The one-sentence summary

Human activities in the last 500 years have been breathtaking and devastating in equal measure – if we truly understood the depth of it we might yet find the collective wisdom to save both ourselves and the planet.

Can’t be bothered to read it? Listen to the 5-minute summary in two parts.

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WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

  • This is an environmental history of the last 500 years, starting with the expansion of the Mongol Empire in the 13th century and working through migration, the slave trade of the 1500s to the 1900s, world wars and to the environmental devastation enacted in the present day.
  • The journey takes us everywhere – from the rice paddies of 11th century Asia to the silver mines of Peru and the oil wells of Azerbaijan. Over centuries people have pursued freedom from hunger and discomfort, freedom to move and explore, and in doing so have brought change to every inch of the earth. The freedom won by many has come at great cost to other human and nonhuman lives.
  • The story of the environment is twinned with empire, genocide and ecocide. Humanity’s innovations and exploitations have had dire consequences. Once upon a time all history was environmental history and life was governed by the seasons. And then things changed. The most privileged people in the world began to think that the human battle against nature could be won.
  • They believed that natural limits no longer hindered their quest for wealth and power. They believed that instant access to the prehistoric solar energy embedded in fossil fuels made them invulnerable. In pursuit of freedom, they took away the freedom of others.
  • The First World War was an ecological catastrophe. It slaughtered animals, devoured forests, feasted on minerals and left its poisonous trace in soils that remain toxic more than a century later. Of the 80 known chemical elements, 30 were required in modern warfare. Nitrogen was crucial, with nitric acid essential for explosives and nitrates for fertilizer to grow food.
  • The uprooting of people by the construction of infrastructure was enormous. From 1947 to 2000, at least forty million people in India alone were driven from their homes by large dams. In China, the number was probably higher. Such people are described as development refugees. The communities were not selected at random – for the most part they belonged to marginalized minorities.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

  • “All ends in the same. Iron mines, coal mines, factories, furnaces, the counter, the desk – no one can live on iron, or coal or cotton – the object is really sacks of wheat.” Richard Jefferies, chronicler of English rural life.
  • In 1868 a visitor to northern Michigan lamented: “The Pioneer is insensible to arguments touching the forest supply; to him, the forest is only fit to be exterminated, as it hinders plough and obstructs his sunlight.”
  • Mahatma Gandhi wrote in 1928: “God forbid that India should ever take to industrialization in the manner of the West. If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.”
  • The introduction of railways into flood plains has caused untold damage in India, breaking up thousands of smallholdings.
  • “Man can be the master of his environment and not its slave,” declared a United Nations Preliminary Report on the World Social Situation after the Second World War.
  • The word earthmoving first appeared in the 1930s and signified a new kind of power. By the 1950s, the yellow construction vehicles of the Caterpillar corporation trundled all over the world.
  • The fifty nuclear weapon tests carried out by the USA between 1948 and 1958 brought lasting harm to the people of Bikini Atoll. Women miscarried fetuses, people of all ages developed thyroid cancer, children suffered from leukemia, and a residue of radioactive strontium, cesium and iodine poisoned aquatic life across 5,000 miles of ocean.
  • Oil insinuated itself into the hopes and dreams of the postcolonial world. Wherever oil was discovered, in Latin America, Asia and Africa, it promised to hasten the path to freedom. Brazilian Congressman Alberto Pasqualini said in 1953: “This basic wealth was not created by engineering nor by the hand of man. It has been bequeathed by nature and therefore needs to be exploited only for the benefit of the national collectivity.”
  • Petroleum advertising in the 1950s celebrated oil culture. Shell declared: “Oil research helps with quick drying paints, no polish floors, durable plastic tabletops, and weather defying asphalt-shingle roofs.” In 1962, Humbol Oil boasted, under a picture of a snow-capped mountain: “Each day Humbol supplies enough energy to melt 7 tons of glacier.”
  • The decades from 1950 to 1970 were a period of sustained expansion in industrialized countries – a “golden age” that saw a fourfold increase in world manufacturing output and left many people behind. In the 1980s, the planet lost 150 million hectares of tropical rainforest – an area half the size of India. More than fifteen billion trees fell each year. The term biodiversity only entered English in the late 1980s.
  • High intensity farming takes its toll. Since the late 1990s, 17,000 farmers in India have committed suicide every year.
  • More than half the cumulative total of carbon dioxide that humans have emitted since reliable records began has been emitted since 1990.
  • Two thousand climate activists have been murdered.
  • Thermophilization is a widespread ecological response to warming – the process by which communities are invaded by species from warmer biogeographic regions. Unfortunately, trees are advancing ten times more slowly than the climate is warming.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

  • This is several hundred pages of deep history on a complicated topic. It is beautifully reasoned and very much worth the effort, but be prepared to be exasperated by some of the devastation that is revealed.