What can the past tell us about the future? This question, which has vexed and intrigued students of history for almost as long as there has been such a concept as history, looms over The Earth Transformed: An Untold History, Peter Frankopan’s vast, sweeping, deeply researched, and often compelling new book about the role climate has played in shaping Earth’s existence and that of the creatures that have inhabited it.
Frankopan’s stated purpose is “to look at how our planet … has changed since the beginning of time” due to causes including “human endeavors, calculation, and miscalculation.” Frankopan devotes all but his first four chapters to the last 6,000 years, which constitute the whole of human history as it is typically understood, though the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. While that is a rather conventional framework for what is anything but a conventional book, the choice makes sense since this is the era in which man’s impact on his environment became as great as its impact upon him.
Given his subject, Frankopan is motivated by concerns about climate change. He had three aims. One was “to expand the horizons of how we look at history” by incorporating previously neglected “themes, regions, and questions” that can “push the boundaries” of historical research. Another was “to reinsert climate back into the story of the past as an underlying, crucial, and much-overlooked theme in global history.” Finally, Frankopan’s third objective was to recount the tale of man’s “interaction with the natural world over millennia and to look at how” we have exploited and transformed the environment to our will, “for good and for ill.”
Frankopan’s effort is a valiant one. He wields an impressive array of evidence, including the sorts of literary and documentary sources one expects to find in a history book, but also reconstructions of rainfall patterns, pollen measurements, ice core samples, “predictive models, satellite imagery, acoustic surveys, and topographic and bathymetric LIDAR” analyses, to mention a few types of the scientific and technical data he refers to.
The key themes of Frankopan’s 6,000-year, 650-page opus include lessons for today. One is that, for all we think of climate change as something novel, it is, in fact, part of the natural order. Extended periods of cooler and warmer temperatures than normal have been routine occurrences down the ages. As Frankopan observes early on, an average global temperature increase of 1.5-2 degrees Celsius (the amount that many climate treaties and activists describe today as an outer limit of what is tolerably survivable) is, while dramatic, “modest” compared to the “very many and regular double-digit rises and falls that have occurred in the past.” Moreover, even though we dread climate change today, it has often been a boon for mankind. All through history, we’ve taken advantage of favorable shifts to expand our footprint on the globe, find new food and other resources, and exert greater control over the natural world. The entire time of mankind’s slow technological progress to manipulate the natural environments has been marked by atypically benign and stable climatic conditions. No species, Frankopan avers, has benefited more from “such transformations in the past.”
Arguably, the book’s most important theme is that episodes of intensified interaction between human communities produce significant environmental change. This is obviously true of the post-Cold War phenomenon we call by the term “globalization,” which Frankopan characterizes as “by far the most intensive period of commercial exchange and integration” ever. But it is no less true of 19th-century European imperialism, the Columbian exchange, the steppe empires of Eurasia, all the way back to Sumer.
A renowned scholar of the Silk Road who teaches at Oxford, Frankopan is particularly interested in moments when the creation of trade networks and other connections accelerated, which they have at regular intervals throughout history. But while this has brought humanity many advantages, the cost has been steep as well. Frankopan doesn’t say it in so many words, but he implies that a certain level of environmental damage is the inevitable price of civilization. “‘Civilization’ is by far the single greatest factor in environmental degradation and the most important cause of anthropogenic climate change.” Every time civilization levels up, so to speak, and stimulates further urbanization, population increases, resource consumption, and draws the globe closer together, it exacts a greater toll upon the natural world.
Laudable as it is in so many ways, the book isn’t without flaws. The lack of notes is unacceptable. These, because they would have lengthened it by 200 pages, have been relegated to the internet. It is unfair to expect the reader to whip out their phone or iPad every few sentences to check a source. Hopefully, this does not become a trend. Frankopan’s frequent references to “prominent scholars,” “famous historians,” “some scholars,” “one leading scholar/historian,” and the like quickly become grating. They’re not anonymous. Just name them.
Because it covers so much ground — not only environmental history but also social history, political history, Chinese history, African history, U.S. history, the history of science, and so many more kinds of history — Frankopan’s tome is brimming with information and facts. Sometimes too much so, as from time to time, he loses the forest for the trees. This is most glaring in the last part of the book, which covers the 19th century to the present. Here, the once-abundant climatic evidence disappears. There is no more talk about volcanoes or rainfall shortages, and we hear no more about the North Atlantic Oscillation or the El Nino-Southern Oscillation. The actual climatic phenomena simply drop out, and just when climate change becomes a salient matter. Volcanoes are a major influence on the global climate. After paying considerable attention to them for most of the book, Frankopan makes little mention of their activity in the last 200 years. The impression one gets is that there’s been less vulcanism over that duration than in the past. But without a comparison of the data, it’s hard to tell.
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Frankopan disclaims any intention of trying to forecast “what will happen in the future.” But he clearly hopes to impart some lessons about what the past tells us about how climate change may play out. What it teaches is that humans cope and adjust — they have done so before and will do so again. We are marvelously adaptive creatures. But it also reveals that, sometimes, conditions become so adverse, when combined with other factors, that societies and civilizations collapse. “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 been unable to adapt.” One crucial distinction between global warming today and previous phases of extraordinary climatic conditions — such as the Roman Warm Period, Medieval Climate Anomaly, and Little Ice Age — is that even widespread ones were localized, not universal. Climate change now is “globally coherent.” The whole planet is experiencing the same transformation. There is nowhere to run or hide.
It’s true we’ve survived worse. But, Frankopan wants to drive home, it’s never been pretty. And given the consequences of past transformations of the environment and the unprecedented scope and scale of our own present role in shaping it, it is perhaps a gamble we shouldn’t take.
Varad Mehta is a writer and historian. He lives in the Philadelphia area. Find him on Twitter @varadmehta.
