What Are The Environmental Effects Of The Columbian Exchange

The Columbian Exchange was the transfer of crops, livestock, technology, and disease from Afro-Eurasia to the “New World” and vice-versa. Alfred W. Crosby created the term “Columbian Exchange”, in a book he published about the effect on the environment when the exchange began in the New World. It began in the 15th century when Christopher Columbus arrived into the Americas with plants, animals, and bacterial diseases from Europe. The Columbian Exchange significantly changed the way of life of the new and old worlds. New crops allowed for a significant increase in population in both hemispheres. Livestock exchange played a major role in the life that the Native Americans lived. Native Americans were forced to change their everyday traditional

Before the Columbian Exchange, animals were significantly different in each hemisphere. Animals brought over to the Old World did not have nearly as much of an impact that animals brought into New World had. Christopher Columbus brought horses, pigs, cattle, chicken and sheep to the New World on his second voyage. These animals took over local environments in the Caribbean. Pigs brought from the Old to New World illustrate how big of an impact the exchange had on the New World. Pigs reproduced much faster in the western hemisphere. The pig had no natural predators, which didn’t help its rapid reproduction. In April of 1514 Diego Velaspquez de Cuellar wrote the King that pigs he had brought to Cuba had increased to 30,000(which figure is perhaps translated from the sixteenth-century Spanish as “more pigs than I ever saw before in my life”)3.” The growth of pigs got so out of control that laws had to be created to control the rapid growth. The laws created by colonists, which often was in their favor, forced the pigs into forested areas and the mountains. The movement of the pigs into the forested areas and mountains significantly changed the lives of the natives because that’s where they lived. They had to change their traditional ways of life because the pigs were getting into gardens and eating their food. Natives Americans had to put fencing up around where they were

The new world was much more impacted than the old world from diseases exchanged. The Native Americans were more impacted because they had no previous contact with Old World diseases, and were immunologically defenseless. “Before Europeans initiated the Columbian Exchange of germs and viruses, the peoples of the Americas suffered no smallpox, no measles, no chickenpox, no influenza, no typhus or parathyroid fever, no diphtheria, no cholera, no bubonic plague, no scarlet fever, no whooping cough, and no malaria5”. The first recorded smallpox epidemic in the new world was in 1518 in the Greater Antilles and swept through Mexico and Central America. It caused “in all likelihood the most severe loss of aboriginal population that ever occurred6.” In some areas contact with smallpox wiped out nine-tenths of the Indians population. Smallpox was brought over by animals when they were transported overseas. It is communicated through the air by means of droplets or dust particles and enters the body through the respiratory tract. Europeans were not as susceptible to smallpox because they had built up much stronger immune systems from being around epidemic pathogens for a long time. They viewed smallpox as an illness almost every child gets while growing up. Unlike the Europeans, the Native Americans had limited exposure to epidemics because of their isolated way of life and less dense populations. Smallpox and other diseases spread