Peter Frankopan - The Earth Transformed

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

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.

My first encounter with the human impact on the environment and climate change came with a childrens current affairs programme called John Cravens Newsround which was shown every day in the UK when I was a young boy. Newsround was a flagship BBC project that was a lifeline, connecting younger viewers to the world beyond the British Isles. One of the few programmes my parents allowed my siblings and me to watch when we were growing up, it introduced me to the suffering of people at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, to the complexities of the Middle East and to the realities of the Cold War.

One of the themes that came up regularly in the late 1970s and early 1980s was the subject of acid rain. I remember being transfixed by the horror of trees without leaves and by the thought that human activity was responsible for the degradation of nature. The idea that the factories belched emissions that devastated forests, killed animals and contaminated the ground came as a shock to me. Even as a young boy, it seemed obvious that the choices we made to produce goods and products had impacts that had long-term effects on us all.

These misgivings were compounded by a fear of devastation that was a hallmark of my childhood. I am part of a generation that was brought up to believe that the world might see global nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union that would result in large-scale death not only from the detonation of countless intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) but from the nuclear winter that would result from mushroom clouds released by warheads on impact. One film, When the Wind Blows, which came out in the mid-1980s, painted a poignant and awful picture of what lay ahead: sadness, suffering, hunger and death all because of humanitys ability to invent weapons of mass destruction that would not only kill millions through firestorms and explosions, but would change the earths climate so drastically that survival alone would be a miracle.

The detonation of scores of nuclear weapons promised to throw so much debris into the atmosphere that we would have to learn to live in sub-zero temperatures. Sunlight would be blocked by blankets of dust and particles with the result that plants would die. Animals would succumb as a result too leaving those who survived the blasts not only freezing cold but hungry. Fallout from radiation would contaminate flora and fauna, poisoning all forms of life. The aim was to get through the apocalypse and to hope to be one of the survivors. In due course, we hoped, the climate would reset. Then it would be a case of seeing how many people were left alive and where, and starting again.