I. G.

Simmons

10,000 BC to AD 2000
10,000 BC to AD 2000
I. G. Simmons

Courses which deal with environmental history have long lacked an overview: a book

10,000 BC to AD 2000
which looks at the long-term history of environment and humanity, considers the whole
world and recognises the contributions of both the natural sciences and the social
sciences, together with – increasingly – the humanities.

This book takes the major phases of human technological evolution in the last 12,000
years and looks at the ways in which they have been deployed to change the natural
world and which in turn have responded to factors such as climatic change. Today’s
environmental anxieties are thus put into a long-term perspective, though this book is
of history and not prophecy – it makes no judgements on current preoccupations. The
accessibility of the writing makes Global Environmental History useful for readers of all
backgrounds and a glossary of unfamiliar terms is included.

I. G. Simmons retired in 2001 from his position as Emeritus Professor of Geography

at the University of Durham. His publications include An Environmental History of Great

I. G. Simmons
Britain (Edinburgh University Press, 2001) and The Moorlands of England and Wales
(Edinburgh University Press, 2003). He is a Chartered Geographer, a Fellow of the Society
of Antiquaries of London and of the British Academy and a Victoria medallist of the Royal
Geographical Society.

Cover image: Dream, stonecut by Kenojuak Ashevak, 1963. Reproduced by kind permission of Dorset Fine Arts.

ISBN 978 0 7486 2159 0

Edinburgh

Edinburgh University Press

22 George Square
Edinburgh EH8 9LF
www.eup.ed.ac.uk
Cover design: clareturner.co.uk
G E
H
G E
H
10,000  to  2000

I. G. S

EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

© I. G. Simmons, 2008

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

22 George Square, Edinburgh

Typeset in Minion
by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
Cromwell Press, Trowbridge, Wilts

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7486 2158 3 (hardback)

ISBN 978 0 7486 2159 0 (paperback)

The right of I. G. Simmons

to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reproduce

material previously published elsewhere. Every effort has been
made to trace the copyright holders, but if any have been
inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make
the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

Unacknowledged plates, figures and tables are © Ian Simmons

 Contents

List of tables viii

List of figures ix
Preface x

Prologue: M   xii

An approach to a complex history xiii
States of change xiv
Perspectives xv

Chapter 1 R 1
Some assumptions 2
Basic demography 6
Material linkages in human–environment relationships 8
Talking to ourselves 13
Local, regional, continental, hemispherical, global 17
A transition to the later chapters 19

Chapter 2 T -    24

‘Joint tenants of the world’ 25
The cultural ecology of gatherer-hunters 26
Evolution and dispersal 26
The energy relationships of gatherer-hunters 27
‘The first great force employed by man’ 29
Management and impact 35
The diminution of foraging societies 38
Proper respect: hunter-gatherers in a cohesive world 39
Buying the land: fragmentation in the foragers’ worlds 40
Representing hunters and gatherers 41
Outcomes 43
Hunter-gatherers in their ecosystems 44
Foundations of the foragers’ environmental history 45

Chapter 3 P-  52

‘No god like one’s stomach’ 53
vi G E H
The cultural ecology of agriculture 54
Evolution and dispersal 54
Environmental relationships 58
Fire and the farmer 61
Management and impact 63
Diminution and disappearance 86
Sewing the world together 87
All coherence gone? 90
Representing this world 93
Outcomes 94
The world on the cusp of industrialisation 94
Technologies of a solar-powered era 95
The emergence of philosophies 96

Chapter 4 A   109

A second Iron Age 110
The cultural ecology of industry 111
Evolution and dispersal 111
Environmental relationships 114
Management and impact 117
Prometheus’ next bound 143
Moral, intellectual and material 146
The collapse of continuity 150
Representing industriousness 153
A waste land? 154

