Conclusion

Abstract

If, as I think, history has relevance and power to shape the present, then this study of European responses to environmental transformation is particularly timely. We inhabit a planet facing myriad pressures. Increasing population, pollution and extinction are everyday realities, squeezing the quantity as well as the quality of remaining ecosystems and impacting in deleterious ways on our own existence. We live, in short, in a time of increasing environmental anxiety whose problems, I would contend, originate in part in the experience of empire.