Europe's natural environment has interacted with the Continent's vigorous economic history over the last several hundred years largely in ways conducive to growth. Three attributes of the European environment – its particular location on the surface of the earth, its comparative freedom from natural disasters, and the variety of its resources – are discussed in this first section. The next section discusses influences of the environment on the location of industry, the section after that touches on the effect of industrial and other forms of pollution on the human habitat, and the final section deals with the way Europeans expanded their effective resource base by securing control over other continents.

In considering these matters it is worth emphasising the experience of the western part of Europe. That experience is not a close guide to what was happening simultaneously in the remainder of the Continent, but there are two reasons for thinking it exceptionally significant in the history of almost the whole world. The former is that from the fifteenth century western Europeans disrupted other ecosystems by plunder, trade and colonialism, and by introducing old world diseases among vulnerable populations, sufficiently to amount to a reshaping of the whole globe's demographic, economic and political life.