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01 / 05
India’s Good Fortune: How the Country Is Tackling Energy Poverty, Increasing Growth, and Building the Future

Blog Post | Economic Growth

India’s Good Fortune: How the Country Is Tackling Energy Poverty, Increasing Growth, and Building the Future

Energy poverty and many other problems will soon be things of the past for India.

Summary: Over the past two decades, India has made remarkable strides in multidimensional poverty reduction. This comprehensive measure, which considers factors like education and infrastructure alongside income, paints a more accurate picture of poverty. Additionally, India has achieved significant progress in areas such as child mortality, sanitation, access to clean water, and electricity, signaling a positive trajectory for improved living standards and environmental outcomes in the country.


Just two decades ago, life in India looked bleak. Between 2005 and 2006, 55.1 percent of the Indian population—the equivalent of 645 million people—suffered from multidimensional poverty, and in 2004, 39.9 percent of Indians lived in extreme poverty.

Multidimensional poverty measures the percentage of households in a country deprived along three factors: monetary poverty, access to education, and basic infrastructure services. That captures a more thorough picture of poverty.

Multidimensional poverty dropped from over half of the population to 27.7 percent (370 million people) in 2014. In 2019–21, the proportion of people suffering from multidimensional poverty declined further to only 16.4 percent of the total population, or 230 million people. Although the pandemic slowed some aspects of poverty alleviation, the percentage of people in multidimensional poverty has continued to drop significantly year on year in India.

It’s also worth considering extreme poverty, which is defined as living below the international poverty line of $2.15 per day. Using this measure, the number of people living in extreme poverty in India declined from more than half of the population (63.1 percent) in 1977 to only 10 percent in 2019.

Moreover, child mortality declined from 43.4 percent in 1918 to only 3.1 percent in 2021. The number of people without adequate sanitation has dropped from 50.4 percent to 11.3 percent, and the proportion of people without adequate drinking water has fallen from 16.4 percent to just 2.7 percent. As well, more people in the country have access to clean cooking fuels than ever before, from 22.3 percent of people in 2000 to 67.9 percent in 2020.

India has also been tackling environmental concerns. The population of the greater one-horned rhino, which has a “vulnerable” conservation status, has increased from 40 in 1966 to over 4,000 in 2021. Air pollution is one of the world’s largest health and environmental problems, and in low-income countries, it is often the leading risk factor for death. Although there is still work to do, the death rate in India from air pollution decreased from 1990 to 2019 by 42 percent, from 280.5 deaths per 100,000 people to 164.1 deaths per 100,000.

In 2017, Indian Prime Minister Modi launched a plan to electrify more households, targeting over 40 million families in rural and urban India, or roughly a quarter of the population. The plan was called “Saubhagya”—literally, “good fortune” or “auspiciousness.” Although the country did not meet its target as quickly as planned, access to electricity in India has been increasing.

The term “access to electricity” does not have a universally accepted definition, but general usage takes into account the availability of electricity, safe cooking facilities, and a minimum level of consumption. According to the International Energy Agency, “access to electricity” involves more than just connecting a household to the grid; it also requires households to consume a certain minimum amount of electricity, which varies based on whether it is a rural or urban household.

According to the UNDP report, 97.9 percent of Indians had access to electricity between 2019 and 2021. Only 50.9 percent of Indians had access to electricity in 1993. The country has achieved immense progress. In 2018, Prime Minister Modi stated that every village in India had access to electricity.

Climate change is likely to be costly to the Indian subcontinent. Heatwaves have already led to an increase in deaths in India, particularly since a large share of the population is employed in outdoor labor like farming and construction.

India aims to reach net-zero emissions by 2070 and for 50 percent of the power-generation capacity to come from clean energy sources by 2030. The energy transition for India will take time, and the country will need fossil fuels to meet its energy needs for many years yet, but the future is looking promising.

Last year, for example, India brought an indigenous reactor design online at the Kakrapar Atomic Power Project Unit 4. India has 22 working nuclear reactors, which produce about 3 percent of the country’s electricity. India has ambitious plans to build more reactors—aiming to commission a new reactor every year.

