What Are The Environmental Effects Of The Columbian Exchange

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.

Although the Columbian Exchange brought many good things to America such as food and transportation, The Columbian Exchange was an Overall Negative event because it killed millions of people because of slavery,war,disease, and overwork.

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 began as people from the Old World and New World began to interact with one another. Natives had many valuable items such as gold and corn, which contributed to one of the many positive effects the New World had on the Old World. Population rapidly increased in Europe and Africa due to new crops, and eventually caused China’s population to triple (America’s History, pg43). The English settlers brought wheat, apples, and grasses for the livestock to graze on. One of the less desirable results of the Columbian Exchange was the exchange of diseases. Along with domesticated animals, which enriched the Native diet, Europeans brought smallpox, measles, influenza, malaria, and yellow fever (The Columbian Exchange, pg1). These diseases devastated Native populations as countless people fell at the hands of new illnesses. Thousands died of mysterious disease, and it got to the point where tribes ran out of people to make fires, fetch water, and bury the dead (The Columbian Exchange, pg1). Native suffering did not stop there. White brutality, alcoholism, and the killing and driving off of game also took a toll on them. While the colonists did suffer from American diseases such as syphilis and Chagas Disease, the deaths from that are insignificant to Native

The Columbian Exchange began soon after Christopher Columbus returned from his voyage to the Americas, which he believed to be India. As he returned to Spain, the Columbian Exchange soon began with the exchange of items from the Old to the New World. Some of which brought negative and positive effects to the various regions of the Old and New World. Of the various items traded, sugar was among the items brought from the Old to the New World, specifically to the Americas. Due to this new crop a new economy began. For the Europeans, because they were able to set up the sugar plantations due to the decreased population brought on by disease, their settlements were able to flourish.

Throughout the life cycle of the Earth our continents have been constantly changing. Causing animals and plants that may of once shared a habitat to split and evolve separately. The exploration of the new world created a bridge over the separation creating unity between continents called the Columbian exchange. Plants animals and the dreaded disease were spread and continue to wherever the European, and future explorers step and beyond. This event is the most significant ecological event to happen in the past hundreds of thousands of years. Bringing men and women across continents pioneering the unknown and taking roots into land that once was thought not to be their. From all over Africans Chinese Europeans and The Spanish settled and explored bringing with them their biology ideas and goods and bringing back the same from the native populations. Expressed in three words Alfred w. Crosby describes the entire process calling it “global biological homogeneity”.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

- 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

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.

One consequence of the exchange was mass death. In the search for new routes for trade, people of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas came in contact with each other, causing the spread of disease. Columbus's colonization brought a host of new diseases to the populations of the Americas. Europeans exported their diseases such as influenza, tuberculosis and smallpox. In return, European traders and colonizers returned the Europe with syphilis and typhus from the Americas. The slave trade caused the spread of malaria and yellow fever from Africa to the Caribbean and North America, and yellow fever to Europe.