Deforestation for Agriculture

The human need for calories has shaped human societies as well as the natural world. With the onset of strategic plant domestication, which began during the agricultural revolution, approximately 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, there has been a correlation between agriculture and deforestation committed by human communities. Many scholars and studies suggest that the connection between agriculture and deforestation is one of outright causation, although it is potentially problematic to make such explicit claims when it comes to biocultural evolution. However, as human societies have historically adopted settled agriculture based on domesticated annuals, especially those of the major cereal grains, there has been a marked, and oftentimes, dramatic increase in deforestation wherever such settled agriculture has occurred. Some of the earliest creation stories from the ...