A brief history of western globalization and its environmental costs

Abstract

In this article, we intend to reflect on the current globalization process. We recognize globalizations promoted by lifestyles that spread throughout the world without political, economic and cultural domination, such as that of Palaeolithic and Neolithic societies, which diversified as they spread throughout the world. Several civilizations have also partially globalized. The largest and most enduring of all before the Western world was that of the Hellenic civilization, expressed in the Roman Empire. All of them had social, cultural and environmental impacts. None, however, has been as prolonged as impactful as the globalization of Western civilization, both in space and in time. Like none, its socio-environmental impacts have been caused by the capitalist economic system. In this article, we seek to examine the transformations of the natural environment across the planet under the pressure of the capitalist mode of production, as well as the constitution of a new science, which can only be treated, by the complexity of its object, in a transdisciplinary way; at least in a multidisciplinary way.