HOMO SAPIENS & THE PLANET: 2/8: The Earth Transformed: An Untold History by Peter Frankopan (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 25 February 2024
⏱️ 6 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 | I'm John Bachelor with Peter Francopan. He's a professor of global history and his new book is exactly that. |
| 0:08.0 | Global history over several tens of thousands of years, but right now we're after 2,200 BC. |
| 0:16.0 | The rise of cities that leave records, law records, codes records, |
| 0:21.0 | relationships then are suggestive. |
| 0:24.0 | Professor, this is trade. This is globalization. |
| 0:28.0 | Do I over read it? |
| 0:30.0 | No, I think some of my colleagues will get very overexited about the word |
| 0:35.4 | globalization because it clearly means something in the modern world that is |
| 0:38.2 | different to the past. In the past connecting the Americas to each other and also to the other great |
| 0:43.8 | continents of the world is obviously a different story but one can talk about |
| 0:47.8 | long-range connections linking Europe, Africa and Asia going back |
| 0:51.9 | thousands of years. |
| 0:53.8 | And I think that if one is willing to be relatively generous with the idea about what |
| 0:58.7 | globalization means in terms of exchange, we can chart that through the exchange of |
| 1:07.0 | and we can change that through the exchange of ideas, which a little bit more tricky to always |
| 1:08.2 | pin how they're moving and how they're being spread, but we can also test through linguistics and genetics. |
| 1:14.2 | And those kinds of things tell us a wholly different picture of what is going on around |
| 1:18.8 | about 4,000 years ago. |
| 1:20.7 | Those rise of those cities in competition with each other, often in conjunction with each other. |
| 1:25.0 | But one of the things that's most interesting is that the glue between these cities and the key driver for these cities |
| 1:31.0 | is that their connection often to thematic peoples who are the |
| 1:35.7 | conveyors and the vectors of long distance goods ideas technologies and so on so |
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