Development and the environment: the appalling story stated

Development of the environment, as opposed to more or less comfortable accommodation with it, is not a human universal. For most of human history, domestic production units sought environmental accommodation, not development. Development arose with sedentary agricultural states, for such states saw the emergence of surplus dependent, and so surplus demanding, elites. Development shifted from being an essential means to state formation and stability to the very end politics when European states, caught up in furious interstate competition, unleashed the 'economic agency' of their merchant and commercial classes, thereby generalising across all areas of life the economic logic of capitalist reinvestment, and so of development at all costs.