Essay The Spread of People, Agriculture, and Disease

The Spread of People, Agriculture, and Disease It is obvious that as humans have traveled and exploited the world for their own purposes, their actions have had drastic effects on the environment as they deforest the land and introduce foreign flora and fauna to different ecosystems that may not be able to cope with them. What is not as obvious is that as humans have affected the environment, so the environment has also affected humans. While humans have settled down and chosen an agriculturalist, sedentary lifestyle over the semi-nomadic life of the hunter-gatherer, they have become susceptible to a barrage of diseases that have adapted specifically to afflict human beings. Because we, as humans, have come to believe†¦show more content†¦Once they discovered the New World, they similarly transported the technologies and techniques they knew for farming and herding to their new homes and took over the Americas as they had taken over Eurasia. Agriculture and herding has had detrimental effects on our environment in numerous ways. Land must be cleared in order to plant crops or allow grass to grow. This not only kills native plants, but it also alters the habitat of the location and destroys the natural homes of many wild animals. By introducing plants and animals that are not native to the area, humans alter the environment in order to suit their own needs. However, human alterations are not always compatible with the ecosystem, which is extremely complex and has evolved into its own sustainable system. As we continue to alter our environment, we are speedily changing the ecosystem with high levels of destruction that it may not be able to cope with fast enough. When agriculture is not practiced in a sustainable fashion, soil can be quickly depleted and more land may have to be cleared in order to continue the practice. Flax is a very good example of this. Flax quickly depletes the soil so that it is extremely difficult for anything else to survive for some time after flax has been raised. Flax has additional environmental drawbacks in its processing – when it is â€Å"retted,† or held underwater so that undesirable parts canShow MoreRelatedAgriculture Vs Hunter Gatherer1027 Words   |  5 Pagesat the University of California, mentions an important mistake in his essay, The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race. Diamond discusses agriculture versus the hunter-gatherer method of acquiring food. He exclaims that agriculture is the worst mistake human race has made. Additionally, Diamond introduces two perspectives towards agriculture. A person may take a revisionist standpoint and â€Å"advocate revisio n of a system, theory, etc† (OED). 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