A New Green History of the World



A New Green History of the World (2007) is the new and improved version of A Green History of the World (1991), which was translated into 13 languages.  British historian Clive Ponting did a fantastic amount of research, and then refined it into a very readable, mind-altering 400-page book (a silver bullet cure for folks suffering from denial).  It spans the two million year saga of our hominid ancestors, devoting most attention to the last 12,000 years, the era of thunder footprints.

Ponting provides numerous charts displaying the skyrocketing growth of many unsustainable trends.  For example, world coal production was 10 million tons in 1800, 760 million tons in 1900, and 5 billion tons in 2000.  World oil production was 95 million tons in 1920, 294 million tons in 1940, 2.3 billion tons in 1970, and 3.8 billion tons in 2004.  Is it any wonder that the atmosphere is having convulsions?

For almost the entire human journey, wood was our fuel, a renewable resource.  With the shift to agriculture and civilization, we invented forest mining, which is unsustainable.  Industries making glass, ceramics, bricks, and metals rapidly obliterated forests.  By the 1550s, regional wood shortages began limiting growth.  The English were the first to begin the shift to coal.  Coal lit the turbo thrusters for the Industrial Revolution, which accelerated the process of urbanization, and ignited two centuries of pandemonium.

Until 1800, 95 percent of humans were paupers.  Ponting says, “Since the rise of settled societies some ten thousand years ago the overwhelming majority of the world’s population have lived in conditions of grinding poverty.  They have had few possessions, suffered from appalling living conditions, and have been forced to spend most of their very limited resources on finding enough food to stay alive.”  European commoners often lived in crude huts with dirt floors, and no windows or chimney.  Bed was a heap of straw.  No corpse was buried in usable garments.

Until 1800, most people travelled on foot.  Paupers couldn’t afford horses, or six acres (2.5 ha) of pasture to feed one.  Consequently, villages and towns remained small, close to their food supply.  Few places could afford even rudimentary sanitation services.  Village households dumped their night soil in the streets.  Almost any place was a restroom.  Fecal-oral diseases were popular, and bathing was not, especially in chilly months.  It was a wonderland for rats, fleas, flies, lice, and infectious diseases.

In 1652, the council of Boston banned residents from discarding the “entrails of beasts or fowls or garbage or dead dogs or cattle or any other dead beast or stinking thing” into the streets.  In the summer of 1858, the British House of Commons abandoned its sittings because of the unbearable “Great Stink” (all raw sewage went into the Thames).  The official residence for Britain’s prime ministers is 10 Downing Street, which didn’t have an indoor bathroom until 1908.  And so on.

With urbanization, the privileged class grew — folks who could afford horses, stables, carriages, and feed.  More horses were needed to haul more goods.  As cities grew, they got too big for foot travelers, so horse-drawn buses, trolleys, cabs, and coaches came into service.  Sprawling cities gobbled up nearby farms, increasing the distance between the inner city and their source of food.  More horses were needed to haul more food over more miles.  Eventually, farmers could no longer afford to have urban manure hauled to their distant fields, so it piled up in empty places.

By 1900, horses plopped 10 million tons of fragrant manure on British streets each year.  When it rained, the streets became yucky mucky smelly ponds.  In warm dry weather, the breezes carried manure dust for all to inhale.  The incredible filth attracted countless trillions of flies that took great delight in spreading typhoid.  New York City had to remove 15,000 dead horses annually.  Imagine the stench.

By the early twentieth century, Britain and France each had about 3.5 million horses.  The U.S. had 20 to 30 million, and feeding them required 88 million acres (36m ha) of farmland — about a quarter of the total.  These countries had little spare land to feed more urban horses; they were close to Peak Horses.  (Here’s an interesting stinky horse story.)

In 1900, London was the world’s biggest city, with 4.5 million.  New York City was second with 2.7 million.  Their streets were jammed with slow chaotic clippity-clop traffic, close to capacity, with little room for more.  The bubble of cheap and abundant horse feed was over.  Both cities had to switch from horse power to fossil power.  By 2000, Tokyo had 26.4 million, Mexico City had 18.4 million, and Mumbai had 18 million.  They cannot shift to horse power when motor vehicle extinction approaches.

