With a cultured British accent and detached lecture style, Peter Frankopan, Professor of Global History at Oxford University, outlines ways that climate change may have influenced human development and, conversely, the ways human development may have influenced and accelerated climate change. Frankopan cites extensive research demonstrating the reality of climate and environmental change, as well as the natural volatility of the planet--for example, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes--and how it has impacted events ranging from agricultural disasters to disease and political turmoil. He goes on to alert listeners to the dangers of continuing to degrade the environment. Sadly, Frankopan as narrator does not serve his long text well. A plodding cadence and unvaried tonal quality detract from what might otherwise be an engrossing listen. S.G. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
The Earth Transformed: An Untold History
Narrated by Peter Frankopan
Peter FrankopanUnabridged — 29 hours, 11 minutes
The Earth Transformed: An Untold History
Narrated by Peter Frankopan
Peter FrankopanUnabridged — 29 hours, 11 minutes
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Overview
A gifted historian with an eye for the unexpected connection, Peter Frankopan’s new work is a wholly unique and provocative lesson in the intertwined dependencies of nature and humans throughout history, highlighting in vivid relief why climate change demands our attention and what we risk if we fail to act.
Global warming is one of the greatest dangers mankind faces today. Even as temperatures increase, sea levels rise, and natural disasters escalate, our current environmental crisis feels difficult to predict and understand. But climate change and its effects on us are not new. In a bold narrative that spans centuries and continents, Peter Frankopan argues that nature has always played a fundamental role in the writing of history. From the fall of the Moche civilization in South America that came about because of the cyclical pressures of El Niño to volcanic eruptions in Iceland that affected Egypt and helped bring the Ottoman empire to its knees, climate change and its influences have always been with us.
Frankopan explains how the Vikings emerged thanks to catastrophic crop failure, why the roots of regime change in eleventh-century Baghdad lay in the collapse of cotton prices resulting from unusual climate patterns, and why the western expansion of the frontiers in North America was directly affected by solar flare activity in the eighteenth century. Again and again, Frankopan shows that when past empires have failed to act sustainably, they have been met with catastrophe. Blending brilliant historical writing and cutting-edge scientific research, The Earth Transformed will radically reframe the way we look at the world and our future.
*Includes a downloadable PDF of historic maps and global charts from the book, as well as the written acknowledgements
Editorial Reviews
★ 02/27/2023
In this sweeping history, Oxford historian Frankopan (The New Silk Roads) explores how climate has shaped human history, and how humans have shaped the climate in return. He suggests that climate is a “crucial and much overlooked theme in global history” with sometimes catastrophic consequences, such as when volcanic eruptions around the world in the 530s and ’40s belched a stratospheric haze that dimmed the sun and caused global cooling, crop failures, and famine. Industrialization, the author contends, marked a turning point in humanity’s relationship with the environment as pollution, deforestation, and the depletion of resources posed formidable threats to civilization (he notes the High Plains aquifer crucial to U.S. agriculture is being depleted faster than rainfall can replenish it). Frankopan shows that while environmental upheaval has been a constant presence roiling human affairs, what’s varied has been the ability of societies to adapt. Indus Valley denizens, for example, successfully diversified their crops to adjust to erratic precipitation around 2000 BCE, but less lucky were Chinese citizens under the 10th century Tang Dynasty, which was overthrown after leaders failed to effectively respond to difficulties caused by drought. Frankopan demonstrates an impressive mastery of anthropological, historical, and meteorological literature, and his scrupulously evenhanded analysis carefully notes uncertainties in scientific and historical evidence. Elegant and cogently argued, this illuminates an age-old and urgently important dynamic. (Apr.)
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2023: BBC NEWS, SUNDAY TIMES CULTURE, FINANCIAL TIMES, NEW EUROPEAN, GUARDIAN, NEW STATESMAN, THE TIMES (LONDON), AND THE WEEK
"An essential epic that runs from the dawn of time to, oh, six o’clock yesterday."
