Agriculture and the Natural Environment

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Introduction
Agricultural activity is the earliest human’s activity on the natural ecosystem. It not only changes the local natural ecosystem but it also has a huge impact on the ecological environment. When many scholars trace back the historical roots of the problems of ecological environment, naturally they will be concern about the traditional mode of agricultural production, even back to the age when the foundation of traditional agricultural technology system was formed. Agricultural development for thousands of years both created a splendid civilization, but also accumulated a lot of environmental problems. The negative effects both affect the prevailing agricultural production and left some bad condition to future generations. In this paper, the whole process of the impact of human activities on natural ecology was discussed to provide more adequate historical basis for future environmental protection.

Impact on the ecological environment of ancient agriculture
In primitive societies, many forests were destroyed. People deforested to stave off the wild animals, develop farmlands and build houses. The disafforestation caused great damage to the forest and the animals inhabited there. Easter Island once had lots of forests. There are a lot of statues made by stone in Easter Island (Hughes, 102). Sculpture and transportation required a mass of mainpower and resources. Therefore, the subtropical forests in the island disappeared after deforestation. There were no raw materials for shipbuilding and transportation of the statues and no edible wild animals because of the extinction of tree species. In 1774, Europeans came to the island, kidnapped natives as slaves, brought infectious diseases such as smallpox and introduced shee...

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...ulgated in many countries, which play an important role on the protection of agricultural ecological environment. The "ecological agriculture" is a new type of agricultural production systems which is that the modernization of agriculture will go into a road with reasonable ecology and will achieve sustainable agricultural development. The "ecological agriculture" is the only way to promote the sustainable development of agriculture in modern world.

Works Cited

Crawford, Dorothy H. Deadly companions: “how microbes shaped our history”. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Print.
Hughes, J. Donald. “An environmental history of the world humankind's changing role in the community of life”. London: Routledge, 2001. Print.
Yeh, Emily T. “From WasteIand to Wetland? Nature and Nation in China’s Tibet,” Environmental History 14 (January 2009): 103-137. Web. Nov. 2013

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