Modern cities cannot function without nonrenewable fossil power.  It is needed to move folks from home to work, and from the ground floor to the thirtieth.  It moves water in, and sewage out.  It picks up the garbage and carries it to landfills.  It powers farms, ships, air travel, factories, mines, refineries, lighting, communication systems, and on and on.  The list includes everything essential for the energy-guzzling consumer lifestyle, and industrial society itself.

Our global civilization is completely addicted to ever-increasing quantities of finite nonrenewable resources.  Obviously, this can only be temporary.  We’ve had a high-speed joyride of insane growth, pollution, and ecological gang rape.  We’ve invented lots of fascinating gizmos, lived like crazy, and created a monster that has an expiration date.  It will disintegrate, sooner or later.  Ponting warns that we are approaching a major crossroads.

To make the coming decades even more exciting, climate change is knocking on the door, stopping by to collect our staggering karmic debts.  The Technology Fairy cannot give us the magic beans needed to remove the carbon from our emissions.  Ponting shrugs, “Global warming is the greatest threat that the world faces and finding a solution will be extremely difficult.”

The Technology Fairy also appears impotent to accelerate the crop yield gains necessary for feeding the projected mob in 50 years (see Cribb and Bourne).  Like the Green Revolution disaster, GMO crops require big inputs of fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation — large fields, expensive seeds, rich farmers, big machines, and lots of petrol.  Industrial agriculture is getting gray and wrinkled, its best days behind it.  Ponting has no faith in biotech miracles.

With the calm and objective voice of a venerable professor, Ponting lifts readers far above the intense roaring madness that we consider normal.  When we can observe the human journey from a perspective that spans thousands of years, it’s easy to see that our consumer lifestyle is an extreme deviation from the human journey.  Every student in every nation should take a class based on this book, every year.  The family of life is paying a terrible price for our ongoing ignorance of environmental history.  Few have a competent understanding of the path we have taken, or the predicaments that now threaten us.

I’ve only mentioned a few of the topics in Ponting’s book.  It’s a fascinating experience.  He did not include the obligatory chapter of brilliant solutions.  His conclusion: “The course of human history over the last two centuries has produced change at a rate never before experienced and brought together a series of interlinked problems that almost defy solution because of their complexity.”  Progress is wonderful, eh?

Ponting, Clive, A New Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations, Penguin Books, New York, 2007.

Europe Between the Oceans

I’ve long been interested in learning more about my wild ancestors, the indigenous hunter-gatherers of Europe, in order to better understand who I am.  Descriptions of them recorded by the ancient Greeks and Romans were too meager to satisfy my curiosity.  Recently, I came across Barry Cunliffe’s book, Europe Between the Oceans: 9000 BC – AD 1000.  Cunliffe is an archaeologist, and ongoing research is discovering many new pieces for the puzzle.  His book serves readers a staggering amount of information.

Cave paintings have preserved beautiful memories of the wild paradise of ice age Europe, and the lucky people who enjoyed the continent in the days of its undiminished vitality.  The party began breaking up around 9600 B.C., when a warmer climate returned.  Glaciers melted and forests expanded northward into tundra country.  Tundra critters like the reindeer and elk were forced to migrate further north.  Others, like the mammoth and wooly rhino, walked off the stage.

The recovering forests provided habitat for smaller animals, like deer, elk, boars, and aurochs.  Here’s a surprising notion: “This forest fauna amounted to only about 20-30 percent of the total biomass of herbivores that had roamed the tundra before them.”  In a land of trees, there was far less meat nibbling on the foliage.  Folks were forced to live in smaller and fewer settlements.  Their population “drastically declined.”  They preferred locations close to coastlines, lakes, rivers, and wetlands, where a year round supply of food could be gathered with little effort.

Meanwhile, over the border in Asia, dark juju was swirling in the Fertile Crescent.  Between 12,000 and 9600 B.C., the number of permanent settlements was growing, based on hunting and foraging the (temporarily) abundant wild foods.  Then came the ominous Aceramic Neolithic period (9600 – 6900 B.C.).  By its end, people were growing fully domesticated cereals, and dining on domesticated sheep, goats, pigs, and cattle.  Cunliffe blames population issues for this shift, which has yet to stop clobbering the planet via seven billion unintended consequences.

The laborious new way of life worked for a while in Asia, but turned into a nightmare when supersized — large-scale irrigation-based agriculture, reckless forest mining, explosive population growth, bloody warfare, and full-blown civilizations run by power-crazy tyrants awash in testosterone.  Few civilizations, if any, have ever managed to reverse their mistake and deliberately return to low impact living.  Most self-destruct.  It’s easier.

