The Earth Transformed: An Untold History

by Peter Frankopan

Three things exercise a constant influence over the minds of men:climate, government and religion. Voltaire,

So this book has three goals. The first is to reinsert climate back into the story of the past as an underlying, crucial and much overlooked theme in global history and to show where, when and how weather, long-run climate patterns and changes in climate– anthropogenic and otherwise– have had an important impact on the world. The second is to set out the story of human interaction with the natural world over millennia and to look at how our species exploited, moulded and bent the environment to its will, both for good and for ill. And the third is to expand the horizons of how we look at history.

On average today, further human-made mass that is more than the equivalent of the body weight of every person on earth is produced every single week, a phenomenon closely linked to the rise of cities and megacities, and to high levels of consumption of food, water, energy and non-perishable goods.

Nature is not a harmonious, benign and complementary concept that preserves balance, for ecosystems have always been transformed and reshaped by many non-human forces.

For some scholars, collapse in production was the direct result not only of rising population levels but of a rapacious central bureaucracy, whose own need and aspirations placed demands that forced farmers to push their lands to their ecological limits. In particular, the problem was caused by excessive irrigation that ruined soils by causing salinity levels to rise. The search for short-term gain resulted in outcomes that were not only unsustainable but damaging. As we have seen in the cases of implosions of states and the breakdown of trade networks, rising complexity produces diminishing returns as well as magnifying vulnerability. Far from success breeding success, in other words, what seemed like never-ending success as states expanded and land under cultivation increased in extent was often an exercise in the seeds of ruin being sown inadvertently.

As far as colonial settlers were concerned, therefore, African manpower was the answer to multiple problems. As malaria kicked in, decimating the existing population, the desire for more coerced labourers rose sharply. Buyers were not keen to buy enslaved people from just anywhere, but had strong preferences for acquiring those from malaria-ridden regions in Africa, whose populations had high levels of resistance to the disease. This resulted in what one scholar has called a ‘malaria premium’: higher prices for people most likely to survive infection – and therefore prove to be better ‘investments’. Captives from the Gold Coast were considered robust, strong and little affected by disease, while those from the Niger Delta were thought to be less hardy.

Developments such as these fuelled the Great Divergence – the shift by which the western world caught up with, overtook and dominated vast parts of the world. To most Europeans, this was a story of entitlement as much as one of enlightenment, a natural outcome of inherent sophistication and progress which those living in other parts of the world could not and never would match, a result even of racial superiority. Underpinning all these ideas, however, were the cold realities of resource exploitation, of the creation and improvement of supply chains and of turning blind eyes to abuses, of not asking too many questions about who lost while others gained.

One result was that there were widespread environmental changes in North, Central and South America in the centuries that followed 1492 that were not caused by human activity – but quite the opposite. This was a time of major reforestation and wildlife gains in many regions. The major reductions in human populations as a result of disease, hunger, warfare and dislocation meant that land that had been cultivated became overgrown, to the benefit of wild plants and the detriment of foodstuffs like fruits and nuts. Likewise, animals that had been heavily exploited for food or status recovered – such as birds whose feathers had been valued as symbols of prestige and currency, or apex predators like jaguars who gained from expanded habitats with the thinning out of the men who had hunted them and of settlements that had displaced them. Animals whose fortunes and numbers had risen with human success, like turkeys, dogs and llamas, suffered decline as their owners, breeders and keepers died out. But one of the most curious outcomes of the European settlement of the Americas – outside the locations given over to the cultivation of a small number of valuable crops – was the significant wildlife gains across vast territories. Taken as a whole, the Americas were more heavily forested in 1800 than they had been 300 years earlier.

An acre of potatoes typically produces three times more energy than an acre of oats, wheat or barley.

Military records of more than 13,000 French soldiers born between 1658 and 1770 suggest that adult height went up by an average of over one centimetre as a result of nutritional investments made during early life that can be directly attributed to consumption of more calories in general and of potatoes in particular.

In 1900, there were just over four thousand vehicles on the roads in the United States. Twenty years later, that had risen to almost two million.

Gold mining is often both inefficient and highly polluting: twenty tons of soil and rock are typically required to produce enough gold to create a single ring – with much of the waste contaminated with the cyanide and mercury that are used to extract gold.