The fact that a large country can more than halve multidimensional poverty in only 15 years is a cause for celebration, but India’s foresight of meeting future increasing energy needs is also something to be applauded. Energy poverty will soon be a thing of the past for India. Increased electricity will lead to further poverty alleviation, economic growth, and improved living standards, which in turn will lead to better air quality and environmental outcomes. These are good fortunes that we can all celebrate.

Blog Post | Energy & Natural Resources

The Simon Abundance Index 2025

Earth was 518.4 percent more abundant in 2024 than it was in 1980.

The Simon Abundance Index (SAI) measures the relationship between resource abundance and population. It converts the per capita abundance of 50 basic commodities and the size of the global population into a single value. The index began in 1980 with a base value of 100. In 2024, the SAI stood at 618.4, indicating that resources have become 518.4 percent more abundant over the past 44 years. All 50 commodities in the dataset were more abundant in 2024 than they were in 1980. The global abundance of resources increased at a compound annual growth rate of 4.22 percent, thus doubling every 17 years.

Figure 1: The Simon Abundance Index, 1980–2024 (1980 = 100)

The SAI is based on the ideas of Julian Simon, a University of Maryland economist and Cato Institute senior fellow who pioneered research and analysis of the relationship between population growth and resource abundance. If resources were truly finite, as many people believe, an increase in population would be expected to lead to scarcity and higher prices. However, as Simon discovered through exhaustive research spanning decades, the opposite was true. As the global population increased, resources tended to become more abundant.

How is that possible? Simon recognized that atoms, without knowledge, have no economic value. Knowledge transforms atoms into resources—and the supply of undiscovered knowledge is limitless. He also understood that only humans can discover and create new knowledge. Therefore, resources can be effectively infinite, and humans are the ultimate resource.

Consider this example. Before the 19th century, agriculture relied heavily on manure for fertilization, limiting crop yields due to its low nitrogen content. As populations grew, farmers sought more potent alternatives. In the early 1800s, guano—bird droppings rich in nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium—was discovered on islands off the coast of Peru. Its extraordinary effectiveness led to a global guano trade boom, fueling industrial agriculture in Europe and America. By the late 19th century, however, supplies started to dwindle.

The breakthrough came in the early 20th century with the Haber–Bosch process, developed by the German chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch. This method allowed for the synthetic fixation of atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia, producing fertilizer on an industrial scale. It decoupled food production from natural nitrogen sources, revolutionizing agriculture and enabling the rapid expansion of global populations. It is estimated that without synthetic fertilizer, the planet’s food production would be able to support only four billion rather than eight billion people.

Individual Commodity Changes Between 1980 and 2024

The SAI uses “time prices” to measure changes in relative abundance. Time prices tell you how long you must work to earn enough money to buy something. As long as you work less time this year than last year to afford something, your standard of living is rising. Time prices are a simple and intuitive way to compare the true cost of things.

Time prices for individual commodities decreased, on average, by 70.4 percent between 1980 and 2024, ranging from −2.9 percent for oranges to −85.2 percent for lamb. That means that the average inhabitant of the planet saw their personal resource abundance increase by 238.1 percent, ranging from 2.9 percent for oranges to 573.6 percent for lamb. Put differently, the same length of work that allowed the average inhabitant of the planet to purchase 1 unit in our basket of 50 commodities in 1980 allowed him or her to buy 3.381 units in 2024.

To continue with our fertilizer example: Since 1980, the time price of fertilizer has fallen by 56.4 percent. The same length of work that allowed the average inhabitant of the planet to purchase 1 unit of fertilizer in 1980 allowed him or her to buy 2.2 units in 2024, an increase of 120 percent.