Chapter 5 A - ? 167

I saw it on TV 168
The cultural ecology of the world after 1950 169
Evolution and dispersal 170
Environmental relationships 171
Management and impact 176
Insider knowledge 195
Increased population, higher consumption 196
Technology and ‘progress’ 197
Superpower: coalescence after 1950 199
No power here 201
Screening the world? 203
Tensions 205
A haste land? 209

Chapter 6 E  218

Ignoring the snap-locks 219
 C vii
Under the sun 220
Minding our language 220
Postmodernity and environment 222
The ecology of emotion 223
Religion 226
Myth, symbol, value 227
Parts and wholes 229
Unpredictable woods and pastures 232
‘The balance of nature’ 233
The ‘nature’ of consciousness 235
The drive to dominion 237
At the year 2000 239
Knowing where we are 239
Rolling smithy-smoke 244
Indra’s internet? 245

Further reading 255

Glossary 256
List of Acronyms 261
Index 262

T 
In the body of the text, words which are defined and explained in the Glossary
are printed in bold face. Any other typographical enhancements are for local
emphasis only.
 Tables

1.1 Gross energy expended by humans in history 10

3.1 Dates of transition from intensive hunting and gathering
to agriculture 55
4.1 Environmental impact of the city 133
4.2 World land transformation 1700–1950 143
5.1 Environmental surprises since 1950 175
5.2 Levels of consumption 208
6.1 Changes in the understanding of land-cover and land-
use changes 241
6.2 Shifts in attitude in recent decades 242

viii
 Figures

1.1 Kleine Orgel (small organ) at St Jacobskirche in Lübeck 1

2.1 Depiction of an owl in the Hillaire Chamber of
La Grotte Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc 24
3.1 Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala: Nueva corónica y buen gobierno
(c.1615–16) 52
4.1 Derwentcotes Steel Mill 109
5.1 Joseph Beuys’s The End of the Twentieth Century,
1982–83 (detail) 167
6.1 Garden of the Ryoanji temple in Kyoto 218

ix
 Preface

This book completes a trio of planned works at different spatial scales: that of
the country (Britain), an internal landscape type (moorlands) and now the
whole globe.* The timescale has been the same in all of them: the last 10,000
years. When people ask, ‘what are you writing?’, and you tell them, then the
usual reaction is one of amusement, qualified by a nod in the direction of the
poor old fellow’s age. They may well be right but, inspired by some other
attempts at ‘big’ history, I wanted to try. As Chapter 1 shows, I want to move
the writing of environmental history further in the direction of inclusiveness.
I believe that the natural sciences are very important but they are not the
whole story because they sit in the type of social framework analysed by the
social sciences and the humanities. Hence there is reference to a wide variety
of work in this volume. Beyond that, I have no methodological ambitions: I
do not think that there is a ‘right’ way to write environmental histories.
Any book has to be selective: it would be impossible to mention even every
outstanding example of the processes that have been chronicled, and so those
included comprise both the obvious and the eccentric. Some cannot be
ignored, while others result from trawls through the literature or, increasingly,
a period of surfing the net. The last is influential in one particular way: I have
not (as in my other books) included a plethora of numerical tables and graphs.
All the information in them is always badly out of date by the time a book
actually appears, and readers will find it easier to go to a website and call up
the latest data. Some sites are specified, others not, but appropriate govern-
ment departments, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP),
and bodies such as the World Resources Institute, the Population Reference
Bureau, and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) will provide necessary
numbers and graphics.
Another initial point to make is that this is a book of history and not prog-
nosis. I have tried wherever possible to end the narrative at the year 2000
though, in Chapter 5, this gets to be more or less impossible because so many
trends simply carry on at the point where they have been discussed quite
recently. If there is anything to be carried forward then it is the suggestion that

* An Environmental History of Great Britain from 10,000 years ago to the Present, Edinburgh
University Press, 2001; The Moorlands of England and Wales. An Environmental History 8000
– 2000, Edinburgh University Press, 2003.

