8/8: Nature and Human History: The Earth Transformed: An Untold History Hardcover by Peter Frankopan (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 5 July 2023
⏱️ 5 minutes
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8/8: Nature and Human History: The Earth Transformed: An Untold History Hardcover 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 Batchwood, Professor Peter Frankapan, the Earth |
| 0:09.4 | transformed and untold history. This has to do with natural resources and exploitation. |
| 0:16.3 | We no longer cut down huge forests, well not on purpose. But I learned from Peter's reporting |
| 0:21.9 | that one cotton shirt requires 2,700 liters of fresh water. I'm stunned, Peter. Is that |
| 0:28.6 | a factor in the cotton industry? I know they've done a lot of work about blood cotton, but |
| 0:35.5 | the use of water seems reckless. Is there comment on this generally? |
| 0:39.9 | Yeah, I mean that amount of water, just under 3,000 liters of fresh water is the equivalent |
| 0:45.8 | of a person's drinking needs for two and a half years. And apparently jeans, it's about |
| 0:50.7 | three times that amount. The global fashion industry produces around about 10% of all greenhouse |
| 0:56.7 | gas emissions averaged out. And some projections put it that in the next 20 years, that's going |
| 1:01.6 | to trouble. So I think that my job as an educator and as a professor is to give people |
| 1:10.2 | more knowledge than perhaps they had beforehand and to let them make their own decisions about |
| 1:15.2 | how they use that. But I hadn't realized the level of waste for example around food. |
| 1:22.2 | So we waste globally around 930 million tons of perfectly edible food. If you put that |
| 1:27.8 | all in 40 ton trucks with stretch around the world seven times round, 231 million trucks. |
| 1:35.2 | So there are all sorts of, sorry, 23 million trucks with stretch around the world seven |
| 1:39.8 | times round. So the wastage that we go through because the way we make things, the way we |
| 1:45.9 | discard things, the way we throw things away, looks to me totally unsustainable. And of course |
| 1:51.4 | we individually we're quite good. I think no one really opens the window of their car and |
| 1:55.8 | trucks trash out onto the sidewalk. No one deliberately throws food away from their fridge |
| 2:00.2 | because they can't be bothered. But the way in which we don't realize what those cycles of |
| 2:05.3 | intensive farming or why do we need to the fruit that we to look perfect rather than being |
... |
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