—Jill Lepore, The New Yorker
"Thanks to Frankopan and the specialists he cites, the triumphalist procession of steles and slabs and coins that have formed the building blocks of history will give way to a deeper consideration of what constitutes a historical source....Again and again the hindsight that Frankopan exploits so intelligently forces us to look afresh at things we thought we knew."
—Christopher de Bellaigue, The New York Review of Books
"Frankopan has brought all of this scholarly work together into a massive book that is comprehensive, well-informed, and fascinating. It has the intellectual weight and dramatic force of a tsunami....This is an endlessly fascinating book, an easy read on an important issue."
—Gerard DeGroot, The Times (London)
"Frankopan shows you how everything fits together...Vast, learned and timely work...The Earth Transformed is Sapiens for grown-ups....It holds lessons for a world grappling with rapid climate change caused by human industry."
—Dan Jones, The Sunday Times
"A dazzling compendium of global research....The value of this book is an act of deep understanding, recognising not only scientifically but culturally and philosophically that we are epiphenomena—not dominators of the Earth but products of it."
—Adam Nicolson, Spectator
"The author succeeds in mastering a seemingly impossible challenge, distilling an immense mass of historical sources, scientific data, and modern scholarship that span thousands of years and the entire globe into an epic and spellbinding story. Humanity has transformed the Earth: Frankopan transforms our understanding of history."
—Walter Scheidel, Financial Times
"Even as temperatures increase, sea levels rise, and natural disasters escalate, our environmental crisis feels difficult to predict and understand. Again and again, Frankopan shows that when past empires have failed to act sustainably, they have met with catastrophe. Blending brilliant historical writing and scientific research, The Earth Transformed will reframe the way we look at our future."
—JP Faber, Coral Gables Magazine
"All historians aiming to tell a narrative face the problem of when exactly to start it. Only Peter Frankopan would go back 2.5 billion years to the Great Oxidation Event."
—Tom Holland, author of Dominion
"Frankopan demonstrates an impressive mastery of anthropological, historical, and meteorological literature, and his scrupulously evenhanded analysis carefully notes uncertainties in scientific and historical evidence. Elegant and cogently argued, this illuminates an age-old and urgently important dynamic."
—Publishers Weekly, starred
"A scholarly assessment of the long-standing human habit of altering the environment to increasingly devastating consequences....The author negotiates the difficult matter of environmental determinism well....A deep, knowledgeable dive into environmental history."
—Kirkus
"Mapping historical, anthropological, and economic narratives against mountains of climate data, Frankopan correlates periods of instability to shifts in weather patterns, ocean currents, and seismic events. And if the human species has frequently survived existential peril—the Black Death, the Little Ice Age, volcanic mega-eruptions—the threats to our collective future are massive and unprecedented....Propelled by Frankopan’s global scope and interdisciplinary legwork, the resulting synthesis is ambitious, nervous, and impressive."
—Booklist
With a cultured British accent and detached lecture style, Peter Frankopan, Professor of Global History at Oxford University, outlines ways that climate change may have influenced human development and, conversely, the ways human development may have influenced and accelerated climate change. Frankopan cites extensive research demonstrating the reality of climate and environmental change, as well as the natural volatility of the planet--for example, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes--and how it has impacted events ranging from agricultural disasters to disease and political turmoil. He goes on to alert listeners to the dangers of continuing to degrade the environment. Sadly, Frankopan as narrator does not serve his long text well. A plodding cadence and unvaried tonal quality detract from what might otherwise be an engrossing listen. S.G. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
2023-02-07
A scholarly assessment of the long-standing human habit of altering the environment to increasingly devastating consequences.