x
 P xi
major changes have involved technological developments (agriculture, the use
of fossil fuels) and that the future will as likely be driven by an equivalent change
as by the more modest requirements of environmentalists. But any future seems
likely to have to respect the laws of physics and the biogeochemistry of the
planet: a revived potential for the ideas of environmental determinism, perhaps.
In line with my other books, then, I have used human access to energy sources
as a periodisation device. This has its disadvantages in terms of asynchrony and
accusations of technological determinism but has the up-side of connecting
with lively debates at the present time for I do not believe that history is cultur-
ally irrelevant, only that it may not be an accurate guide to the future. In social
terms, increased access has allowed social differentiation and so cultural frag-
mentation has resonated in our attitudes to nature. It is not so simple, of course:
for the world has long been subject to coalescence by both natural and cultural
processes of diffusion, if that last word can be decently applied to electronic
communication as well as medieval trade.
Even though three-score years and ten is now reckoned to be no age at all
in western countries, it is always possible that I may not write any more books.
So this is a good time to acknowledge all the generous encouragement and
help that I have had from so many people over a forty-year career in acade-
mia: colleagues and friends at Durham, Peter Haggett in Bristol, academics in
sister universities in several countries (with special thanks to Aberdeen for
the honorary doctorate and to the ACLS for a postdoctoral fellowship at
Berkeley), my teachers and postgraduate supervisors at UCL, quiet neigh-
bours, GPs, and cats. There are too many names to mention individually but
not a day goes by without thinking of one of you. From Berkeley Square to
George Square, John Davey has always been a constant source of discriminat-
ing encouragement. It is a source of great pleasure to me that the book will be
published in the USA by the University of Chicago Press, since it was their
Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth (ed. W. L. Thomas) in 1956 that
more than any other book turned me to this kind of topic.
My offspring, Catherine and David, are also a great inspiration in several
ways, and grandchildren are just the sheer pleasure needed to offset some of
the things our species has been responsible for perpetrating. All my books
have been written while married to Carol and so she is present within all of
them. If the publishers allowed watermarks in books, then her name and
picture would be visible on every page.
I. G. Simmons
Durham, October 2007
 Prologue
Mustering the marks

200
2000

150
1800
Actual effects as

Sulphates (ng/g)
Developement of articulated
measured by science body of environmental 1600 100
Sulphates
thought, written after

Methane (ppb)
1400 50
18 ky
1200 0
Hunter-gatherers 1800

800 300
Methane
10 ky
600
290

Nitrous oxides (ppb)

Agricultural
280

340 Nitrous oxide 270

AD 1750
320
260
CO2 (ppm)

Industrial 4
300

World population (billion)

CO2
3
380
AD 1950
2
260
Post-industrial
1

Present 0
1000 1100 1200 1300 1400 1500 1600 1700 1800 1900 2000 2100
> Environmental constraints: topography, climate etc. Year AD

<Attitudes, mythologies and other cultural influences

(A) (B)

(A) A simple model of human–non-human interactions on Earth in

the last 12,000 years, based on the double helix conception of the DNA
molecule. Here, the base pairs represent the influence of the natural on
the cultural and vice versa. They should perhaps have different widths
according to their strengths at various times, but the size of the diagram
does not make that visually effective. In this version, the gyre of the helix
is very roughly proportional to the size of the human population, with
the downturns pointing out that population growth, while apparently
inexorable, can be affected by plagues and pandemics. For greater accu-
racy, the diagram should be cut off at about the level of the label ‘Post-
industrial’ but that would fail to convey any sense of vulnerability. But
this model is mostly a guide to the structure of the material in this book,
rather than a direct help to understanding the world.
(B) A set of graphs for the period  1000–2000. The lowest curve
is a numerical indication of the size of the gyre in (A) and the other