Figure 2: Individual Commodity Percentage Change in Time Price and Percentage Change in Abundance, 1980–2024

Finally, the SAI is calculated by multiplying personal resource abundance by population size. As noted, between 1980 and 2024, personal resource abundance increased by 238.1 percent. Over this same period, the global population increased by 82.9 percent, rising from 4.444 billion to 8.126 billion. The relevant equation is:

SAI = (1 + percentage change in population) x (1 + percentage change in personal resource abundance) x 100
SAI = 1.829 x 3.381 x 100
SAI = 618.4

Individual Commodity Changes from 2023 to 2024

The SAI increased by 1.48 percent from 609.4 in 2023 to 618.4 in 2024. During that period, 30 of the 50 commodities in the dataset became more abundant, while 20 became less abundant. The one-year change in abundance ranged from a 68.9 percent increase for coal to a 53.7 percent decrease for cocoa.

Figure 3: Individual Commodity Percentage Change in Abundance, 2023–2024

Oranges

The abundance of oranges has not changed greatly since 1980. The lowest time price on record for oranges occurred in 2019, when you could get 3.64 oranges for the time price of 1 orange in 1980. Even with the recent nominal price spike, however, the time price of oranges has been declining at an average rate of 1.56 percent per year.

Julian Simon noted that short-term price spikes are expected due to temporary market conditions. He also noted that these higher prices create incentives for people to focus on discovering new knowledge that will make that specific product more abundant in the long run.

This new knowledge eventually shows up in even lower prices. You can see that in the chart for oranges, as the underlying trend points to lower time prices and increasing abundance over the long run. Because of that factor and the 44-year trendline, we can expect that the time price of oranges will probably be lower in 2025. Time will tell.

Conclusion

The SAI began to recover in 2023 from the effects of COVID-19-related government lockdown policies and monetary expansion. Despite natural disasters, political turmoil, and wars since 1980, resource abundance has continued to increase more than six times faster than the population grew—a phenomenon we call “superabundance.”

To stick with our fertilizer example: Abundance of fertilizer has grown at a compound annual growth rate of 1.81 percent per year. The global population grew by 1.38 percent per year. Therefore, we can say that fertilizer, growing 31 percent faster than the population, is superabundant.

We explore these topics in our book Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet.

Additional Information:

Appendix A: Alternative Figure 1 with a Regression Line, Equation, R-Square, and Population

Appendix B: The Basic 50 Commodities Analysis, 1980–2024

Appendix C: Why Time Is Better than Money for Measuring Resource Abundance

To better understand changes in our living standards, we must shift from thinking in terms of quantities to thinking in terms of prices. While the quantity of a resource is important, economists focus on prices because prices contain more information. Prices signal whether a product is becoming more or less abundant. However, prices can be distorted by inflation. To address that, economists often convert current nominal prices into real or constant prices—a process that can be subjective and contentious.

To overcome those challenges, we can use time prices. The most important consideration from the perspective of an individual consumer is how much time it takes to earn the money needed to buy a product. A time price is simply the money price divided by hourly income. While money prices are expressed in dollars and cents, time prices are expressed in hours and minutes. There are at least seven reasons why time is a better measurement tool than money:

  1. Time prices contain more information than money prices: Since innovation tends to lower prices and increase wages, time prices better capture the benefits of new knowledge and the growth of human capital. Looking only at prices without considering wages tells only half the story. Time prices provide a clearer view of the full economic picture.
  2. Time prices avoid the complications of inflation adjustments: Time prices transcend all the complications associated with trying to convert nominal prices to real prices. Time prices avoid the subjective and disputed adjustments, such as the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the GDP deflator or implicit price deflator (IPD), the Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index (PCE), and purchasing power parity (PPP). Time prices rely solely on nominal prices and nominal hourly incomes at each point in time.
  3. Time prices are universally applicable: Time prices can be calculated on any product with any currency at any time and from any place. That means you can compare the time price of oranges in France in 1850 to the time price of oranges in New York in 2024. Researchers can also choose from various hourly income measures as the denominator.
  4. Time is an objective and universal constant: As the American economist George Gilder has noted, the International System of Units (SI) has established seven key metrics, of which six are bounded in one way or another by the passage of time. As the only irreversible element in the universe, with directionality imparted by thermodynamic entropy, time is the ultimate frame of reference for all measured values.
  5. Time cannot be inflated or counterfeited: Time is both fixed and continuous.
  6. We should measure time inequality, not income inequality: Since everyone has exactly 24 hours each day, examining differences in how time is spent provides a more meaningful perspective on standards of living than comparing income alone. This approach yields a less negative—and perhaps more accurate—picture of inequality.
  7. Time cannot be bought or sold: If it could, the rich people would never die.

