HOMO SAPIENS & THE PLANET: 1/8: The Earth Transformed: An Untold History by Peter Frankopan (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 25 February 2024
⏱️ 11 minutes
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Summary
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 Transformed will radically reframe the way we look at the world and our future.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a |
| 0:05.0 | This is CBS Eye on the World. |
| 0:08.0 | Here's John Bachelor. |
| 0:10.0 | The Earth Transform, a new book, an extensive tour through Homo sapiens and before, |
| 0:19.0 | mankind and the ecology of the Earth. |
| 0:22.0 | We are in the 21st century so this is a commonplace |
| 0:25.5 | topic now climate change. However I welcome Professor Peter Frankupan, |
| 0:30.8 | professor of global history at Worcester College, Oxford, whose no book is The Earth |
| 0:35.2 | Transformed in Untold History, will begin in the Holocene with two violent events to show that |
| 0:42.4 | mankind responds to nature, responds to catastrophe, |
| 0:47.0 | responds to climate change, and gets lucky sometimes. |
| 0:52.0 | Professor, a very good evening to you. |
| 0:54.3 | Congratulations, we begin with the breakdown of the ice dam |
| 0:58.3 | in the Lorne Tide part of North America |
| 1:01.8 | which changed the ocean circulation and affected climate globally. |
| 1:07.0 | And then also within the same time frame, seventh, eight century, eighth mill millennium before the common era, the collapse of a piece of the Norwegian |
| 1:19.1 | coast that created it tsunami. |
| 1:21.7 | Those two events, what do they describe? How do they change the nature of |
| 1:26.0 | mankind at that point responding to nature? Good evening to you. Good evening |
| 1:31.6 | it's a real pleasure. Thank you so much for having me come and join you, John, and thank you all for listening and watching. |
| 1:38.0 | Well, I guess the starting point is that we've got so used in the modern era to being masters of our own destiny |
| 1:44.4 | that we forget about these great forces in the human past and how important they |
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