xii
 P xiii
curves reflect human activities. Carbon dioxide (CO2) has a very high
profile and represents the take-off of fossil-fuel use in the growth of
industrialism, a curve echoed by methane which is a more effective
‘greenhouse gas’ than CO2 by a factor of twenty-three. It is emitted
from human activities that involve anaerobic digestion such as land-
fills, and the stomachs of cattle. Nitrous oxides, which are emitted by
many forms of transport, are also greenhouse gases and fall out from
the atmosphere as part of acid precipitation. Like the DNA gyre, these
are both cause and effect. The growth in human numbers and the
changes in economy increase the quantities of gases emitted to the
atmosphere but the curves also symbolise cultural attitudes in which
growth in wealth and throughput of resources are regarded as normal
and every effort is made to sustain rates of growth rather than level out
the curves. One task for environmental history is to chronicle and
explain the strength of the interactions between the human and non-
human worlds in terms of their mutual effects and the creation of
hybrid forms.

This initial section of the book is basically an overview of what will be devel-
oped later in the text and may therefore allow potential readers to tell if it is
the book they are looking for. It contains in brief many of the ideas and themes
that are treated at greater length but obviously loses many of the nuances
and caveats that pepper the longer chapters. But, in the spirit of the ‘executive
summary’, it contains a compressed version of what follows: it musters
together the essence of the printed text (‘the marks’).

An approach to a complex history

As a foundation, this narrative emphasises the empirical evidence for change
in the last 10–12,000 years.1 It is not confined to the material world, however,
for it is also concerned with humans’ ideas about the planet and their place
on it. This inevitably means noticing the debates about the status of know-
ledge: how do we know what we think we know? This discussion of ideas
per se is in Chapter 1, and readers can pass it by if they want the (relatively)
simple epoch-by-epoch story. But, even then, there is no escape from dis-
cussions of the ideas formulated by various societies together with our recent
interpretations of their perceptions and cognitions. There is also an attempt
to draw out some abstract themes that carry across the whole timespan of
the last 10,000-odd years (with even earlier roots) and which apply to
society–nature interactions. These crystallise around notions of fragmenta-
tion and individualisation in society on the one hand, and coalescence and
uniformity on the other; they are then examined for their impact on the
human environment.
There is as well a stance in terms of definitions. A distinction is made
between worldwide, in which a material entity is found throughout the world
xiv G E H
but in discrete patches and mostly on the land surfaces (e.g. soil erosion or
Sky TV), and global, which is used only when there is the involvement of all
the -spheres of the planet, including the upper atmosphere in its capability of
diffusing uniformly the gases which it receives more regionally. Global phe-
nomena are thus mostly relatively recent when brought about by humans,
though natural climate change (as one example) has always been effective.
This brings us up against the modelling of the ‘greenhouse effect’ and, while
this must be included, the book is not about prognostication and is indeed a
bit sceptical of the view that environmental history has a great deal to tell us
about our future.

