It is a common fallacy to think that globalization and environmental crises are new phenomena, or products only of the post-World War II world. Global environmental concerns are also often considered to be relatively new. But the story of environmentalist reactions to human-induced ecological changes on a global scale is actually more than three centuries old. Many of the anxieties that motivated the first environmentalists are still with us, albeit on a much more threatening scale. Important lessons can be learned from reflecting on the characteristics of global environmental change over the last few centuries and on the personalities and motivations of the environmentalists themselves. What were they trying to do, and have they been successful? Has there been, historically, any real confluence of interest between the environmentalism of the rich countries and the environmentalism of the poor majority of the world’s population?

The emergence of a truly global environmental awareness was a very specific historical development. It depended on new empirical knowledge of the scale of the world and actual observations of human ability to change the natural environment on a global basis. Global environmental awareness was thus directly connected to a new capacity for people to travel large distances, transform the earth, and acquire knowledge about the environment. Two elements were necessary for this awareness to emerge: first, the institution of capital and shareholder-rich maritime trading companies backed by state legislation and assistance; and second, the settlement of previously uninhabited islands and continental peninsulas in the tropics and subtropics by colonial settlers and planters. The profit motives and mechanisms of these trading companies, especially of the East India Companies of Portugal, the Netherlands, Britain, and France, resulted in intensive cash-crop plantation activities on oceanic islands and the clearing of forests for agriculture and ship construction.

This process had already begun with Portuguese and Spanish settlement and plantation agriculture on the Azores, Canaries, and Madeira Islands during the 14th century, but the sheer scale of its impact was massively expanded as the European trading companies developed their routes to India, the East Indies, and the Caribbean. As early as the 1670s, the catastrophic consequences of their capital- and labor-intensive activities became clear as the early island colonies experienced drought due to the drying up of perennial streams, soil erosion, dust storms, and the disappearance of animal and plant species. These developments all made practical survival on oceanic islands difficult and encouraged wider questions about the sustainability of a confined settlement. Islands soon became symbolic of the explored world and encouraged ideas about limited resources and the need for conservation or sustainability.

Ancient Problems

The idea of regional environmental degradation or control was not new; indeed the word “conservancy” was first adopted in Britain in the 14th century with relation to the control of whole river basins, such as that of the Thames river. Similarly, in the Venetian Republic, well-developed ideas existed about the control of deforestation in the hills in order to control erosion and silting downstream. These initiatives may have been early signs of responses by new, highly sophisticated maritime states to the first consequences of early merchant capitalism and trade that had a global reach. Indeed, even before the advent of large continental-based European empires in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, the scale of artificially caused environmental change was already being transformed as European maritime countries started to exploit new kinds of natural resources on a global scale. Sugar and other crops essential to the new urban markets of Europe were cultivated on small islands, especially in the West Indies, Indian Ocean, and East Indies. After about 1400, fisheries extended to an oceanic scale as seals and whales were hunted from pole to pole.

The extension of what Immanuel Wallerstein has called the capitalist “world system” on a global scale between 1200 and 1788 had a critically important dimension in terms of resource exploitation. European merchants and companies found that they could exploit the trade goods, markets, and resources of almost every land. Capitalist accumulation and trade developed quite autonomously in South and East Asia. Here too, major transformations of the natural landscape took place. Some, like the deforestation of the Ganga basin, had already been long in progress, but they were quickly accelerated after 1400 as powerful mercantile empires developed. However, it was in the tropics that the destructive environmental impact of globalization made its most obvious impact to the observer.

One of the first symptoms of the early phases of globalization was the marginalization, enslavement, and then extinction of small indigenous cultures, especially those of island peoples; the indigenes of the Canary Islands are a classic example. However, it was on uninhabited islands such as St. Helena and Mauritius that the full effects of highly capitalized plantations, forest clearance, and import of alien animals (especially pigs, goats, and rats) were first observed. The extinction of the dodo made a great impression on contemporary naturalists. The fact that oceanic islands were perceived as highly desirable “Edenic” locations in long-running European cultural traditions served to emphasize the shock of their manifest and rapid degradation. Moreover, their degradation threatened their role as watering and supply stations for company ships. In these circumstances, the colonial governments of many small islands became environmentalist, if only to ensure their own survival and that of their agricultural settlers and slaves.

Some of the first comprehensive forest-protection legislation on such colonies was introduced in 1702 in the Caribbean Leeward Islands. Here, the mountain forests of the island were protected from felling by a rigid ordinance, with the knowledge that unrestricted logging caused soil erosion and flooding on lower grounds and in towns. The Caribbean islands, with their large settler and slave populations, came under sustained ecological pressure at an early date and, as on Mauritius and St. Helena, awareness quickly grew of the physical changes and extinctions brought about by commercial clearance. By 1650, measures had been taken to protect indigenous edible sea birds in Bermuda. By the mid-18th century, overfishing and major reductions in catches were taking place around many now densely populated islands.