PLANET EARTH CHANGES US AS WE CHANGE IT: 6/8: 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
⏱️ 8 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.
1880 PYTHON
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batchew with Peter Frankapan of Oxford University |
| 0:09.5 | of Worcester College, Professor of Global History. The new book is The Earth transformed, |
| 0:13.8 | looking at climate, ecology, pandemic, volcanoes, all of that, and how humankind, especially the civilizations that reach back |
| 0:23.9 | the last 5,000 years, have responded. Now we come to a debate that is ongoing, whether or not |
| 0:32.3 | there is a way of explaining why Europe seems to accelerate in terms of science and technology over Asia, |
| 0:40.3 | where much of the innovation of the earlier 1,000 or 2,000 years took place. |
| 0:46.8 | I know that having visited Central Asia, the city states of Tashkent, of Kabul, of Samarkhan. All of those city states were well established with |
| 0:57.4 | science and learning and education. Thousands of years before that came to Europe. I date European |
| 1:05.3 | universities remembering 1222, Padawa. That is the period of time when universities and guilds are mixing |
| 1:13.8 | with what is known as the feudal revolution. And the professor teaches me that that is too |
| 1:19.2 | shorthand. There's a lot of complication that went on in the 13th century in Europe. But in any |
| 1:25.1 | event, Europe is said to accelerate. |
| 1:28.9 | Professor, the great divergence. Is there an explanation or are we too close to it? |
| 1:34.3 | Well, it's a great question. There are so many fantastic scholars to work on this question, |
| 1:38.8 | most notably Ken Bomerance at University of Chicago. And the question really is, how was it that Europe, as you say, a relative backwater, |
| 1:49.3 | you know, lots of pearls and individual moments of highlights before sort of 1500. |
| 1:55.2 | But how was it that Europe managed to take over the world? |
| 1:58.1 | And in the case of Africa, for example, every single part of Africa was colonized |
| 2:02.3 | by our European power, apart from Ethiopia and Liberia, by the start of the First World War. How was it |
| 2:09.7 | that so many European states had empires? Belgium had an empire, the Netherlands. Denmark had territories |
| 2:15.6 | in the Caribbean. How did that happen? And above all, |
| 2:18.6 | how did they take over great empires like India, the Mughal Empire, and China? And there are |
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