Peter Frankopan - The Earth Transformed: An Untold History

THE EARTH TRANSFORMED

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World

The First Crusade: The Call From the East

BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING

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First published in Great Britain 2023

Copyright Peter Frankopan, 2023

Peter Frankopan has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: HB: 978-1-5266-2256-3; TPB: 978-1-5266-2257-0; eBook: 978-1-5266-2258-7

Maps and charts created by Mike Athanson

Plate section designed by Phil Beresford

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To Jessica

When God created the first human, He took him and led him round all the trees of the Garden of Eden and said to him Pay attention that you do not corrupt and destroy My world; if you corrupt it, there is no one to repair it after you.

Midrash Ecclesiastes Rabbah, 7:13

The drought is so excessive,

And we are tormented by the heat.

I have not stopped offering sacrifices

To the powers above and below I have made sacrifices and buried offerings.

There are no spirits I have not honoured.

King Xuan of Zhou (r. 827782 BC), Yunhan ()
from Shijing (, Classic of Poetry)

[God] has raised the heavens and set up everything in balance,
Therefore do not transgress the balance that has been established.

Qurn, 55:78

A change in our climate is taking place Both heats and colds are become much more moderate.

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1785)

The poorest nations, already beset by man-made disasters, have been threatened by a natural one: the possibility of climatic changes.

Henry Kissinger, Address to the Sixth Special Session of
the United Nations General Assembly (April 1974)

Ive seen it, Ive read some of it I dont believe it.

Donald Trump, 45th President of the
United States of America, on the
US National Climate Assessment 2018

Contents

Historians can tie themselves in knots trying to work out the best way to transliterate names of peoples, places and individuals. I have tried to use my judgement as best I can to make the text readable and, in doing so, to recognise that some readers may on occasion prefer a more faithful rendition, most notably when transliterating non-European languages. Nevertheless, I ask for forbearance from the reader who demands consistency. In return, I hope to inform, enlighten and help provide new perspectives on how we might look at the world we live in.

Maps

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

Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs et lesprit des nations (1756)

Mans first disobedience, wrote John Milton at the start of Paradise Lost, was to eat the fruit of that forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden. The decision brought death into the World, and all our woe. The loss of paradise turned the earth from a place of beauty and plenty into one of sorrow and sadness, where peace and rest can never dwell, hope never come and where life was turned into torture without end.

Miltons epic poem, first published in the second half of the seventeenth century, was a retelling of the story that appears at the start of the Book of Genesis explaining how humans came to be the architects of their own demise. By allowing themselves to be tempted by the infernal Serpent, Adam and Eve condemned all future generations to lives of ecological challenge, ones where the environment was no longer always benign, where food was not always easy to come by and where humans had to work, rather than receive benefits from God. Paradise had been lost.

In todays world, the ways that our species works the land, exploits natural resources and treats sustainability are topics of vehement discussion not least since many believe human activities to be so extensive and so damaging that they are changing the climate. This book sets out to look at how our planet, our enclosed garden (the literal meaning of the word paradise), has changed since the beginning of time, sometimes as a result of human endeavours, calculation and miscalculation, but also thanks to a host of other actors, factors, influences and impulses that have shaped the world we live in often in ways we do not think about or understand. This book will explain how our world has always been one of transformation, transition and change because, outside the Garden of Eden, time does not stand still.