These seven reasons make time prices superior to money prices when measuring resource abundance. Time prices are elegant, intuitive, and simple. They represent the true cost we pay for the things we buy. Time prices are the true prices.

News | Energy Production

Fusion Breakthrough Could Reduce Cost of Future Power Plant

“TAE Technologies, a private fusion energy company developing the cleanest and safest approach to commercial fusion power, has achieved a first-of-its-kind breakthrough that fundamentally advances the performance, practicality and reactor-readiness of the company’s proprietary fusion technology.

Experimental results published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications prove TAE has invented a streamlined approach to form and optimize plasma that increases efficiency, significantly reduces complexity and cost, and accelerates the company’s path to net energy and commercial fusion power.”

From TAE.

Reuters | Energy Production

World Bank’s Banga Intends to End Ban Loans for Nuclear Power

“World Bank President Ajay Banga on Wednesday doubled down on his push to revamp the bank’s energy strategy to end a ban on lending for nuclear power projects and enable more natural gas projects, saying he will seek executive board approval in June.

The changes would mark a shift from the bank’s focus only on renewable energy projects, save for consideration for some gas projects in the poorest countries.”

From Reuters.

Blog Post | Environment & Pollution

Grim Old Days: Richard Hoffmann’s Environmental History of Medieval Europe

The myth of Europe's pristine preindustrial wilderness.

Summary: Many imagine that humans lived more harmoniously with nature in the preindustrial world than they do today, but Richard Hoffmann’s book reveals a very different story. Long before the Industrial Revolution, humans were already transforming landscapes, using massive amounts of resources, eroding soil, and driving animal species to extinction. Hoffmann’s work uncovers how deeply and irreversibly medieval Europeans altered the natural world.


Prior to industrialization, humanity lived in perfect harmony with the natural world, which was largely left unmolested as a vast pristine wilderness, or so claims a popular narrative. Historian Richard Hoffmann, “a pioneer in the environmental history of pre-industrial Europe,” reveals in his book An Environmental History of Medieval Europe that the reality was far more complicated. While many of today’s environmental challenges—such as climate change and plastic pollution—differ from the problems our forebears faced, it sadly turns out that environmental degradation and poor treatment of animals are not recent innovations. From deforestation to driving animal species extinct, human beings have been altering their environment in many ways since long before industrialization.

Preindustrial Europeans “colonized nature to create new anthropogenic ecosystems. The interventions had deep environmental effects.” Europe was hardly unique in this regard. The landscapes of the Americas, for example, were also significantly modified by human beings. European colonists falsely viewed the Americas as unaltered, virgin territory. That was an illusion enabled by the fact that in the Americas, a lack of immunity to viruses common in Europe decimated the former continent’s native population upon the latter’s arrival. As a result, “the American continents were emptied, creating what Europeans perceived as primeval wilderness where once had flourished anthropogenic landscapes shaped by hunter-gatherers, agriculturalists, and indigenous urbanizing cultures.”

Indeed, any long-inhabited environment bears the mark of generations of active human alteration. “The Europe inherited by the Middle Ages [was not] in any way pristine. From the Neolithic to the age of classical Mediterranean civilization successive human cultures had repeatedly affected and transformed European landscapes. Even Pleistocene and post-Pleistocene hunters deployed fire to make game more accessible. Subsequent agricultural adaptations (arable and pastoral) further opened European woodlands.” Intentional fires “to manage landscapes for game created open ‘parkland’ woods and in northwestern Britain, even anthropogenic steppe grasslands.”