Geography has played a starring role in European history.  The continent is a lumpy peninsula protruding from the posterior of Asia.  It is largely surrounded by navigable seas, and interlaced with navigable rivers.  Even in the days before roads, it was fairly easy to journey back and forth across it.  The continent had immense forests, fertile soils, a nurturing climate, plenty of water, thriving wildlife and marine life, and large deposits of industrial minerals and precious minerals. 

The Fertile Crescent, on the other hand, was an arid region that was poorly suited for supporting large complex societies.  But to the west was a vast unmolested paradise, and there were few guards at the border crossings to Europe.  Consequently, the wild hunter-gatherers of Europe were among the unluckiest people in the world, similar to the Native Americans in 1492.  Their valuable assets were irresistible to the growing mobs of hungry farmers.

Cunliffe euthanized the myth of the Neolithic Revolution, which purported that the Asian farmers swept across Europe in a blitzkrieg, nearly exterminating the indigenous folk, as the white folks did in America.  New evidence suggests that diffusion played a significant role in the spread of agriculture, similar to the spread of maize in the eastern U.S.  Whenever the folks down the river start growing lots of calories, and feeding swarms of bambinos, your options are: (1) exterminate them, (2) take up the dirty habit, (3) flee, or (4) be overrun.  Since farmers outbreed hunters, agriculture tends to spread like a steamroller.

Recent studies of mitochondrial DNA conclude that about 80 percent of European females are genetically indigenous, not related to Asian immigrants.  In France, Germany, and northeast Spain, only 15 to 30 percent of males have immigrant genes.

In a nutshell, Europe was essentially a continent of hunter-gatherers in 7000 B.C., and by 4000 B.C. it was reduced to a sad gulag of farmers and herders.  “The rapidity of the spread of the Neolithic way of life was remarkable.”  According to Cunliffe, wild Europe disintegrated in the face of increased mobility, connectivity, innovation, and imbalance.

Mobility was stimulated by factors such as growing population, depleted soils, overgrazing, and bloodthirsty invaders.  Connectivity was increased as trading networks expanded, often leading to tribal alliances led by cocky warlords.  Innovation was the clever process of devising new ways for living farther out of balance with nature, a tireless war on the future.  The Neolithic path was a devastating hurricane of countless forms of imbalance — population, hierarchy, warfare, technology, ecology, pathology.

Friendly traders who made it through the gauntlet of pirates and highwaymen delivered wine, weapons, jewelry, furs, smallpox, and the bubonic plague.  Diseases delighted in paying regular visits to the filthy, malnourished communities, and providing much needed assistance in resolving family planning imbalances.  Slave trading was a major industry.

In central Asia and southern Russia, ancestors of the Aryans hunted the fierce wild horses of the grassy steppes and ate them.  Over time, they succeeded in reducing them to submissive beasts, and used them for hunting, herding, trading, and raiding — another brilliant innovation!  Before long, Europeans on the plains were periodically being raped, pillaged, and slaughtered by scruffy hordes of horse-mounted Cimmerians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans, Huns, Avars, Bulgars, Magyars, and Turks. 

Equally catastrophic was the dark art of metalworking, another diabolical gift from the Middle East.  The Bronze Age began around 3300 BC, and the Iron Age arrived around 1200 BC.  The awesome new technology resulted in the deaths of millions of trees and people, and the permanent destruction of many mining regions.

Conflict was the core of the story.  Every page I turned unleashed a thousand screams, as jets of hot blood squirted out of the book, forming a sticky puddle around my desk, page after page.  They never tired of killing each other.  This psychic epidemic — “grow or die” — has now driven us deep into the valley of the shadow of extinction.  It’s a game we can neither win nor deliberately abandon.  Everyone loses.

Native Americans have always been appalled by the immense craziness of the Europeans who washed up on their shores.  Ward Churchill says that we suffer from a profound sense of identity confusion, having lost all connection to our tribal roots.  John Trudell says we have become disconnected from spiritual reality.  We have lost our identity and need to remember who we are.  The cave paintings are the strongest medicine we have, along with our dreams.

