The Columbian Exchange: A History Lesson in Climate Change
When you think of climate change, what comes to mind? Soaring summer temps and furniture-moving floods? Or perhaps you’re more optimistic, envisioning vast solar arrays and fleets of electric cars. What if I told you that while you reflect on climate change you can also think about…the Columbian Exchange?
Your private musings aside, when you’re in the classroom teaching the Columbian Exchange, climate change probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. Nonetheless, the Columbian Exchange offers an opportunity to encourage students to explore the connections between the history they’re learning and an immediate issue affecting their lives today.
How so? Like climate change today, the Columbian Exchange was transformational—connecting isolated communities, reshaping societies and environments, and bringing both benefits like economic growth and new ideas and challenges like disease, conflict, and ecological disruption.
While humans have long been influenced by changes in climate, the Columbian Exchange marked a turning point in human-driven environmental change. Before 1492, the Americas and Afro-Eurasia had entirely separate crops and animals, but transoceanic voyages brought new foods and livestock that reshaped diets, ecosystems, and economies. European-introduced cattle, pigs, sheep, and horses fueled plantation and ranching systems, which drove deforestation, the disruption of Indigenous practices, and created demand for beef and dairy that laid the groundwork for today’s industrial animal agriculture. With agriculture now responsible for about 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions, examining the legacy of the Columbian Exchange helps students connect past and present food systems to the climate crisis, and invites them to explore more sustainable alternatives. Today, agriculture is a major contributor of greenhouse gas emissions, responsible for about 20% of global annual emissions. Encouraging students to recognize the impact of our current and historical food systems and explore alternatives to how we grow plants and raise livestock for food is essential to understanding the climate crisis we face today.
But why bother teaching climate change in tandem with the Columbian Exchange? First, helping students see the ways in which the past continues to impact their lives today allows them to engage more deeply with and find personal relevance in the history topics they’re learning about. We know this skill is applicable not just to the Columbian Exchange, but to myriad historical topics that continue to shape our world today. Seen through the lens of the Columbian Exchange, we can understand climate change more fully because it helps us see it not as an isolated event, but as part of a longer history of human impact on the planet. By studying the topics side by side, students see that decisions made over 500 years ago have long-term, unintended consequences. They can apply this perspective to think critically about the ways decisions being made today will shape our future. Although the Columbian Exchange didn’t directly cause today’s climate crisis, it is one of many historical events that adds perspective, nuance, and depth to their understanding of climate change and what we can do about it. Studying the connection between climate change and the Columbian Exchange helps students understand that some decisions, regardless of intentions, have irrevocable consequences to both human and planetary history.
Sounds great, no? But are you asking yourself how you can bring this into your classroom? Well, here’s how:
- Start with an opener: Ask students to map their favorite meal to decide if it would exist without the Columbian Exchange and prime their thinking about how interconnection has effected the foods they eat daily.
- Have students watch The Columbian Exchange video and read the article “Crops that Grew the World.” As they work their way through each, ask them jot down notes about the impacts of interconnection on the environment. For each impact, ask them to mark if they think it was positive (+) or negative (-). Then, have them work with a partner to compare notes and craft a claim in response to this question: In what ways did the Columbian Exchange impact global and regional food systems in the period following interconnection?
- Next, show the video Exploring the Grand Challenges. Ask them to take notes about the connections they notice between the Columbian Exchange and sources of greenhouse gas emissions, paying close attention to the section on agriculture (2:22–2:36). Then, have them work with their partners to complete the Grand Challenge Image Sort activity. Ask them to put a star next to each source of emissions they can connect to the Columbian Exchange. There are no wrong answers if they can support their arguments!
- Then, ask partner pairs to craft a claim in response to this question: How has the Columbian Exchange impacted climate change today?
For an optional research extension, ask students to explore the Climate Tech Atlas to research the most promising solutions to the food, agriculture, and nature challenges they learned about. This activity can help structure their research as they learn more.
And—if you really want to blow their minds—ask students what they believe was the most impactful thing traded during the Columbian Exchange. Then, share with them OER Project’s answer: the honeybee. Without the bee’s pollinator powers, how else could all these European plants and foodstuffs ever have grown in the Americas?