Some changes to the environment were unintentional, while others were the product of active land management. “Since deep human prehistory, Europeans both adapted to their natural surroundings and actively modified them in ways people had intended, ways they found surprising, and ways of which they remained seemingly quite unaware.”

Preindustrial people were largely unworried about their environmental impact. In fact, “adversarial relations between humans and nature are a continuing strand in medieval thought.” Indeed, “late antique and early medieval writers often articulated an adversarial understanding of nature, a belief that it was not only worthless and unpleasant, but actively hostile to . . . humankind.” Consider a vivid example of this mindset:

At the far end of the Middle Ages the struggle between humans and nature [inspired] a vision poem by a Saxon humanist, Paul Schneevogel (Paulus Niavis, 1460/65–after 1514), who contemplated his native Erzgebirge, the ‘ore mountains’ today between Germany and the Czech Republic. That mining district appears as an arena of mutual wars of attrition between aggressive men who burrowed into the earth, destroyed woodlands, and befouled streams, and an earth that fought back, caving in the tunnels, poisoning the waters, and blighting harvests. This struggle against nature is, the poem concludes, the inescapable fate of Humankind.

Given such views, it is not surprising that most people had no interest in anything like the modern concepts of environmental conservation or stewardship. “Environmental protection for its own sake had no meaningful role in official discourse.” Any legal limitations on the use of natural resources revolved strictly around how such rules affected human beings. For example, most hunting limitations were focused on keeping the peasants from engaging in an activity (hunting) perceived as above their station in life. “By the later Middle Ages in most parts of Europe commoners were barred from hunting and the activity reserved to nobles. . . . This grievance, among others, helped trigger the German Peasants’ War of 1525. English rebels in 1381 carried a dead rabbit on a pole as a standard.” Note that moral consideration for animals or the natural environment played essentially no part in preindustrial debates on hunting, fishing, forestry, and land use.

First, consider deforestation. Even paleolithic peoples cleared and altered the landscape; they mined flint and other materials. “Salt they obtained by mining or boiling the water from brine springs, burning much wood to do so.” Over time, more woodland was cleared. “Bronze Age clearances for pasture in Denmark strained local wood supplies to the point that some pasture was left to grow back as trees.” Among Iron Age northern peoples such as the ancient Celts and Germanic tribes, “since dwellings were made of wood and human use depleted both local woodland and soil, after a generation or so farmers commonly abandoned their dilapidated houses and rebuilt elsewhere.” Ancient Romans were also “overusing and misusing their woodlands, so they ceased to exist and/or to provide natural habitats and landscapes as before.” In fact, “being subject to regular human use, Mediterranean woods had long been not pristine old-growth ecosystems but rather parts of managed landscapes.”

Cutting down so many trees affected the broader ecosystem. “As domestic animals used the woodland for pasture, it was further opened up. This changed the species composition in the woodland. During the Bronze Age and Iron Age most of the woods of central and western Europe shifted towards a dominance of beech, which more than some previous species favours a more open situation. What some have believed to be the pristine deep woods of central Europe, full of beeches, have rather resulted from the ways in which humans and their livestock have exploited those woodlands since the Bronze Age.”

By the 14th century, human action had reduced “central Europe’s wooded cover to a mere 10 per cent of land area.” To this day, many of Europe’s landscapes bear the imprint of medieval alterations. For example, “the countrysides now visible in Tuscany, on the north German plain, or in Ireland were largely formed during the Middle Ages as a result of how people on the land . . . made use of their surroundings.”

“Landscapes of northern Europe were transformed during the course of the central and high Middle Ages. What had been mostly covered with multi-use woodland, including parcels that were for short periods of time used as farmland and then left to go back to woods, then became permanent arable.” This transformation involved extraordinary effort. “Even with the help of fire, medieval people had to tear the trees out one at a time by muscle power, open the soil surface for plough agriculture, and convert the land from woodland to arable fields.”

Trees were cut down to make way for farmland and to provide wood; over time, deforestation was increasingly driven by the latter motivation. “Through the whole of the Middle Ages Europe was deforested mainly for the sake of arable agriculture. But as those arable clearances slowed in the course of the late twelfth and the thirteenth century until they stopped in the fourteenth, fuel demand came to exert the greater pressure on remaining woodlands.”

