Rampant deforestation.Big Era Six witnessed a sharp increase in world deforestation, notably in Europe, the Americas, and Japan, an exploitation that also involved erosion, flooding, and climate change. The chief cause was the expansion of mining worldwide. This industry required vast quantities of wood, both fuel for smelters and timbers for mine shafts. This led to the deforestation of entire regions around the major mining sites. Silver and mercury mining in Japan and Latin America, notably Potosí and Huancavelica in the Peruvian Andes and Zacatecas in central Mexico, was especially destructive. Mining also significantly decreased forest cover in England, northern France, and central Europe. The energy demands of the sugar industry in Brazil and the Caribbean, where biomass (wood) energy was needed to fire sugar boilers, produced extensive deforestation. Naval construction, which boomed during this period, was another major source of deforestation. The demands for ships’ timbers, masts, and spars placed a severe strain upon the forests of the Baltic and New England, as well as those of the Indian Ocean rim, where vessels for the Asian trade were constructed.
Western Europe and Japan underwent profound energy crises in the seventeenth century due to deforestation. In Europe, the shortage of wood energy occasioned a search for alternative sources, provoking the shift to fossil fuels, initially coal. In Japan, by contrast, the wood crisis led to an ambitious reforestation project. This said, we must note that most of the switch from biomass to fossil fuels occurred in the subsequent Big Era. |