In the West especially, we tend to believe we’ve invented our way out of that endless zero-sum, scratch-and-claw resource scramble—both with particular innovations, like the steam engine and computer, and with the development of a dynamic capitalistic system to reward them. But scholars like Andreas Malm have a different perspective: we have been extracted from that muck only by a singular innovation, one engineered not by entrepreneurial human hands but in fact millions of years before the first ones ever dug at the earth—engineered by time and geologic weight, which many millennia ago
...more
