What Are The Environmental Effects Of The Columbian Exchange

The Columbian Exchange that occurred in the Western Hemisphere subjected America to extensive changes that would fundamentally change the people that lived there, the people that would come to live there, and the land itself. In fact, the America that we know today has been shaped by the events that took place hundreds of years ago during the Columbian Exchange. As European people brought their culture and values to the Americas, it started to combine and mix with the cultures and values already established there, changing both Europeans and Indians in admittedly small, but significant ways. While this can be considered a positive point of the Columbian Exchange, in its entirety, the Columbian Exchange could be considered a disaster, especially for the natives that lived in America before the Europeans came to claim it. Not only did Indians suffer at the hands of European diseases that we completely foreign to them, killing off millions and changing the Indian demographic forever, but the world that they grew to be so familiar with changed around them.

Imagine being in a ship, under the deck, with no way to get out. The ship reeks of feces and sickness. You can only move a short way to go to the bathroom, the bathroom being a bucket. Wouldn’t you also give up on life altogether? This was the fate of every slave on the slave trade ships. Many tried to stop eating and stop living, but were whipped for doing so. It was a disgusting scene that caused so many deaths and a lot of darkness. This was a part of the Columbian exchange. If it weren’t for this exchange then the slave trade wouldn’t have started and become so huge.The Columbian exchange is detrimental because diseases spread quickly, the slave trade started, and many people died due to it.

The Columbian Exchange, derived from the voyages of Columbus to the Americas, was a chapter in history that connected the Old World to the New World by exchanging crops, culture, and technology. The Columbian Exchange in the Western Hemisphere resulted in extensive demographic, social, economic, and environmental changes. The arrival of Europeans to Native American land produced an intense mixture of culture and population fluctuation. Not only did this exchange affect the social aspect between the two nations, it changed the way people engaged in trade and proprietary interests, which would lead to a massive destruction and transformation of the environment.

The Columbian Exchange was one of the most significant periods in the World History. A huge movement of great numbers of animals and plants started after Columbus’s discovery of America in 1492. It was a double-sided exchange between the “New World” of the Americas and the “Old World” of the Afro-Eurasia. The opening of the routes between two “Worlds” distributed a wide range of new crops and livestock. According to many environmentalists, this biological expansion brought a lot of damage to different ecosystems. However, in general, The Columbian Exchange led to the growth of the population. Ships returned to Afro-Eurasia with the sunflowers, tomatoes, and pumpkins. The most considerable organisms, which were brought

The Columbian Exchange is the exchange of plants, animals, food, and diseases between Europe and the Americas. In 1492, when Christopher Columbus came to America, he saw plants and animals he had never seen before so he took them back with him to Europe. Columbus began the trade routes which had never been established between Europe and the Americas so his voyages initiated the interchange of plants between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres, which doubled the food crop resources available to people on both sides of the Atlantic.

Columbian Exchange- The Columbian Exchange was a way exchanging new resources between the new world and the old world. This impacted Europeans and Native Americans positively with the new materials now available, like technology, plants, and animals. There were some negative effects from these exchanges too, such as diseases. Made it easier to interact with other cultures.

Food and crops, such as maize, potatoes, tomatoes, and sugar cane had a very big impact to the New World in helping to feed more people. These crops and food were a great find, considering people in the new world lived in treacherous places, such as the Mayans, but they found crops that were easy to grow. Tobacco, sugar, coffee and the many other New World crops became popular all over the world and brought more Europeans to Central America. Another positive for Europeans from the Columbian Exchange was the introduction of new medicines from the New World such as quinine for Malaria, “...exploration and colonization of this vast tropical regions of these continents was aided by the New World, discovery of quinine the first effective treatment for Malaria.” (pg 164 of The Columbian Exchange: A History of Disease, Food, and Ideas). Disease (along with slavery and war) was one of the huge negatives of the Columbian Exchange, because European diseases killed millions of Native Americans who did not have immunity to them. However, there are many diseases in the world, such as smallpox, measles, whooping cough, chicken pox, bubonic plague, typhus, and malaria and, although you could argue that if the Europeans had never come to the New World these diseases might not have come either, with its plentiful resources and its creative population the two civilizations would have eventually met, so this seems unlikely.