England, where most removal of forest area occurred long before industrialization, provides a case of rapid deforestation. “William the Conqueror’s 1086 Domesday survey of English resources found trees on only about 15 per cent of the realm; by 1340 that ratio had dropped to 6 per cent.” In fact:

Clearances were well under way in Anglo-Saxon England long before the Norman conquest of 1066. King William’s Domesday survey conducted in 1086 found England only 15 per cent wooded, a figure some modern writers argue indicates prior loss of a half to two-thirds of the country’s early medieval tree cover. . . . Continued clearance took England to barely 6 per cent wooded by 1348, a decline of 60 per cent since Domesday. During those two and a half high medieval centuries English men, women, and draught animals removed the tree cover from nearly twelve thousand square kilometres.

Next, consider France. “The 55 million hectare territory of modern France (not, of course, its medieval boundaries) around the time of Charlemagne included something in the range of 30 million hectares of woodland, but by the time of King Philip IV (1285–1314) only around 13 million. Over those five centuries, the wooded cover shrank by more than half (56 per cent).” Meanwhile, in Poland, “the roughly 16 per cent of the terrain now in that country under the plough in 1000 had risen to 30 per cent by 1540, approximately a doubling of the agricultural land use.”

“What motivated the agricultural clearances and transformation of European landscapes? The answer is that medieval peasants came under pressure. Pressure came from subsistence needs: growing families that embodied the rising European population had to have more calories to feed everyone.”

Preindustrial farming practices did not just result in deforestation but affected the environment in other ways. Consider soil. Even before the Middle Ages, “lowland and foothill woodlands [were] cleared [by the Romans] for agricultural use and wetland swamps drained and cut. Consequences included more irregular hydraulic regimes, aridization [and] erosion,” among other things. Soil erosion was not the sole environmental challenge of antiquity. “Soil depletion in the classical Mediterranean was further associated with environmental damage from overgrazing and deforestation.” Still, it is well established that “the classical Mediterranean world [experienced] soil depletion due to erosion and other forms of soil exhaustion.”

Deforestation itself can cause soil erosion. “A switch from woodland to permanent fields altered the runoff regime, which affected soil erosion and deposition, and all this affected the habitat for animals.” Medieval people themselves sometimes described this process:

In the late thirteenth century a Dominican in the town of Colmar on the Rhine wrote tellingly about what had changed in the area between the Vosges mountains and the river during his own lifetime. He said the trees had been removed that once grew along the mountain slopes and the loss of woody cover had resulted in more rapid and erratic runoff. Alsatian streams now alternated seasonally between springtime floods and dry beds in summer droughts. This he attributed to the clearances.

In many parts of the world, “in historic agrarian societies soil erosion [and] nutrient loss” have posed problems. Livestock also contributed to soil erosion. “Hooves may alternatively churn up the soil surface and so open it up for erosion. Introducing meaningful numbers of animals into a landscape thus triggers a whole array of potential ecological consequences.”

Much soil erosion and nutrient depletion resulted from a lack of modern scientific understanding. “To sustain successful agricultural colonization requires management of a whole soil ecosystem which pre-industrial peoples could neither see nor imagine, but had rather to learn and negotiate by local trial, error, and oral transmission of results.” Unsurprisingly, such a haphazard approach often failed. For example, “influential French medievalist Georges Duby blamed what he saw as food shortages and death rates increasing from the 1290s, if not earlier, on . . . cultivation of infertile, soon-exhausted, soils.”

Modern research reveals the extent of soil damage in preindustrial times. “In Germany, geomorphologists find that soil erosion had for several prior millennia averaged less than 5 mm per year. But after the woodland cover was reduced to a mere 10 per cent of surface area by the end of the thirteenth century, extreme precipitation during 1313–19 thrust this alluviation rate up to five times the annual mean, in other words, 25 mm per year or a hand’s span of soil loss in less than a decade.”

