PLANET EARTH CHANGES US AS WE CHANGE IT: 5/8: 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
🗓️ 18 November 2024
⏱️ 10 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 Transformedwill 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 CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor. |
| 0:09.9 | Here's John Bachelor. |
| 0:12.4 | The Earth transformed an untold history by Professor Peter Frankapad of Oxford University, |
| 0:19.1 | a professor of global history. the mosquito empires of the |
| 0:24.3 | period that we reach to in North America as well as Africa, as well as Asia, the mosquito |
| 0:31.3 | empires, the limits of malaria, aka yellow fever. I learned from the professor that in this period of exploitation of |
| 0:40.5 | nature and mankind, after in the 17th and 18th century, the limits of the people to survive |
| 0:49.0 | in mosquito empires define their ability to respond to the politics in Europe and also the |
| 0:57.0 | opportunities in the new world. Professor, the malaria story is one that I did not ever think of |
| 1:04.1 | as a limitation on the Europeans. Did they themselves see it that way? Yes, they did. |
| 1:14.9 | In common parlance, West Africa was known as the white man's grave. |
| 1:20.8 | So short were life expectancies when many Europeans tried to reach West Africa. |
| 1:23.8 | And one of the challenges was around disease environments. |
| 1:30.1 | Ironically, what happened in the case of transatlantic slavery was that many of the peoples who are being transported, of course, against their well in horrific conditions, bonded forever |
| 1:36.1 | and their progeny too, were so desirable, particularly after the 1617, 18, 1680s, was because not all, but some populations in West Africa |
| 1:47.8 | contain genetic mutations that give genetic resistance to malaria, or at least provide 90% resistance to malaria. |
| 1:56.0 | And that mutation meant that their survivability in malarial areas, which has been passed down from |
| 2:02.6 | generation to generation for several thousand years, made them extremely resilient in exposed |
| 2:08.5 | malarial zones, both in West Africa, but also in the Americas, once malaria became established |
| 2:12.9 | in the late 17th century. And we can see the horrors of this because the prices of people who came from |
| 2:18.9 | zones with high malarial resistance are higher than from others. So there was no idea, I think, |
| 2:24.7 | about the science at the time amongst those buying and selling people's lives. But there was an |
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