Yeah exactly there is lot of environmentalism in history if you look carefully. In fact I am a bit surprised it has not been ceased more on by environmental organizations.

I didn't really write this article as being about environmentalist but I can certainly see the possibility of writing similar article which puts a more environmental twist on it.

In this story I focused on our forests, but there is a very similar story with whales. Whale oil was basically the oil industry of the 1800s. What we think of as petrochemical industry today, was earlier based on whale oil.

Mineral oil and oil drilling really took off when we had gotten close to killing off most of the whales (or rather specfic whale species).

Kind of a thing I know about since whaling is a big part of Norwegian economic history.

It is with whales as with fish, trees, water or just about any human resource. It is not inherently wrong to use these resources but we always end up overtaxing them.

Then at some point whole communities or maybe whole countries dependent on an overtaxed resource may collapse or decline. We keep shooting ourselves in the foot.