This Fleeting World Quotes

“Population growth accounts for much of the impact as cities have gobbled up farmland and forest land, as roads and highways have paved over more land, and as Third World farmers have cleared forest lands to eke out a living. However, during the late twentieth century it became apparent that rates of population growth were slowing throughout the world as urbanization, increasing education, and improved services simultaneously reduced the pressure to have large families and raised their cost. At present, it seems likely that global populations will level out at 9 to 10 billion toward the end of the twenty-first century.”
― David Christian, This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity

“The modern era is the briefest but most turbulent of the three main eras of human history. Whereas the era of foragers lasted more than 200,000 years and the agrarian era about 10,000 years, the modern era has lasted just 250 years. Yet during this brief era change has been more rapid and more fundamental than ever before; indeed, populations have grown so fast that 20 percent of all humans may have lived during just these two and a half centuries.”
― David Christian, This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity

“One of the more influential recent estimates by demographer Massimo Livi-Bacci suggests that thirty thousand years ago there were a few hundred thousand humans, but by ten thousand years ago there may have been as many as 6 million. If we assume that approximately 500,000 humans existed thirty thousand years ago, this implies a growth rate between thirty thousand and ten thousand years ago of less than 0.01 percent per annum, which implies that human populations were doubling approximately every eight thousand to nine thousand years. This rate of growth can be compared with an average doubling time of about fourteen hundred years during the agrarian era and eighty-five years during the modern era.”
― David Christian, This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity

“On the largest scales there can be little doubt that there is a directionality to human history. Foraging, agrarian, and modern societies have not appeared in a chronologically random jumble but rather in a clear sequence. And that sequence has an underlying logic that reflects changing human relations with the environment. On large chronological scales human technologies have changed so as to yield increasing amounts of energy, food, and other resources, which allowed human populations to increase. This, in turn, has given rise to larger and more complex communities, whose technologies and sheer numbers have given them many advantages whenever they have come into contact with smaller communities with less productive technologies. There is a shape to human history, and that is precisely why a global periodization scheme of some kind is so necessary.”
― David Christian, This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity

“Of the three major eras the first, “The Foraging Era,” is by far the longest, lasting for more than 95 percent of the time that humans have lived on Earth, whereas the second, “The Agrarian Era,” lasted for almost 10,000 years, and the last, “The Modern Era,” is by far the shortest, having lasted so far for just 250 years. However, populations were small in the foraging era, so that, measured by the number of human lives lived, the agrarian and modern eras loom larger. Perhaps 12 percent of the roughly 100 billion humans who have ever lived were alive during the foraging era, whereas 68 percent lived during the agrarian era and 20 percent during the modern era. Increasing life expectancies in the modern era mean that, measured by human years lived, the modern era looms even larger, accounting for almost 30 percent of all human years lived, whereas the agrarian era may have accounted for just over 60 percent and the foraging era for just under 10 percent.”
― David Christian, This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity

“Diamond, J. (1998). Guns, germs, and steel: The fates of human societies. London: Vintage. Diamond, J. (2004). Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed. New York: Viking”
― David Christian, This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity

“Christian, D. (2004). Maps of time: An introduction to big history. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.”
― David Christian, This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity

“Brown, C. S. (2007). Big history: From the Big Bang to the present. New York: The New Press.”
― David Christian, This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity

“Fernandez-Armesto, F. (2007). The world: A history. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall.”
― David Christian, This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity

“more and more consumers begin to expect the material living standards currently enjoyed in Europe and North America, human pressure on the environment will increase even as population growth slows.”
― David Christian, This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity

“Increasing global inequalities fueled resistance to Western values. In 1960 the wealthiest 20 percent of the world’s population earned about thirty times as much as the poorest 20 percent; in 1991 the wealthiest 20 percent earned sixty-one times as much. The successes of the most highly industrialized”
― David Christian, This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity

“autarky”
― David Christian, This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity

“Western Europe was better placed than any other region to profit from the vast flows of goods and ideas within the emerging global system of exchange. The European scientific revolution was, in part, a response to the torrent of new ideas pouring into Europe as a result of its expanded contacts with the rest of the world. Awareness of new ideas, crops, religions, and commodities undermined traditional behaviors, cosmologies, and beliefs and posed sharply the question of how to distinguish between false and true knowledge of the world. The reinvention and spread of printing with movable type ensured that new information would circulate more easily in Europe than elsewhere.”
― David Christian, This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity

“Between 1750 and 2000 the number of human beings increased from approximately 770 million to almost 6 billion, close to an eightfold increase in just 250 years. This increase is the equivalent of a growth rate of about 0.8 percent per annum and represents a doubling time of about eighty-five years. (Compare this with estimated doubling times of fourteen hundred years during the agrarian era and eight thousand to nine thousand years during the era of foragers.)”
― David Christian, This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity