3/8: The Earth Transformed: An Untold History Hardcover – Deckle Edge, April 18, 2023 by Peter Frankopan (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
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🗓️ 17 June 2023
⏱️ 12 minutes
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3/8: The Earth Transformed: An Untold History Hardcover – Deckle Edge, April 18, 2023 by Peter Frankopan (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Earth-Transformed-Untold-History/dp/0525659161/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
Global warming is one of the greatest dangers mankind faces today. Even as temperatures increase, sea levels rise, and natural disasters escalate, our current environmental crisis feels difficult to predict and understand. But climate change and its effects on us are not new. In a bold narrative that spans centuries and continents, Peter Frankopan argues that nature has always played a fundamental role in the writing of history. From the fall of the Moche civilization in South America that came about because of the cyclical pressures of El Niño to volcanic eruptions in Iceland that affected Egypt and helped bring the Ottoman empire to its knees, climate change and its influences have always been with us.
Frankopan explains how the Vikings emerged thanks to catastrophic crop failure, why the roots of regime change in eleventh-century Baghdad lay in the collapse of cotton prices resulting from unusual climate patterns, and why the western expansion of the frontiers in North America was directly affected by solar flare activity in the eighteenth century. Again and again, Frankopan shows that when past empires have failed to act sustainably, they have been met with catastrophe. Blending brilliant historical writing and cutting-edge scientific research, The Earth Transformedwill radically reframe the way we look at the world and our future.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batch with Professor Frank Frankapad, Peter Frankapad, |
| 0:09.8 | Oxford and Worcester College, Professor of Global History. We're now in the Roman |
| 0:14.4 | Warm period, which is a delight because I've done so much of my reading, most recently, |
| 0:19.9 | about all of the Game of Thrones played around Rome and throughout the Mediterranean world, |
| 0:26.8 | and now to discover it again as reacting to and dealing with and getting lucky about climate |
| 0:32.8 | as a joy. Peter, you've already mentioned Cleopatra, who steals the scenes, but the Romans have an |
| 0:39.2 | important philosophical approach to ecology, to nature. They want to live in harmony with it at the |
| 0:46.9 | same time. They want to take advantage of it to spread their empire. The Romans from the what you |
| 0:54.4 | present, Peter, look to be lucky. Is that too much to take away from their achievements? They were |
| 1:01.2 | at the right place at the right time, in the right part of the world with the Mediterranean as |
| 1:06.1 | they rode to build the empire. And yet at the same time, the climate was not disruptive. At least it |
| 1:12.8 | wasn't disorderedly as it could have been in other periods. I think you could widen that, John, |
| 1:20.6 | if we had a long time with the glass of wine, and maybe say that all empires need to be lucky, |
| 1:27.1 | or all empires need to get institutions right, they need to get justice systems right, and they |
| 1:32.1 | need to get forms of equality right to be stable, because otherwise they topple over. |
| 1:37.3 | So Rome did lots of things that were to do with skill of good administration and good institutions, |
| 1:44.0 | but all empires are extractive. Their aim is to widen the peripheries and to not just |
| 1:50.5 | colonize and conquer space for the sake of it, but to conquer space that is ecologically important, |
| 1:55.7 | either because it is good for fields and crops or trees or because it has minerals or whatever |
| 2:01.2 | that might be, stone, or in the modern era, the race for oil, the race for lithium today. |
| 2:07.2 | So there are always extractive powers that are driving the expansion of empires, but where Rome |
| 2:12.0 | was lucky was that between the eruption of Ockmark in 43, for the next 250 years, almost 300 years, |
... |
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