Environmental Impact of Trade

Environmental Impact of Trade

Cultures in isolation, unless self-sustaining, cannot survive without interacting with other groups. The passage of goods from one area to the other, trade, provides an effective means of distributing supplies to those who seek it but cannot produce it themselves. The human travel needed to conduct trade, while beneficial to people, poses a negative consequence to the environment.

Trade routes started for the exchange of a particular good such as the spice trade. The existence of other commodities later led to the types of traded items to expand and include items ranging from copper to porcelain (Cipolla, 1996). While this increase in scope of goods traded improved the economic well being of the parties involved, it increased resource utilization of the environment. Few items for trade are truly renewable and synthetic items are more dependent on component goods that may eventually be difficult to obtain in necessary quantities. A scarcity of a particular good would increase the price until exhaustion but increase the trade revenue from an item. This short-term added economic benefit would not offset the environmental damage caused by a full depletion of that resource.

For example, the price of copper would increase as the ore became harder to find but it would eventually run out and the ground would be completely missing a mineral it once had. Also, the increase in number of goods traded instead of just a particular type seeks to accelerate the depletion of all kinds of resources. While a local ecosystem would not use up a particular resource in thousands of years based on usage limited to that area, trading this resource to the entire world would cause exhaustion in a much shorter time pe...

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...tems would ensure that trading could continue without the risk of over-harvesting a resource. For example, deforestation due to ship construction alone is an environmental problem but replanting trees would lessen the effect. Also, trading commodities with the geographically closest neighbor that has the desired goods would reduce the effects of long-distance travel on the environment. Europe would need to improve its land exploration abilities but it would avoid having an environmentally costly sprawl of trade partners. With effort the travel associated with trade can integrate better with the environment but economic motives traditionally have overridden these ecosystem friendly goals.

Reference

Cipolla, C. M. (1996). Epilog from “Guns, Sails, and Empires: Technological Innovation and the Early Phases of European Expansion, 1400-1700.” Sunflower Univ. Press.