“Rather as a doctor should have full knowledge of an illness before trying to devise a cure, so too is investigating the causes of the current problems essential if we are to suggest a way to deal with the crises now confronting us all.” So writes Oxford historian Frankopan, enumerating the many environmental challenges we face. It’s no secret that the environment shapes history—e.g., in such events as the Mongol failure to invade Japan thanks to an intervening typhoon or Hitler’s failure to take Moscow because of the brutal Russian winter. However, as the author shows, environment doesn’t explain all: “Overambitious objectives, inefficient supply lines, poor strategic decisions and worse execution of plans on the ground” doomed both Hitler’s and Napoleon’s Russian campaigns just as much as the weather did. Mix poor decisions and incomplete knowledge with an attempt to conquer nature, and you get trouble, as when the Mesopotamian state rose concurrently with its mastery of irrigated agriculture only to watch as its fields were covered with salts from the desert’s hard water, a problem reiterated millennia later in British Imperial India. Frankopan writes that his intention is to meld the environment into the historical narrative, extending that study far into the past, as when he proposes that Neanderthals declined in Europe in a time of widespread climate change to which they were less able to adapt than the Homo sapiens around them. The author negotiates the difficult matter of environmental determinism well, although he does adduce some suggestive stuff—for instance, that the naturally richest agricultural areas of the South, the sites of the most intensive use of slave labor in America, “are more likely today not only to vote Republican, but to oppose affirmative action and express racial resentment and sentiments towards black people.”
A deep, knowledgeable dive into environmental history that doesn’t offer much hope of a course correction.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940176957976 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Random House |
| Publication date: | 04/18/2023 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
| Sales rank: | 982,068 |
Read an Excerpt
1
The World from the Dawn of Time
(c.4.5bn–c.7m bc)
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void ...
—Book of Genesis, 1:1
We should all be grateful for dramatic changes to global climate. Were it not for billions of years of intense celestial and solar activity, repeated asteroid strikes, epic volcanic eruptions, extraordinary atmospheric change, spectacular tectonic shifts and constant biotic adaptation, we would not be alive today. Astrophysicists talk of habitable regions around stars that are not too hot and not too cold as being in the ‘goldilocks zone’. The earth is one of many such examples. But conditions have changed constantly and sometimes catastrophically since the creation of our planet around 4.6 billion years ago. For almost all the time that the earth has existed, our species would not and could not have survived. In today’s world, we think of humans as architects of dangerous environmental and climate change; but we are prime beneficiaries of such transformations in the past.
Our role on this planet has been an exceptionally modest one. The first hominins appeared only a few million years ago, and the first anatomically modern humans (including Neanderthals) around 500,000 years ago. What we know of the period since then is patchy, difficult to interpret and often highly speculative. As we get closer to the modern day, archaeology helps us understand more reliably how people lived; but to know what they did, thought and believed we have to wait till the development of full-writing systems around 5,000 years ago. To put that into context, accounts, documents and texts that allow us to reconstruct the past with nuance and detail cover around 0.000001 percent of the world’s past. We are not just fortunate to exist as a species, but in the grand scheme of history we are new and very late arrivals.
Like rude guests who arrive at the last minute, cause havoc and set about destroying the house to which they have been invited, human impact on the natural environment has been substantial and is accelerating to the point that many scientists question the long-term viability of human life. That in itself is not unusual, however. For one thing, our species is not alone in transforming the world around us, for other species of biota—that is to say, flora, fauna and microorganisms—are not passive participants in or simple bystanders to a relationship that exists solely or even primarily between humans and nature. Each is actively involved in processes of change, adaptation and evolution—sometimes with devastating consequences.
This is one reason why some scholars have criticised the idea and the name of the ‘Anthropocene’, which prioritises humans into ‘a distinguished species’ that has claimed the right to identify what is and is not wild, to classify ‘resources’ as ones that can be used—sustainably or otherwise. Such, argue some, is the ‘arrogance that greatly overestimates human contributions while downplaying those of other life forms almost to the point of nonexistence’.
For around half the earth’s existence, there was little or no oxygen in the atmosphere. Our planet was formed through a long period of accretion, or gradual accumulation of layers, followed by a major collision with a Mars-sized impactor—which released enough energy to melt the earth’s mantle and create the earliest atmosphere from the resultant exchange between a magma ocean and vapour that was anoxic, that is to say, lacking in oxygen.
