Complete the honest formulation.
Eurasia’s east–west ______ let domesticates spread along one climate band, producing dense populations, herd animals, and the ______ that gave Eurasians endemic immunity and devastated the Americas. But environment sets the field of possibility; the encomienda, the mines, and the slave trade were ______ made by people who had alternatives.
Word bank: axis · zoonotic disease · decisions · climate · inevitability
Hints
- The formulation separates the field of possibility from the choices made in it.
- Widening the frame locates responsibility rather than dissolving it.
Show the answer
Eurasia’s east–west axis let domesticates spread along one climate band, producing dense populations, herd animals, and the zoonotic disease that gave Eurasians endemic immunity and devastated the Americas. But environment sets the field of possibility; the encomienda, the mines, and the slave trade were decisions made by people who had alternatives.
Axis, disease, decisions. Widening the frame is not a way of relieving anyone of responsibility, it is how you find out where the responsibility actually sits.
Practise Big History and Environmental History
The app has 4 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on Big History and Environmental History
- What does widening the frame to environmental and deep time actually buy a historian?
- How did the Black Death reorganize western European society?
- Why does a continent’s east–west axis matter for the diffusion of crops and animals?
- Why did Eurasian populations carry epidemic diseases that American populations did not?
- The majority of epidemic deaths in the Americas occurred after sustained European settlement, as a direct…
- Match each environmental event to its historical consequence.
- Environmental history relies on pollen cores, ice cores and tree rings. What did admitting these as sources…
- Sort each item: was it set by the environmental field of possibility, or was it a human decision?
- What is the central criticism of environmentally determinist accounts such as _Guns, Germs, and Steel_?