Peter Frankopan - Earth Transformed - An Untold Story (Bloomsbury, 2024) *****

The words that come to mind when reading this book are colossal, gargantuan, massive, monumental, gigantic, not only because the physical characteristic of its 660 pages, but also because of its incredible and erudite picture of the history of our world that is described here, viewed from the perspective of the interaction of our environment with historical events. 

Peter Frankopan is a British historian and writer. He is a professor of global history at Worcester College, Oxford, and the Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. He is a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. He is also author of the best-selling "The Silk Roads". 

I identified over fifty passages in the book that I intended to refer to in my review, but this is simply too much. 

The book starts at the real beginning, around 4.5 billion years ago, takes us over the origin of our species, prehistory, and then through history to our currrent times with a view to the future. The geography is our entire world, with impact and interaction between environment and people in every geography: earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, droughts, plagues, and other calamities that shaped nations, beliefs and cultures. 

"as societies become larger in size and more specialised in their work, rulers and priests become the interpreters of everything from natural disaster to environmental challenges, from_ resource surpluses to shortfalls, from military defeats to premature deaths, helping explain punishments or bounties that were being administered by unseen gods. Environmental and natural calamities in particular were closely linked to 'moralising gods' who, out of anger or simply from boredom, handed out punishments for transgressions and apparent lack of respect. It is striking, though perhaps not surprising, that regions that were vulnerable to changes in weather conditions - above all droughts, but also floods and storms - developed cosmological systems based on 'moralising gods' who used such events to punish, show their displeasure and teach lessons" (p. 87)

Next to influencing the development of religions of course, the destruction of nature by man has also been something of all times, even if the recent developments are possibly more devastating. Frankopan gives many examples, but I'll just list some from Ancient Europe. 

"deforestation had seriously depleted wood supplies in many regions. The forests in what is now Tuscany had been cut down and exhausted, wrote Strabo around 2,000 years ago, to provide wood both for ships and for houses in and around Rome, including over-the-top villas that were of'Persian magnificence' - a nod to opulence, excess and bad taste. Pliny the Elder, writing not long afterwards, noted sadly that too many people undermine nature with the sole purpose of self-enrichment; it should hardly come as a surprise, therefore, that the earth should occasionally show its displeasure, through disasters such as earthquakes. Rather than content themselves with the bounteous food and natural wealth that the world provides, humans were too busy being overwhelmed by avarice to stop overexploiting its resources" (p. 192)

Despite the endless list of destruction and calamities, the author remains optimistic about man's capabilities of behavioural change and good stewardship, but then with a number of conditions that need to be fulfilled. 

"Some climate sceptics point out - rightly - that forecasts that look into the future can be highly speculative, and they also seek to dampen alarm by noting, again quite correctly, that economic growth, new technologies and adaptation may alleviate the problems that lie ahead and, in some cases, may even s.olve them. 8 That too, however, requires faith and confidence; moreover, what history in general and this book in particular show is that there have been a great many times in the past when societies, peoples and cultures have proved unable to adapt. Indeed, in some respects, the human story of progress is about batons being repeatedly dropped and picked up by others. 

The question, then, is not so much whether to adapt, but how, where and when to do so. And in that sense it is certainly true that there is plenty of good news, much to celebrate and reasons to be optimistic." (p. 643). 

As you can expect, this is a really important book, not only because of its perspectives on our history, but also as great background knowledge that should help us to become more environmentally conscious and especially for politicians to finally act in a meaningful way. This book was of course written before the current Trump administration, which decided to step out of the Paris Agreement, and claiming that global warming is a hoax, promoting "beautiful, clean coal" instead of renewable energy. I hope this short-sightedness will stop soon, yet with the probability that Donald Trump reads this book are zero, prospects become worse. 

Often when reading, I deplored the fact that the sources of all the references are missing in the book. At the end, he explains that there is a dedicated website that contains the 200 pages with his source material. The QR code below leads the reader to the source material.