"Black Death" had a positive impact on the environment?

Mankind is terrible. Of course, we managed to accomplish amazing things, for example, to study space, to land on the moon, to cure really terrible diseases, including with the help of a vaccine. But also over the past decades we have thrown out so much plastic waste into the oceans that they began to form separate islands, and thus literally stimulated the evolution of bacteria that can process them. Is it worth mentioning the global warming caused by the emission of huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and the destruction of whole populations of wild animals?

So in general people are terrible. Nature clearly realizes this and tries to destroy us from time to time. A good example of this is the "black death", which in the XIV century in just a few decades destroyed 20 million people. However, a new study shows that the plague may also have had an unexpectedly positive impact on the environment.

How the environment is contaminated with lead

According to a publication in the journal GeoHealth, a group of researchers from Harvard University, for a long time, has been monitoring the regional and global level of lead pollution, as evidenced by a series of advanced analyzes of the ice core. Generally speaking, mining and smelting, along with a number of interrelated industrial processes, lead to the ingress of a large amount of lead into the environment, both into the atmosphere and into the hydrosphere.

How lead affects a person

Lead adversely affects all living beings. It greatly damages the nervous and digestive system of not only humans but also other animals. Before the person intervened, he was not in such quantity in the environment, although for the sake of justice it is necessary to say that people have been engaged in its extraction for the last 2000 years, if not longer.

Reducing pollution during the pandemic of the plague

By tracking the concentration of lead in the environment through the ice cores, the team noted that during the "black death", especially between 1349 and 1353 years, for the first time in the past two millennia there was no lead in the air. As it turned out, because of massive deaths, basic survival became a more important priority than lead mining.

"During the pandemic of the plague, demographic and economic collapse interrupted the production of metals, and the amount of lead in the atmosphere fell to an undetectable level," the scientists write.

Controversial idea

Such studies confirm the idea that fewer people will harm the environment less. The smaller the population of the planet, the less resources are needed to meet its needs, and the less lead will be in the air and plastic in the ocean.

This idea may seem inhuman and wild, but we do not need to follow it. There is another way.

The Paris Agreement and the Human Genome Project clearly show that people are able to work together to solve monumental problems. Therefore, instead of waiting for nature to decide to send us another deadly disease, we could find alternative solutions to the problem of our destructive behavior that would suit everyone.