Cunliffe’s 10,000-year tour tells us almost nothing about tribal Europeans living in relative harmony with the ecosystem, but it exhaustively describes the birth of disharmony, which is useful to understand.  Many of the important lessons in life are learned from goofy unclever teachers, who demonstrate the wrong way to do something, and the Neolithic Europeans excelled at this, as did their descendants around the world.

They weren’t stupid or evil.  It’s nearly impossible to intentionally stop or turn a complex society in motion.  They were born in the wrong place at the wrong time, and had little choice but to be swept away by the roaring currents of their era, as we have been.  But calmer waters lie downstream, and some folks may survive the journey.  May they learn well from our mistakes, let the planet heal, and remember who they are.

Cunliffe, Barry, Europe Between the Oceans: 9000 BC – AD 1000, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2008.

The Roots of Dependency

In the 1970s, there was a trendy movement in academia to romanticize Native Americans into pure, innocent, saint-like beings.  Richard White wrote The Roots of Dependency to butt heads with the romantics, while at the same time presenting the European invaders in a manner that was anything but flattering.  He sought to pursue an approach to history having greater balance and accuracy.  White examined the history of three tribes, the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos.  He described how their traditional subsistence way of life collapsed, and how they eventually became dependent on white society for their survival. 

The traditional home of the Choctaws is now the state of Mississippi.  Before the whites arrived, they had become addicted to a dangerous habit, agriculture, which had harmful side effects, like population growth and ecological destruction.  When the chaotic dance of climate delivered drought seasons, the food supply was threatened.  All tribes in the scorched regions intensified their hunting, which inevitably lead to conflicts.  There was not enough wild game to feed excessive numbers of corn eaters.  Famine helped to restore balance.

In the sixteenth century, disease-ridden Spanish tourists trekked through the southeast.  Before long, 80 percent of the natives had dropped dead.  In the absence of significant hunting, the numbers of deer and buffalo exploded.  Abundant game allowed the Choctaws the luxury of depending less on farming, a dirty and toilsome occupation.  Things were fairly cool for a while, until French and English traders moved in and trashed the neighborhood.

In the early days, business activity at the trading posts was modest.  The Choctaws brought in some deerskins from time to time.  Once a hunter owned a decent knife, he saw no point in acquiring ten more knives.  Their frugality mystified the Europeans, because the woods remained crowded with deer — exploitable wealth.  The whites believed that the “love of gain” was a universal human trait: work more, get more stuff.  They suffered from a soul-killing mental illness that came to be known as the Puritan work ethic.

Around 1740, trading posts in Creek country were handling 100,000 deerskins per year, while Choctaw country produced a mere 15,000 skins.  In order to boost Choctaw business, the traders decided to break two laws: they started carrying liquor, and they offered credit to the hunters: drink now, pay later.

Unfortunately, many Choctaws found rum to be irresistible, and they tumbled into an era of drunken brawls, murders, and social breakdown.  The proceeds from months of hunting could be guzzled overnight in a whirlwind of oblivion drinking.  The hunters had little understanding of numbers or interest rates, and they essentially became slaves.  Before long, rum constituted 80 percent of the trading.

The traders were aggressive about collecting debts, and they sometimes got land cessions for payment.  Crushing debt and rum fever sparked intensive overhunting.  Using his new musket, a hunter could kill 20 times more deer than his bow-hunting father.  In 1770, a visitor to Choctaw country commented, “Almost half of the men had never killed either a deer or a turkey in their entire lives.”  They were forced to become full-time farmers, making them helpless sitting ducks for the crop-roasting droughts of 1777, 1778, 1782, and 1792. 

The trading economy blindsided traditional Choctaw society, making a few rich, and more poor.  The traditional culture of sharing and cooperation was seriously damaged.  Murders became a daily affair.  In 1830, the whites seized their land, and sent the tribe off to Indian Territory.

Credit has a powerful crazy-making juju.  Once upon a time, the major multinational religions banned usury — Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity.  It was virtuous to help others, but charging interest on loans was a devilish enterprise (making money whilst doing no work).  In the words of the venerable wise guy Benjamin Franklin: “Who goeth a borrowing goeth a sorrowing.”  It’s vitally important to remember that.  Borrowing has destroyed countless lives, and brought many large economic systems to their knees.

*        *        *

The Pawnees lived in western Nebraska and Kansas.  They weren’t very interested in trading, and they largely refused liquor.  Neighboring tribes were more eager to trade, which led to sharp reductions in the numbers of beaver, otters, elk, and deer.  Diseases arrived in the 1750s, and a smallpox epidemic in 1831 killed half of the tribe.  Droughts periodically dried up the bliss.

