2007-09-02 00:57:57 · 4 answers · asked by des 2 in Science & Mathematics ➔ Earth Sciences & Geology
it's more important today because we are closer to disaster and it's mostly all fault. also, back then, people didn't even know about stuff like global warming
2007-09-02 01:06:52 · answer #1 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
There are many more people alive today than there were in the recent past (up the last 100 years, say), and so for the first time in history people CAN exhaust natural resources.
Not to say that older societies were more environmentally moral than the present one. For some bizarre examples, Native Americans hunted horses to extinction - for food - before re-discovering long forgotten horses for work and war brought to the Americas by Europeans. Older (and many current) economic societies around the world - from Mesopotamia to the Americas - overfarmed the best soil and left unlivable arid deserts behind (see modern Iraq or the American Southwest).
2007-09-02 08:31:33 · answer #2 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
With certain notable exceptions - like Easter Island - when early people used up all their easily-accessible resources, they moved somewhere else. That is no longer an option, as wherever you might go, there are already people living there.
2007-09-02 17:39:27 · answer #3 · answered by skeptik 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
It's not. It's just that today we are using them at a faster rate.
2007-09-02 09:04:10 · answer #4 · answered by gebobs 6 · 0⤊ 0⤋