The earth’s biogeochemical cycles eventually resulted in a radical transformation. Although there is considerable debate about how, when and why oxygenic photosynthesis occurred, evidence from organic biomarkers, fossils and genome-scale data suggests that cyanobacteria evolved to absorb and take energy from sunlight, using it to make sugars out of water and carbon dioxide, releasing oxygen as a by-product. New models suggest that 1 to 5 billion lightning flashes that occurred per year on early earth may have been the source of large volumes of prebiotic reactive phosphorus that played an important role in the emergence of terrestrial life.
Around 3 billion years ago—if not earlier—enough oxygen was being produced to create ‘oases’ in protected nutrient-rich shallow marine habitats. Whether because of chemical reaction, evolutionary development, sudden superabundance of cyanobacteria, volcanic eruptions or a slowdown in the earth’s rotation (or a combination of all five), atmospheric oxygen levels accumulated rapidly around 2.5–2.3 billion years ago, resulting in an episode known as the Great Oxidation Event. This was a key moment that paved the way for the emergence of complex life as we know it.
It also led to dramatic changes in climate, as rapidly increasing oxygen reacted with methane, producing water vapour and carbon dioxide. Alongside the effects of a supercontinent being formed from the collisions of landmasses, the earth’s greenhouse was weakened, leading to the planet being covered completely in ice and snow. Changes in the earth’s orbit around the sun, known as the Milankovitch cycle, may also have played a role in this process. So too might giant meteorite impacts which not only threw up debris into the atmosphere that blocked the sun’s light and heat but also played an important role in the formation of the continents. The glacial episodes may have been weaker or stronger over the course of several hundred million years, but in general the effect of ‘Snowball Earth’ was so dramatic that some scientists refer to this period as a whole as a ‘climate disaster’.
This process was precarious and complex, and is the subject of considerable advances in current research. As with later glaciations, however, it resulted in profound changes for the planet’s plant and animal life. One outcome appears to have been the evolution of small organisms into larger sizes, capable of moving at faster speeds to compensate for the high viscosity of cold seawater. It has recently been suggested that the formation of 8,000-kilometre long belts of ‘supermountains’ may have played a role in the rise of atmospheric oxygen and in stimulating biological evolution as a result of phosphorus, iron and nutrients being deposited into oceans as mountains eroded over the course of hundreds of millions of years.
The fossil record of complex, macroscopic organisms begins with the Ediacara Biota period which started 570 million years ago and which saw at least forty recognised species developing into multicellular animals that were symmetrical—presumably helpful for functions such as mobility. It marked a period of extraordinary diversification in the variety of animals living in the oceans and in their evolution, development and adaptation, with some creatures like trilobites developing respiratory organs on their upper limbs.
Near the end of the Ordovician period, around 444 million years ago, a sudden cooling, perhaps triggered by tectonic shifts that produced the Appalachian mountains, led to sharp falls in temperature and initiated shifts in deep ocean currents, as well as declines in sea level that shrank habitats for marine planktonic and nektonic species. That cooling produced one pulse of extinction; another came when temperatures moderated, sea levels rose and ocean current patterns stagnated, with a resultant sharp fall in oxygen levels. Traces of mercury and indications of significant acidification suggest that volcanic activity was a key factor in the second stage of a process that ultimately brought about the extinction of 85 per cent of all species.
As the moon used to be much closer to the earth—perhaps half the distance away that it is today— these forces were considerably stronger and therefore had a greater impact on the earth’s climate and also perhaps on its wildlife: recent modelling suggests that big tidal ranges may have been responsible for forcing bony fish into shallow pools on land, thereby prompting the evolution of weight-bearing limbs and air-breathing organs. The moon played a role not only in the transformation of the earth, in other words, but also in the development of life on this planet.
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