Sixteenth-century apologists justified deforestation by claiming profits could offset ecological losses.
Evidence
To the argument that the woods were cut down and the price of timber therefore raised, Agricola responded that most mines occurred in unproductive, gloomy areas. Where the trees were removed from more productive sites, fertile fields could be created, the profits from which would reimburse the local inhabitants for their losses in timber supplies. Where the birds and animals had been destroyed by mining operations, the profits could be used to purchase “birds without number” and “edible beasts and fish elsewhere” and refurbish the area. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 219
Categorization
- QUESTION: This commodifying trade-off logic — reimbursing nature’s losses with purchased replacements — seems an early form of offset economics; worth tracing whether it anticipates modern carbon-offset reasoning.
- ADDENDUM: Speaks to the trees-as-infrastructure article: deforestation for mining fuel and the rhetoric compensating for timber loss with money.
- XREF: connects to: Charges of neocolonialism justify deforestation by recasting conservation as foreign domination. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2533
Broader Connections
- Charges of neocolonialism justify deforestation by recasting conservation as foreign domination.
#responds-to(0.75) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2533