The soil was clearly abused, but what about the quality of life for farm animals? Today, animals are bred to be larger, producing more meat. But in the medieval period, farm animals actually shrank in size compared to antiquity, with inadequate feeding resulting in their diminution over generations:

Domestic animals diminished in size. Skeletal remains show Roman cattle stood on average about a head taller than later Frankish cattle. While Romans had typically practised stall feeding, the new agrarian regime used rough pasture, where a smaller animal is more likely to succeed. Perhaps because husbandry of sheep and swine changed less, those beasts shrank less—though the latter did so even in northern Spain—while dogs and horses remained unaffected.

Domesticated animals nonetheless fared better than certain wild species. Species loss is sometimes thought of as a purely modern phenomenon, but in fact, many species were exterminated from large parts of their native habitats or even driven to extinction (such as the auroch) in the preindustrial era. A fact that should perhaps be more widely known is that lions, hyenas, and leopards are all native to Europe but were eliminated from the continent by human activity:

Lion, hyena, and leopard had vanished from Mediterranean Europe by the first century BCE and bear populations in both the Balkans and the Apennines were much reduced. Elimination of all the now proverbially ‘African’ animals—lion, elephant, zebra, etc.—from areas north of the Sahara was complete by the fourth century CE. Besides these purposely targeted ‘trophy’ organisms, pursued on cultural grounds beyond all reasonable expenditure of energy, economic pressures took their toll on other biota. Capture and export of sturgeon from the Rhône delta to Roman markets, for example, caused steady shrinkage in their average size and eventual near disappearance from the archaeological record.

People killed animals in many ways, including gladiatorial fights and mass slaughters during celebrations. “Animals, preferably large, fierce, and exotic ones, put on show or goaded to fight other beasts or men in the arena gave prestige to the sponsor and entertainment to the audience. Their huge numbers—one triumph of Emperor Trajan in 107CE killed 11,000”—are boggling to the modern mind. The animals thus killed may have included elephants, lions, and bears.

In the medieval period, torturing and killing animals for entertainment remained popular. Also, it was widely believed that animals could become possessed by demons, which made people drive away or kill the animals. For example, “when seventh-century wandering Irish ascetic Gall went into the Alpine foothills south of the Bodensee, he had to drive demonic otters from the pool beneath a waterfall.” One wonders whether animals deemed possessed may have had rabies or other illnesses that altered their behavior in a way that the medieval people interpreted as demonic possession or whether in such cases people actually harassed perfectly healthy animals.

Overfishing also harmed some local species. “Almost as soon as references to fish prices appear in mid-twelfth-century documents, their upward movement reveals imbalance between supply and demand. Fishing pressure is shown, too, in the shrinking size of favourite varieties recovered from archaeological sites of long-term consumption. In kitchen middens along the southern shore of the Baltic, for example, early medieval sturgeon were of great size, those of the twelfth century much smaller, and the species nearly disappeared thereafter. Some local runs of salmon and sturgeon were extirpated from the twelfth century onwards.”

Overhunting was another issue. “Such prized game as bear, wolf, and wild pig were extirpated from the British Isles by the end of the Middle Ages. The last individual specimen of the great native European wild ox, the aurochs, was killed by a known noble hunter in Poland in 1637.” Perhaps human activity resulted in “a western Europe lacking pine marten or sturgeon.”

Habitat loss also reduced the numbers of many local animal species. “Remains of woodland birds dominate in archaeological sites around Madrid dating to the fifth to twelfth century, but lost importance in the later Middle Ages,” when clearing of woodlands resulted in habitat loss for such birds, and their numbers plummeted. “Through central medieval centuries up to the twelfth, overhunting and habitat destruction in the form of the great clearances had damaging effects on wildlife populations. Western fur-bearers were depleted or extirpated. By the high and later Middle Ages a beaver was but vaguely known to most western European naturalists. . . . Wild cats disappeared, and so, too, did most animals larger than the smaller weasels from all but the most remote and rough uplands in the west.”

