This new economic system was not without tangible environmental and biological costs, however. Large settlements, slash and burn agriculture, and over-explotation of resources all may have significantly altered the landscape and ecosystem. Game populations and wood availability, for example, were likely reduced. Farming on the floodplain typically could produce a bountiful harvest, but the negative aspects of reliance on maize likely became apparent after periodic catastrophic flooding or other environmental disasters. Not only would a poor harvest of their staple food create dietary stress, the stress could be compounded by the resulting intensified exploitation and competition for wild foods.

Another potential consequence of increased population was increasingly well-defined political areas of resource exploitation. As settlements grew in size and the political landscape became more divided, so too did the intensity of resource exploitation within individual polities. That is, areas previously utilized by Mississippians of different social and political affiliations were reduced in size as social and political units grew in size and number and extended their control of previously shared resources. Effectively this division of land into more and more political and social units reduced the size of buffer areas from which foods could be acquired in times of poor harvests. Thus, more people with different socio-political ties competing over fewer and fewer "owned" resources may have resulted in periodic dietary and social stress.