opium trade?
There is no doubt that opium and tea formed a "commercial nexus" that became an essential element of the British imperial economy. Although the British government wasn't directly involved in the opium ...
- 77.2k
10
votes
Why didn't the Greeks or Romans have an Industrial Revolution?
Everyone is missing some fundemental preconditions of industrialization. Namely, there needs to be a large class of people who must purchase the consumer goods and must sell their labor to survive. ...
- 101
9
votes
Accepted
Were high wages the root cause of the industrial revolution?
I suspect that the podcast may be referring to published research by Robert Allen of Oxford University. In his 2006 paper Explaining The British Industrial Revolution From the Perspective of Global ...
- 77.2k
8
votes
Did the ancients or other pre-industrial civilisations engage in unsustainable practices?
No, of course not. The ancients were completely in touch with their surroundings, living lightly upon the land, and never, ever, EVER did ANYTHING which would negatively impact their Druidic karma.
...
8
votes
Accepted
Was it widespread during the 17th and 18th Century for British country people to be evicted and replaced with more profitable agriculture?
Yes, the was a process called enclosure. It started in the 16th century in England, and picked up momentum in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Prior to the enclosure times, farming had taken places in ...
- 104k
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