Uranium from the Shinkolobwe mine at Katanga in southern Congo was far richer than any other source in the world – producing uranium oxide whose quality assayed as high as 75 per cent (compared to 0.02 per cent from ores in the United States and Canada). So important was Shinkolobwe to the US nuclear programme, and consequently to the Cold War, that it was deemed to be essential to US national security. Congo as a whole ‘offers natural resources of extreme importance to our domestic economy’, noted the officials and engineers who worked on the Manhattan Project; they went to great lengths to conceal the origin of the uranium used in the first successful atomic bomb test, claiming it derived from Canadian sources. As a report of 1951 declared, uranium from Congo was of ‘capital importance to the free world’.

Enforced collectivisation of farming under Stalin was supposed to improve yields by 20 per cent as a result of increased crop planting and the use of the latest agricultural technologies. The lack of co-operation from a peasantry resistant both to new methods and to coercion, coupled with requisitioning and repression, created circumstances that resulted in famine across Ukraine and southern Russia which claimed astonishing numbers of lives – perhaps as many as 8 million in 1932–3; life expectancy for men born in Ukraine in 1932 was thirty; for those born in 1933–5, it was just five.[44] The victims were disproportionately those of Ukrainian ethnicity, a reflection of bias in policymaking in the Soviet Union – a significant feature given the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022.[45]

By the 1940s, many areas in the Great Plains had lost more than three-quarters of their topsoil.

It was a similar story in Afghanistan, a country that had positioned itself well during the first half of the twentieth century and ended the Second World War with $100 million in reserves. Nevertheless, Afghanistan was ‘a backward country’, said the prime minister, Mohammed Daoud. ‘We must do something about it or die as a nation.’ He was particularly keen on building a dam. The resultant scheme in the Helmand valley was a disaster. Rather than crystallising Afghan dreams, it turned into a nightmare. As well as the water table being raised too high, salination quickly became a big problem. Vast sums were spent on construction salaries as well as on the wages of technicians during construction; costs were passed on to farmers, who were also subject to inefficient tax collection designed to repay a US loan for the project. Perhaps worse, it encouraged competition from the Soviet Union, which was keen not to lose influence in the region; this led to the construction of the Jalalabad dam and major development of the Amu Darya River, funded by a loan worth three times that of the US, and on terms that had little chance of being met. This all helped undermine the credibility of the king and the government – setting the scene for turbulence later in the twentieth century which has continued to the present day.[66]

The Soviet Union was at a chronic climatological disadvantage when compared to the United States. The thermal conditions of the USSR were poorly suited to agriculture: 80 per cent of Soviet cropland was located in what would be classified as ‘the least productive thermal zone’ – four times as high as was the case in the US. Moreover, while around a third of US cropland was in the most favourable zone for agricultural production, the same was true for just 4 per cent of the equivalent in the USSR. Comparative rainfall levels were also very heavily weighted in favour of North America, where moist oceanic air helps support high continental moisture levels. According to some estimates, while 56 per cent of land suitable for cereal cultivation in the United States has an optimum combination of temperature and moisture, the same was the case for just 1.4 per cent of land in the Soviet Union.[98]

With the fault lines of the Cold War already taking shape, a series of decisions were now made in Washington that had momentous significance. Unlike western Europe, which benefited from a massive injection of funds to help it rebuild, little or nothing was set aside to support China. Moreover, George Marshall, the architect of the regeneration of post-war Europe, was sent to China by President Truman with instructions not to back the government of Chiang Kai-shek, but to broker an agreement with Mao and the communists, persuaded by Stalin’s apparent lack of interest in China, and by the soothing promises that ‘Chinese democracy’ under Mao would follow ‘the American path’. Mao and his followers had little to lose and much to gain by making such commitments – especially when Washington imposed an arms embargo, which tied the hands of Chiang while those of his rivals were being untied and empowered with a massive injection of rifles, machine guns, aircraft and artillery from Moscow.

Air conditioning requires vast amounts of energy: in Saudi Arabia, for example, 700,000 barrels of oil per day are burned, primarily to keep premises cooler than they would otherwise be. Around 70 per cent of all energy consumption in Saudi Arabia is spent on air conditioning.

a survey of almost 90,000 peer-reviewed climate-related papers published since 2012 suggests that the consensus about human-caused climate change among scientists working in this field exceeds 99 per cent. This stands in sharp contrast to members of the 117th Congress of the United States, of whom more than a quarter both in the House of Representatives and in the Senate – including more than half the Republican members of the former and 60 per cent of the latter – have made statements either doubting or refusing to accept the scientific evidence for anthropogenic climate change.[106]