The Impact of Travel on the Evironment

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The Impact of Travel on the Evironment

Human history has been defined by movement and expansion, as humans slowly moved throughout the globe. Even after humans had populated the entire world, humans continued to travel for many reasons: war, trade, adventure, and religion. It would seem that the human species is filled with inveterate travelers. Throughout history, those nations and civilizations that had the best modes of transportation seemed to have a real competitive advantage. The “northern barbarians” who savaged and conquered much of Europe in its early history, the Greeks, the Romans, and eventually all of Europe in the age of Exploration dominated because they had superior transportation. Horses, boats, and well-built roads are all examples of this general trend. Travel has had a significant impact in human history, and it has also had a significant impact on global ecological history. However, it is not the movement of humans that seems to carry environmental significance. If humans moved throughout the world, empty-handed and naked perhaps the effects of travel would have been minimal. Instead it seems that often the things that humans carried with them caused many more calamities then humans themselves. The plants, animals and technologies, which travelers carry with them often had devastating affects on the environment.

When humans travel, they often brought their plants and animals with them. Early man brought their dogs with them, even to the Americas, while much later settlers also brought their cows, horses, and agricultural plants to the New World. However, things also traveled the other way, and potatoes and corn became widespread in the rest of the world after the Europeans brought it back from the Amer...

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...fects on the ecology of an area.

Humans have found a myriad of reasons to travel throughout their history, and they continue to do so through today. However, often it was not the actual travel of the humans, which had significant effects on the environment of the places they visited. In fact, as travel increasingly became about trade and exploration and not about settlement, humans often did not stay in the new places long enough to have a real effect. Instead, it was often the things that they brought with them that stayed behind, such as plants, animals, and technologies, which often had the most significant effects on the environment. If humans traveled alone, empty-handed, empty-headed, and naked, then travel would most likely not have an important impact on the ecology of the world.

Source

Internet 1 http://www.austmus.gov.au/factsheets/canetoad.htm

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