History of Environmental Economics, continued

Revenons à nos moutons.

In medieval times in Europe, the catholic church got really powerful and said usury was evil, which made them pretty much anti-growth. Humans go back to a deeper dependency with their environment and we're looking at lots of small pretty self-sufficient villages over big cities. Use of money goes down, and global trade slows way down, apart from a few Venetians who keep traveling to Asia. {Side note, this only holds for western Europe — the middle ages are also when the Islamic Golden Age flourished and China had a giant navy to trade all over the Southeast Pacific and Indian Ocean with Hindu, Islamic, and East African spheres of the world...} Anyway, western europe's economy is contracting and there's a huge loss of knowledge and know how compared to empire days. Since interest is outlawed for good catholics, the only people who can lend at a gain are Jewish people and rich Bourgeois merchants of a variety of faiths who lent mostly to nobles who rarely paid anyone back (in cash) anyways, though sometimes lenders could negotiate better titles or advantages with their leverage. According to Prof Levrel, not much happens to environmental economics until capitalism starts forming in the 14th & 15th centuries in the city states of present-day Italy (Venice, Genova, Pisa, etc — but not Rome, who was still in its post imperial slump.) They revived the former empire's colonial trade routes for commerce, setting up comptoirs aka trading ports and start lending to other countries (and former colonized territories) like Spain who "needs" the money for its reconquista. {It is very hard to type these notes without falling down a million wikipedia rabbit holes, so just noting that I'm not verifying any of this right now but that I have doubts about these historical narratives.}

Anyway! Growth comes back as an idea, and the printing press gets invented. It's getting culturally acceptable to take huge losses for the chance of some gain, because the gains might be gigantic, so nobles and rich lenders start gambling with their gains to to finance colonial expeditions, arming boats and making port cities like Saint Malo and Nantes and Bordeaux super rich off trade (but let's be real, it's really theft). In 1602, we get the first corporation = the Dutch East India Company, selling shares on a stock market. Protestants are all about it, saying money is actually reward for hard work that's earned and deserved, not this amoral horrible thing :/

From then on, the centers of capitalism shift every other century from Italian city states to the 7 Dutch provinces (16th-17th c), to the UK (18-19th) to the USA (20th) to probably China (21st). All of this is fueled by the evil fuckery of the triangular trade (Europeans abduct people from Africa to sell their labor in the Americas to bring back sugar and gold and expensive commodities back to Europe). On a plant level, it's also when Europeans start classifying their pillaged goods and Buffon and Linneus start organizing a very anthropocentric catalog of plants to make sure the colonizers are trading the same stuff worldwide. This is also when Jardin d'Acclimatations start appearing to try and grow plants from elsewhere in Europe, to massive failure but a few key successes: potatoes, potatoes and corn (my fav, but a huge problem to grow worldwide since it's a tropical plant that needs a fuckton of water.)

In 1658, Charlton writes about animal economy. In 1714 Carl von Carlowitz (what a name!) first uses the term sustainability — Nachhaltigkeit in German and here's more for the German speakers on the 300th anniversary of the term — when writing about mining optimization over time, noticing that we need to let forest regenerate if we want to keep exploiting them. Some ancient romans had also noticed that, and nobles sort of practiced it with exclusive forest rights so that they could keep all the forest bounty for themselves (hence, Robin Hood) but again, knowledge loss leads to repeated mistakes for biodiversity.

It's also getting apparent that there's a pattern, what humans want is not really in agreement with what the planet needs.