The examples of species depletion go on and on. “By the end of the Middle Ages the southernmost breeding population of walrus on the Scottish North Sea coast had been extirpated and Basque and other whalers had so depleted some varieties from European waters as to move operations promptly to newly found coastal North America.” In Iceland, “by the twelfth and thirteenth centuries nearly all the scrubby valley woodlands had been destroyed and some areas in the more densely settled south were likely overgrazed to the point of erosion. Fuel wood had become scarce and timber supplies dependent on driftwood or imports. The resident walrus of the southwest coast were extirpated.”

New settlements also drove species loss in some cases. For example, “after 1425 Portuguese settlement on the uninhabited archipelago of Madeira triggered massive clearances of primeval indigenous woodlands and the extermination of native animal species in the jaws of European domesticates (pigs), commensals (rats), and introductions (rabbits).”

That brings us to invasive, or nonnative, species. The human introduction of such species to environments has been occurring since classical times. “Roman soldiers or their camp followers knowingly carried grape vines to Britain in their baggage and unknowingly the malaria parasite to the Rhine delta in their bloodstream.”

The introduction of new species sometimes coincides with the loss of native species. Hoffmann poses questions, such as, “Did the spread of an exotic animal, the rabbit, in thirteenth-century England and the Low Countries have anything to do with the simultaneous extirpation of native wild boar from Britain? And the arrival of an exotic fish, the common carp, in France at the very time that native salmon were vanishing from streams of coastal Normandy?”

In the medieval period, hunting devastated the populations of many species and motivated the introduction of nonnative species, all while contributing very little to food security. Hunting for food was rare, especially among the nonelite, and even among the elite, hunts tended to be largely ceremonial or cultural events rather than practical outings in pursuit of food. “On twenty-six long-inhabited archaeological sites in northern France dating from the thirteenth century through to the seventeenth, for instance, game animals provided but 2 per cent of the food bones at secular elite locations (lord’s houses, castles) and less than 0.5 per cent everywhere else (towns, monasteries, peasant villages).” While hunts did not significantly increase the food supply, they did have profound effects on the environment:

Interest in the hunt motivated medieval elites to introduce exotic animals to Europe. Besides the rabbit, a small species of deer, the fallow deer (Dama dama), was also brought to Europe, probably under French noble auspices. These originated in China but European populations likely descended from an earlier transfer into Persia (also for hunting) that drew the attention of crusading aristocrats. In the thirteenth century the French crown owned several herds of fallow deer. Peasant neighbours were called out on corvée (forced labour) to dig ponds to water the deer, build fences to keep them protected, and plant crops for their fodder. Anglo-Norman lords brought fallow deer to Britain along with rabbits and pheasants, another animal exotic to Europe.

Once introduced to the continent by humans, rabbits spread rapidly, altering Europe’s ecosystems. “Rabbits are native to North Africa and the Romans had introduced them to Iberia. By the 1100s rabbits were present in France and by the 1200s had been brought to the Low Countries and England. Around 1500 they were crossing the Vistula in Poland and had arrived on the plains of Hungary.” Invasive rabbits soon outcompeted their native relative, the European hare. “The rabbits, having adapted ever more successfully to their new habitats, themselves went feral and spread all over the continent. At the same time the native member of the related family, the European hare, seems to have dwindled and in some areas disappeared. Good comparative zooarchaeological evidence from a wide sample of medieval sites shows hare remains diminishing in proportion to rising numbers of rabbits.”

“Twelfth-century France saw intentional construction of artificial pond structures to grow fish on landed estates and the next century their proliferation along with techniques to rear a species exotic to western Europe, the common carp. . . . Like rabbits, carp established feral populations too.”

In short, preindustrial people inhabited a world that was far from an untouched wilderness. “Medieval Europeans changed their natural world, even permanently.” Hoffmann’s book helps to raise “awareness that even early medieval Europe was no pristine natural system . . . but already fully marked by long human presence, learning, use, and adaptation of its ecosystems.” As Hoffmann’s book makes clear, some preindustrial practices would give a modern-day environmentalist ample cause for dismay.