In the sixteenth century, North America contained 25 to 30 million buffalo; by the late nineteenth century fewer than 100 remained. While removing the buffalo east of the Mississippi took over 100 years, the remaining 10 to 15 million buffalo on the Great Plains were killed in a punctuated slaughter lasting little more than ten years. I employ theory, international trade statistics, and first-person accounts to argue the slaughter was initiated by a foreign-made innovation and fueled by a foreign demand for industrial leather. European demand and American policy failure are jointly responsible for the “Slaughter on the Plains.”

This essay reviews what we currently know about the environmental consequences of economic growth and international trade. Using a unified framework, we critically review both theory and empirical evidence on issues such as the Environmental Kuznets Curve, the pollution haven hypothesis, and the effects of environmental policy differences on trade and investment flows. We consider how this evidence can help us evaluate ongoing policy debates, and we discuss directions for further research.

This paper presents a general equilibrium model of renewable resource and population dynamics related to the Lotka-Volterra predator-prey model, with man as the predator and the resource base as the prey. The authors apply the model to the rise and fall of Easter Island, showing that plausible parameter values generate a 'feast and famine' pattern of cyclical adjustment in population and resource stocks. Near-monotonic adjustment arises for higher values of a resource regeneration parameter, as might apply elsewhere in Polynesia. The authors also describe other civilizations that might have declined because of population overshooting and endogenous resource degradation.