The 1400s Through the 1700s

1. The 1400s Through the 1700s Inhabiting a New Land By: Audrey Urbis

2. INTRODUCTION While Euro-Americans immigrated and subsequently colonized the North American continent in the early 1600s, they imposed their belief systems and attitudes on their surrounding environment including the aboriginal Native Americans. Their profit-seeking, liberated, and determined mindsets heavily influenced their conquest and cultivation of the environment around them.

3. NATIVE AMERICANS AS PROTOTYPICAL ENVIROMENTALISTS The native inhabitants of North America undoubtedly played a critical role in the environmental movement. Some groups fought relentlessly to protect land they believed could not be owned from Euro-American intrusion. These groups venerated every aspect of nature –rivers, mountains, trees, lakes --invoking their animistic religion. Though some adhered to such beliefs, other groups actually exploited the land through agricultural practices that greatly harmed the environment such as intentional burning of large areas to aid their hunting endeavors. Such groups did not hesitate to alter their environment to meet their daily needs.

4. EARLY COLONIAL ENVIRONMENTAL ATTITUDES In the early eighteenth century, European society held wealth to equate to land ownership. Similarly, land ownership in North America became the portal to affluence. Acting upon this belief, Euro-Americans often times wrongly claimed land belonging to Native Americans. Many of these new immigrants felt that Earth was designed to benefit humanity alone. Embracing such justification, they eagerly founded entrepreneurial companies like the Virginia Company to produce tobacco and other lucrative cash crops. Through the accomplishment of such goals, they often exhausted surrounding land and depleted the nutrients in the soil.

5. Continued… With a rigid belief in Manifest Destiny, (their God-given right to expand to the Pacific coast) these colonists soon conquered the Western wilderness and settled the Pacific coast. After securing the Louisiana Purchase, President Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark to explore the area and document the plant and animal species they encountered thus displaying an element of interest in the biodiversity of the environment. Ultimately though, these new Americans dramatically changed the relatively-unharmed land they had discovered.

6. The End