The Frontier

     With the advents of the Industrial Revolution and Globalism, the materialism of Capitalism has spread from Europe and America around the world. These dual events have enormously changed life in every region and nation around the world whether through locomotion and medicine or through colonization and exploitation. While these effects are uncontested, the residual philosophies prior to the Industrial Revolution's impacts in the early nineteenth century have placed the world, resources, and biological population limits into new perspectives.
     With the public discovery of a New World by Christopher Columbus's expeditions in the 1490s, Europe began an expansive invasion-settlement of these newly recognized lands. European nations began sending conquers to subdue native populations and explore the lands. Later, settlers, particularly in North America, made permanent homes along the coast to enable trade with their mother European nations. With the devastation of ninety-percent of native populations, the Europeans had half the world to extract wealth and resources from to send back to Europe. The Spanish and Portuguese focused on gold, silver, and precious materials to supplement their coffers while the French, Dutch, and British turned to fur and forestry.
     The Spanish and Portuguese did not make permanent plans of colonization and instead concentrated their efforts on extraction. The North American experience was different but similarly economically-oriented; settlers hunted several animals to extinction and cut huge swathes of forests that permanently changed the landscape and soil type. Because of the required manual labor and slow trans-Atlantic shipping, the extraction of New World resources escalated slowly and seemed to be able to last forever.
     With the improvements of steam and machine and the growing populations in both Europe and these New World settlements, resource extraction became mechanized to meet industrial needs. Never before had the provisions of nature been taxed so greatly to provide materials for the incredible population boom. The seemingly endless reserves of resources in the New World began to be depleted by the mid-nineteenth century.

     As the abundance of natural resources became more difficult to find and extract, the populations of Europe began to look elsewhere to meet their new industrial might, especially toward Africa and SouthEast Asia. The inhabitants of the New World, particularly in the United States where industrial growth was increasing to match Europe's, had to live in the reality of the stripped, barren landscapes. This proximity to the destructive greed of man birthed two movements in the United States just before the turn of the twentieth century. The first group continued the practices from the decades before and moved on to new lands that were farther west and previously inaccessible. The second group began a conservationist movement that sought to protect resources and restore land usefulness after strip mining and clear cutting forests.
     The first group, known to history as the frontiersmen, miners, and cowboys of the American West, continued to exploit the immense natural wealth of the land without regard to future uses. Despite the efforts of the conversation movement and the establishment of federal government regulations like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1972 and Endangered Species Act (ESA) in 1973, the indoctrination of capitalist-consumerism of Americans and industrial countries requires escalated production to grow the economy and collect the money of consumers who buy things that they did not know they needed.
     The ecological term for the exploitation of natural resources because of their endless reserves in known as the Frontiersman Mentality or the Cowboy Mindset. While modern people might pride themselves on being green or practicing efficient, renewable business practices, the frontier's influence on the United States has not disappeared. Today Americans throw away more reusable materials than every before, especially non-degradable plastics. The Throwaway Mindset of a consumerist culture is directly related to the assumption that resources are endless and that there will always be new reserves to take from.
     This century as the global population begins to level off around eleven billion and the easiest reverses of metal, oil, and timber are used up, humanity will not be able to run away from its actions any more. Overlooking the effects of climate change, the economy, and agricultural needs, as the waste and debris of the civilized, industrial countries begins to choke the world, change will come from choice or inevitability. There is not another frontier.

 __    
Agatha Tyche