Peter Frankopan’s The Earth Transformed: An Untold History is a compelling account of the interaction between humans and the environment. We would be unwise to ignore it.
The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Oxford professor of history Peter Frankopan was initially widely admired. But critics point out that the book exaggerated the significance of the land connection between Europe and East Asia. In his The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World William Dalrymple makes a convincing case that the main trading routes were by sea and they played a part in the critical role in the contribution that the Indian subcontinent made to the world in the 1500 years from the beginning of the common era (when Europe was backward).
But the dispute on the transport routes understates Frankopan’s achievement. He centres his history of the Eurasian world near Persia, rejecting the Eurocentric world histories that most of us grew up with. Dalrymple’s book reinforces that re-centering. My guess is that in a few generations’ time, students will be taught history from a less European-centred perspective.
As if the heroic task of getting us to think differently about the geography of world history was insufficient, Frankopan’s latest book The Earth Transformed aims to change our perceptions about the interaction between human history and the environment.
Obviously, this writer of Not in Narrow Seas: The Economic History of Aotearoa New Zealand is sympathetic. When I began the book, I knew it would finish with climate change because it illustrates how New Zealand is so dependent on the outside world over which it has little control.
As I wrote the book, I learned that there had been climate change in the past (although more moderate than we expect to happen in the future). Both the proto-Māori migration to the country of 700 years ago and the European visits which began 250 years ago occurred in times of a favourable climate for long-distance sailing. (Abel Tasman was not so fortunate.) The deterioration shortly after the proto-Māori arrival probably explains why there were so few return voyages. As anthropologist Atholl Anderson has shown, the climate change which happened after had Māori settlement shifting from the drying east side of the country to the wetter west.
Frankopan has a stronger story to tell. Climate change did not just impact on humans, sometimes human settlements impacted upon the climate. That is not so astonishing today given what is happening via carbon emissions and global warming. But it happened in the past, albeit on a smaller scale.
Coming to think of it, there may have been a local instance although my book did not pay much attention to it. Shortly after the proto-Māori arrived, much of the South Island forest cover was reduced. Some think this was a consequence of climate change but others think the proto-Māori started the fires. I am willing to compromise by saying both (while acknowledging that Māori society learnt from the experience and evolved to a more sustainable culture). Given the sort of settlements at the time, the economic impact did not seem to be great so I did not emphasise it. Frankopan, concerned with the whole world and his much longer time-frame gives many more examples which usually had a bigger impact on – some civilisations were extinguished. (He is so assiduous with his examples that they over-power the reader.)
Frankopan is able to do this because in recent years scientists have developed ingenious means of measuring climate change in the long distant past. (Another impressive ‘archaeological’ breakthrough is Svante Pääbo’s development of methods to evaluate the genomes of extinct hominins for which he was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine.)
To give but one example of the environmental story in history, if you have visited Mycenae, the legendary city of Agamemnon who led the Achaean (Greek) forces at Troy, you will be struck by its poor location, 19kms from the sea on a tiddly river and hardly in a hospitable area. Part of the explanation is that Greece is a tectonically active area and the land has lifted with the sea retreating. But assuredly, three and more millennia ago the land around Mycenae was heavily wooded area. Deforestation changed the local climate and the soil eroded into the valley below. Eventually Mycenae was abandoned.
It is instructive that standard histories of Mycenae ignore the environment. We tend to interpret its history – and much elsewhere – as if there is no environmental change. Frankopan would say that is a nonsense. His 700-page book has example on example going back three millennia of human-environment interaction.
It does not confine itself just to the climate. Civilisations have come to grief by their careless treatment of water when they exhausted an aquifer or when rising salinity undermined their agriculture. He also traces the impact of pandemics, which had a climate dimension.
Almost every example is small in terms of the total globe and the human time on it, although empires have risen and fallen because of climate change. But the process is slow in terms of most of our preoccupations. What is unusual today is that because there are so many of us and because our resource usage is so intensive, the change is much faster.
It took a bit of trouble when I was writing In Narrow Seas to get a measure of just how much climate change has occurred since coal-burning industrialisation began. It turns out that New Zealand temperatures have risen about 1°C since the start of last century, while global sea levels rose about 20 cm in that time. Sometimes I look at a sandy beach trying to envisage what it was like a century ago. A common estimate of the maximum gradient is about 1 in 8. That would mean the sea would be at least a metre and a half or so further out. We think the levels are rising faster nowadays. We cannot be sure how much faster, but it seems to be reasonable to imagine a grandchild will one day look at that beach and the sea may be three metres closer.
I’ve already stated the primary lesson from the book: do not assume the environment is static, that any changes are irrelevant to human destiny and that civilisation has no impact on the environment (including on the climate).
This lesson was there millennia ago, but we show little evidence of having learned it. It’s like the story of the frog in the slowly warming pot of water who boils to death. Experiments show it is not true for frogs – they jump out. It seems truer for humans.