Both ecologists and historians have offered changing definitions of older concepts such as equilibrium, community, balance of nature, stability, and sustainability. Gender, race, and class are important in understanding divisions and subgroups within history. Prophecy in environmental history is tied to narrative trajectory. Capitalism as a standpoint provides a single narrative trajectory of environmental decline that informs environmental histories of the past as well as future environmental prophecies. Focusing on the transition from traditional or susbsistence modes to the modern capitalist world builds prophecy into environmental history.
Modes of production are insufficient.
We also need modes of social reproduction. Native Americans, Australian aborigines, New Zealand Maori's have vastly declined from pre-Columbian population levels. The demographic takeover is a European invasion of temperate U.S., Canada, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, and India. It failed in the tropics. Cattle, horses, goats, sheep, pigs, brought on boats of explorers and colonizers, became feral in new lands where no predators halted their spread.