The new plants and technologies included in the Columbian Exchange were crucial between the Native Americans and the Europeans, the Spanish in particular, in

The Columbian Exchange had a major effect on people residing in the United States. Disease was the number one cause of death amongst the other tragedies that came with the Columbian Exchange such as violence, culture, trade, and people that had followed Columbus. Many Native Americans died from diseases that were brought from Europe. The Europeans who had brought the diseases over did not seem to have done it intentionally. The Europeans were just in search of the New World. Native Americans lived free from the terrible diseases that destroyed populations in Asia, Europe, and Africa. Therefore, when Europeans came to America no one knew how to treat the diseases or how to handle them. Native Americans lacked the ability to fight off bacteria

The columbian exchange was the most helpful for the europeans (especially spain) because they gained new valuable supplies like gold and new crops that increased popluation tremedously. It also created money-based stimulation. Population increase led to establishing homes and having complete control over areas. Africa no longer had a hold on gold, their population staggered, communities became ghost towns and the Columbian Exchange marked the rise of the slave trade. The Americas got deadly diseases, and new orders enforced on them etc.

When you are sitting in a fancy restaurant in Texas, tasting a delicious steak with a nice cup of coffee, do you know that before 1492, American people don’t even know what is beef and coffee. Nowadays, people’s diet is abundant. People in every part of the world can taste the food originated in other side of the world. This is due to one of the most significant ecological events in human history called the Columbian Exchange. According to Nunn Nathan and Qian Nancy, “the Columbian Exchange refers to the exchange of diseases, ideas, food crops, and populations between the New World and the Old World following the voyage to the Americas by Christopher Columbus in 1492” (Nathan and Nancy, 2010). It was so spectacular that has left both positive and negative impacts in each side of the world.

That had to be the worst thing ever to have to deal with. Some of the diseases were: small pox, measles, chicken pox, malaria, influenza and cholera, along with others. The ending result and the ultimate result of the whole Columbian Exchange was negative because of the spread of the diseases to the Indians and European, it created a lot of things and introduced new pests to the New World. The disease did not only spread to the Europeans to the natives, but the natives passed syphilis to the Europeans. Almost 90% of the Indians died due to the disease between 1492 and 1650. The disease did the stop the Europeans from trying their best to get make it to the New World. They could not avoid getting sick but it did not and could not stop them from invading Europeans. Clearly, imported disease had the most ruinous influence on the lives of Indians. Cooperative labor was required for hunting and gathering, and native groups faced extinction if disease caused a shortage of labor. Besides goods, disease and other things, the Columbian exchange was also apart of slavery. When slavery came most of the Native Americans has been killed off by the diseases that they has caught. The Europeans had now brought slaves in to work for them on the land. When you think of slaves you think of the south, but only 5% of the slaves brought to the New World started importing slaves in the 1620’s and it didn’t end until the Civil War. It is still true that slavery has existed long

This event during 1492 was a global diffusion of plants, animals, humans and diseases (Drame, Lecture notes). This system of mass immigration from and into Europe, Americas, Africa and Asia, resulting from explorations allowed for a diffusion of knowledge, language and culture as well. New foods were being produced in different places of the world such as potatoes in Ireland during 1840 and oranges in California. Wheat, cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, chickens, papayas, and pineapples were available in places of the world that had never seen these animals and food before. This global diffusion did have negative consequences such as contagious diseases including plague, smallpox, measles, whooping cough and influenza. However, overall, the Columbian exchange resulted in an increase in the world's population because of a greater availability of food as well as the discovery of antibiotics and vaccines. The discovery of different

- The Columbian Exchange was a worldwide transfer of plants, animals, and diseases. Before Columbian Exchanged certain foods were not in European meals such as, corn, potatoes, and different kinds of beans – (kidney, lima), peanuts, and peppers. The same for the Native Americans, certain foods were not a part of the culture such as, rice, wheat, barley, oats, melons, Kentucky bluegrass, and dandelions. The diseases the European’s as well as the slaves carried over, they effected the Native Americans greatly and caused millions to die. These diseases consisted of smallpox’s,

In modern America, we often take for granted the natural world that surrounds us and the American culture which is built upon it. For many of us, we give little thought to the food sources that sustain and natural habitats that surround us because when viewed for what they are, most people assume that they have “simply existed” since the country was founded. However, the documentary ‘America Before Columbus’ provided this writer an extremely interesting record of how the America we know came to exist. In the documentary, one of the most interesting discussions centered on the fact that it was not merely the arrival of conquistadors and colonists that irrevocably changed the landscape of the Americas, but that it was also the coined term known as the “Columbian Exchange” that afforded these travelers the ability to proliferate so successfully. The basic definition of the Columbian exchange is one that defines the importation of European flora and fauna. It could also loosely represent other imports, both intended and unintended, such as tools, implements, and even disease. Armed with this definition, it takes little imagination to envision how differently the Americas might have developed had any significant amount of the native European flora, fauna, or other unintended import not been conveyed to the Americas through the Columbian Exchange. Beyond the arrival of explorers, settlers, and colonists to the New World, the breadth of what the Columbian Exchange represented to