European feudalism absolutely fucked up the environment tho. Europe used to be covered in beautiful lush forests, now it’s mostly a patchwork of fields.
Sorry I wrote this long response I couldn’t help myself, no pressure to read it tldr I agree farming has always been damaging but I’m mad at enlightenment era culture for taking away all moral qualms with raping the land.
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Yeah unfortunately farming has been damaging the environment for a long time. Indigenous methods of clearing land like burning large sections of forest to create more grassland for hunting also made a lasting impact in a lot of geographies. Mercantilism, which I always picture as the direct precursor to capitalism, accelerated exploitation hugely though. This is when people didn’t just clear land for farming they traveled to find forests to clear cut just so they could float them overseas and flip the wood for cash. No more medieval ‘everything living thing has a soul’ following Aristotle, instead the enlightenment embraced the secular version of science where the earth is just calculable resources to be exploited and we stand outside of it not as part of it. Imagine clear cutting those old forests in Germany or the Redwood forests in California. Those people should have known better deep in their souls when they looked at those beautiful places before and after, but society gave them a logic that allowed them to ignore a bit of sullying of the soul.
No impression of man as stewards of the environment survived the enlightenment which gave way to a version of utilitarianism that was tweaked to be amicable to capitalist logic (originally utilitarian calculus claimed if we wanted to decide the best use for one dollar we should figure out where that dollar would go the furtherest—one dollar is much more valuable to a poor person than to a rich one).
It’s true, at least feudalism didn’t destroy our environment, just made us all sharecroppers. Anything is better than thoughtless exploitation .
European feudalism absolutely fucked up the environment tho. Europe used to be covered in beautiful lush forests, now it’s mostly a patchwork of fields.
Sorry I wrote this long response I couldn’t help myself, no pressure to read it tldr I agree farming has always been damaging but I’m mad at enlightenment era culture for taking away all moral qualms with raping the land.
— — —
Yeah unfortunately farming has been damaging the environment for a long time. Indigenous methods of clearing land like burning large sections of forest to create more grassland for hunting also made a lasting impact in a lot of geographies. Mercantilism, which I always picture as the direct precursor to capitalism, accelerated exploitation hugely though. This is when people didn’t just clear land for farming they traveled to find forests to clear cut just so they could float them overseas and flip the wood for cash. No more medieval ‘everything living thing has a soul’ following Aristotle, instead the enlightenment embraced the secular version of science where the earth is just calculable resources to be exploited and we stand outside of it not as part of it. Imagine clear cutting those old forests in Germany or the Redwood forests in California. Those people should have known better deep in their souls when they looked at those beautiful places before and after, but society gave them a logic that allowed them to ignore a bit of sullying of the soul.
No impression of man as stewards of the environment survived the enlightenment which gave way to a version of utilitarianism that was tweaked to be amicable to capitalist logic (originally utilitarian calculus claimed if we wanted to decide the best use for one dollar we should figure out where that dollar would go the furtherest—one dollar is much more valuable to a poor person than to a rich one).