Rachel+Buesser

The Columbian exchange has made a mostly negative impact on the world. They turned the luscious and living “new world” into a similar replica of their world.
 *  The Not So New World **

The Europeans came over and took advantage of the Americas. They took all our lumber and most of our crops. They deforested our jungles and turned our amazing country into a bare one. They did plant new kinds of fruit trees but it didn’t make up for the amount of wood that was already lost.

The Europeans had slaves from Africa join them and they forced them to do labor. They would sell them and wouldn’t even treat them like real human beings.

Also accompanying them on the trip was animals and plants that were not native to the Americas. They brought cattle, pigs, horses, and chickens that ultimately decreased the space available to native animals such as llamas, turkeys and goats. The new animals also decreased the amount of food available to the natives and caused many of them to die.

With Europeans bringing in new plants, an unexpected visitor arrived as well. Soon the Americas were covered with weeds. These spread across the Americas taking space from the luscious grass that once was there. Bison (a native animal to the Americas) eat grass as a large portion of their diet so when the grass began disappearing, so did the bison.

Finally, probably the biggest problem that the Europeans did to the Americas was that they brought with them a very serious illness called smallpox. The illness wiped out about 90% of the Indians that were the first to own the land. Also, the Europeans thought that the Indians dying were just a way for God to show them what was rightfully theirs. They never considered their own actions.