HOW much of an influence has climate had on human history? How early in our existence did we begin to affect the environment? Can a sudden drought really cause a society to collapse? And what does 鈥渃ollapse鈥� mean? These are just some of the questions that historian Peter Frankopan tackles in his ambitious new book, The Earth Transformed.
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Frankopan is best known for his 2015 book The Silk Roads, which argued that human history was heavily influenced by commercial routes that spanned southern Asia. This time, his subject is the role of the environment in history: how the rise and fall of empires has been influenced by volcanic eruptions, storms and shifts in the climate, and how, in turn, societies have disrupted the ecosystems in which they exist.
The book is part of a genre that includes author Jared Diamond, of Collapse and Guns, Germs, and Steel fame. If anything, Frankopan is more ambitious than many other such writers, running from prehistory through the origin of farming and writing to the present. Frankopan also aims for a global account by including case studies from every continent.
Any such sweeping account will inevitably include some arguable claims. For instance, Frankopan is too accepting of the Toba bottleneck hypothesis: the notion that the eruption of the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia 74,000 years ago caused global cooling, devastating ecosystems and nearly driving humans extinct. This idea has been dismissed by many palaeoanthropologists for the lack of evidence of widespread ecological disruption at the time or of any impact on prehistoric humans. For me, the sections on prehistory were the weakest.
But, once Frankopan gets into recorded history, he hits his stride. As he works his way from the deep past to the present, he highlights how societies have come into conflict with nature and how those conflicts played out. Some of the examples, like the fall of the Maya elite, will be familiar. Others aren鈥檛 yet widely known.
He handles some of the most famous cases of past climatic change with considerable care, avoiding the many pitfalls. His accounts of the fall of the Akkadian empire 4200 years ago and of the more recent Little Ice Age are both excellent.
In particular, Frankopan avoids appealing but over-simplified narratives. For example, climate change can and does pose a threat to complex societies, but even dramatic shifts don鈥檛 have to spell inevitable doom. Adaptation is always possible: the question is whether societies are willing to make the sometimes drastic changes necessary.
Similarly, events that we label as societies 鈥渃ollapsing鈥� are typically examples of them ceasing to build enormous monuments, or of the political elite losing power. Power structures collapse, but this doesn鈥檛 necessarily mean mass deaths: indeed, for ordinary people, the collapse may be good news because their oppressors have been vanquished.
I have two concerns about The Earth Transformed. The first is that it contains so much detail that reading it is like being pummelled with facts and figures, with too little scene-setting.
The second is that, having expertly compiled such a vast amount of material, Frankopan has few insights to add. With so many examples of societies thriving or failing in the face of environmental crisis, I wanted to know why some did better. Is it more important to have free speech and democracy, or a powerful central authority that can enact sweeping changes? Can we make commerce and capitalism sustainable, or are they inevitably harmful? Frankopan has the material to explore such questions, but he doesn鈥檛.
It would be churlish, however, to complain too much. The Earth Transformed brings together an enormous range of material from around the world and millennia of human history. It reveals that our societies are, and have always been, intimately bound up with the natural world. Importantly, Frankopan shows our modern concerns about the environment are no modish fad: they were shared by ancient thinkers and leaders. Anyone with an interest in building a more sustainable world would do well to read his book.
Michael Marshall is a science writer聽based in Devon, UK