The arrival of horses around 1700 created many serious problems.  They were seen as being private property, leading to wealth disparity, and the consequent social strains.  Prior to horses, the only animals you owned were the ones you killed.  Nobody owned the vast roaming herds, and this belief was a mainstay of all happy and sustainable societies.

The horses raided the crops, which infuriated the women, and led to the breakup of many marriages.  The ecosystem was poorly suited for keeping large numbers of horses year round, and the Pawnees did not cut and store hay.  Tall grasses lost their nutritional value when they dried up, and many horses perished during harsh winters. 

Horses made it much easier to hunt buffalo, but they also made it easier for enemies to visit, and the spread of firearms increased the level of violence.  Living in a remote location was no longer safe and secure.  In this era, horse-mounted slave raiders snatched Indians from many tribes.

The Pawnee’s problems became serious when the whites decided to hunt buffalo on an industrial scale.  Competition for food became intense.  It was not uncommon for hunters returning home to find their women, children, and elders dead, their horses missing, their fields burned, their lodges destroyed, and their stored food gone.  The Sioux and their allies were powerful enemies, and they eventually defeated the Pawnees.  Three years later, the Americans conquered the Sioux.  The Pawnees moved to Indian Territory in the 1870s.  By 1900 the tribe had dwindled to 1,000. 

*        *        *

The Navajo or Diné remain on their own land.  Their reservation covers portions of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah.  They were farmers when the Spanish colonists arrived with their livestock.  Eventually the Navaho acquired livestock and became ranchers, raising horses, goats, and especially sheep.  The Navajo were able to thrive on land that the whites thought to be nearly worthless.  In 1869 they owned 15,000 to 20,000 sheep, and fifteen years later they had almost a million sheep and goats.  Periodic droughts and severe winters killed hundreds of thousands of animals, but the herds were back to a million or more by 1930. 

Overgrazing contributed to increased erosion and land degradation, and this made the whites nervous.  The expensive new Boulder Dam (later called Hoover Dam) was collecting a lot of silt, much of it running off Navajo land.  Experts recommended exterminating the vegetation-gobbling prairie dogs, and sharply reducing the size of Navajo herds.  Hundreds of thousands of sheep and goats were killed or removed, and countless prairie dogs were poisoned.

This did not make the natives happy.  They agreed that the range was in poor condition, but believed that the cause of this was drought, not overgrazing.  The government aggressively took measures to reduce herds, at the same time that drought made farming nearly impossible.  The drought ended in 1941, and the reservation exploded with lush green vegetation.  After World War II it became clear that stock reduction had not healed the range, and that the livestock business had a limited future. 

The tribe became dependent on American society in the 1950s, as wage work and welfare expanded.  “The Navajo reservation today remains overgrazed, but on the reservation strip-mining, radioactive rivers, and mines which cause cancer dwarf overgrazing as an environmental problem.”

*        *        *

In the end, the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajo became dependent on white society.  All three had enjoyed greater stability and freedom prior to 1492.  All three were slammed by contagious disease, and by the disease of the market economy — both were weapons of mass destruction. 

White focused his attention on the notion of dependency, but another component of this process was disintegration.  In traditional Indian society, nobody went hungry unless everybody did.  Cooperation and sharing were essential components of every functional culture.  The introduction of private property (personal wealth) inspired endless conflicts and roaring craziness.  It always does.  Harmony in the human sphere disintegrated.  On a larger scale, traditional harmony with the ecosystem also disintegrated, as human society increasingly fell out of balance with the family of life.

All three tribes practiced primitive agriculture.  Prior to 1492, they had no livestock to produce manure for maintaining soil fertility, a serious shortcoming that contributed to rapid depletion of the land.  History informs us that agriculture is almost never sustainable in the long run.  It creates more problems than it solves.  It’s vitally important to remember that.

All three tribes were seriously affected by normal climate variations.  Today, in our temporary energy wonderland, food is promptly shipped in to regions suffering from crop failures, and famine is avoided.  Almost all societies in human history lacked this safety net.  Instead, intelligent societies created a safety net based on deliberately maintaining a population that was well below the carrying capacity of their wild and healthy ecosystem.  Remember that.

White, Richard, The Roots of Dependency, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1983.