The continents of our vast planet were “drawn together by the sailmaker’s needle,” wrote historian Alfred Crosby[1] European exploration made the world smaller, and ultimately, he argued, more impoverished. So much was lost and destroyed by man’s search for raw materials and markets. When Crosby wrote this in The Columbian Exchange (1973), only Exxon and the other petroleum companies knew that their emissions of fossil fuels would warm temperatures across the globe.[2] Little did he realize that the impact of the eternal search for conquest and profit would destroy the very atmosphere that we inhabit. Today, this new reality is brought into stark relief as double tropical storms and out of control wildfires signify the intensity of the other climate change “pandemic” that promises ultimately to swallow up all the rest.

Notes

[1] Alfred W. Crosby and Otto von Mering, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 1973).

[2] Shannon Hall, “Exxon Knew about Climate Change Almost 40 Years Ago,” Scientific American, October 26, 2015, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/.