We needn't fool ourselves that messing with the environment is a recent thing. Frederick Engels in his work, ''Labour In The Transition From Ape To Man'', had plenty to say about it.
''Let us not , however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each victory it takes its revenge on us. Each of them, it is true, has in the first place the consequences on which we counted, but in the second and third places it has quiet and different, unforeseen effects which only to often cancel out the first. The people who in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, utterly destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land never dreamed that they were laying the basis for the present devastated conditions of these countries, by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture. When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, and making it possible for them to pour still more furious torrents of it on the plains during the rainy seasons. Those who spread potato in Europe were not aware that with these farinaceous tubers they were at the same time spreading scrofula. Thus at every step we are reminded that we by on means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature - but that we, with flesh, blood, and brain, belong to nature and exist in its midst and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to know and correctly apply its laws. Since this has been happening for so long its about time we had a society that will put an end to it."
Steve and John.
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