States of change
The world has been in a state of flux since the height of the last glacial
maximum of the Pleistocene (1.8 million to 11,500 years ago); the post-
glacial climate is sometimes said to be unusually stable but there have
been notable fluctuations: a widespread ‘optimum’ in the mid-Holocene,
sudden descents into cold phases and long periods of intense drought.
Recurrent phenomena like the El Niño/La Niña variations in Pacific sea tem-
peratures have experienced measurable fluctuations in frequency and inten-
sity. Yet most of these second-order changes have not been uniform across the
planet: there are regional differences in their incidence. There has been a con-
tinuous response by living organisms whose populations have grown or fallen
and which have changed their distributions. New land surfaces have been
colonised, and most human habitats have acquired a characteristic flora and
fauna, including micro-organisms. None of the scientific investigations into
the last 10,000 years has indicated a stable state of nature.
In addition to these transitions, human societies have changed their
ways of life. From a population that was 100 per cent hunter-gatherer (or
‘gatherer-hunter’ or ‘forager’ – equivalent terms) and based on food collec-
tion from the wild, agriculture became dominant after about 8000 ,
though leaving large marginal areas for the hunters and gatherers. The solar-
based agricultural economies persisted until after the mid-eighteenth
century when the industrial economies then burgeoning in Europe and
North America began to have a strong impact upon them. Although such
agriculture has persisted until very recently, it can be argued that a fossil-fuel
based industry was the world’s major economy until about 1950, when it was
intensified to a different level of interaction with the rest of the globe. All
these changes (each of which is labelled an era) have been accompanied by
a rise in the human population from a few million in 10,000  to just over
6,000 million (6 bn) in  2000. The main difference between the beginning
and the end of this sequence has been a transition from patchy and tempo-
rary impacts upon the energy and material flows of the ecosystems inhab-
ited by humans to a partial obliteration of the natural world in a series of
very large conurbations together with a considerable degree of alteration of
 P xv
the terrain devoted to agriculture, grasslands and forests. Further, the effects
wrought by carbon-based industrial activity upon the oceans and atmos-
phere have made Homo sapiens a species with a truly global reach.2
Parallel to this history devoted to alterations in the material world, there are
the shifts in ideas about the kind of world we talk about and of the human place
in it. There may have been a degree of commonality in most hunter-gatherers’
world views as they adapted to circumstances over which they often had only
a small degree of control. Agriculture seems to have produced many different
interpretations of humans’ place and role in the world but industrialisation
brought about more uniformity as technologies powered by steam emplaced
conquest, colonialisation and the spread of genetically uniform crops. Then,
since 1950, there is the phenomenon called ‘globalisation’ in which instant
communication and rapid transport have allowed an intensification and accel-
eration of most forms of interaction between humans and between humans
and the non-human world of the globe: the ‘post-industrial’ economy. Both
the last two eras have spawned countercultures which exist as islands in time
as well as space.
Nobody can now imagine that these are stories in isolation from one
another. They intertwine and are connected by strands of material flow and of
meaning in which separation of either is very difficult. The quantity of food
on a plate in the United States, for example, has more to do with the symbol-
ism of plenty and achievement than with what is needed for healthy nutrition.
A possible visualisation of these relationships might be the kind of DNA-style
double helix, as presented above. Such imagery does not produce explanations
and, in this case, it is only an aid to grasping the structure of the thinking
behind the book. In fact the approach of this present volume is largely descrip-
tive and even where, at the end, some ‘why’ questions are approached, it is in
the knowledge that there are deeper levels of understanding that need another
set of enquiries.

Perspectives
Even without humanity, the world would have changed and be changing.
Humans have, though, produced many alterations which are very different
from those of a ‘natural’ kind. Although the roots were much earlier, the
period since 1950 has been the most extensive, the most intensive and the
most measured. These features tend to overshadow the fact that each era has
had its origins in an earlier phase but, once established, the later epoch dom-
inates the scene. Equally, every subsequent era was not predictable by its pre-
decessors, each of which would have declared itself to be the only way of living.
Yet all of them were superseded by changes in the harnessing of energy and
the application of that energy through technologies which move within a
matrix of social attitudes. Hunter-gatherers, pre-industrial agriculturalists
and hydrocarbon-based industry alike would have believed at the time of their
zenith that they expected to go on for ever.3
xvi G E H

N
1. There is a number of textbooks which supply long-range and worldwide accounts
of the development and activities of human societies. For ‘prehistory’, see
C. Scarre (ed.) The Human Past. World Prehistory and the Development of Human
Societies, London: Thames and Hudson, 2005 (784 pages); for later times there is
R. Tignor et al., Worlds Together, Worlds Apart. A History of the Modern World from
the Mongol Empire to the Present, New York: W. W. Norton, 2002 (462 pages + 49
pages of Index); more modestly there is P. Atkins, I. Simmons and B. Roberts,
People, Land and Time. An Historical Introduction to the Relations between
Landscape, Culture and Environment, London: Arnold, 1998 (a mere 286 pages).
There is something of a gap between the chronological coverage of the first two,
not filled by any comparable work. For really long-range history (the last 4.5
billion years), see D. Christian, Maps of Time, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London:
University of California Press, 2005.
2. Overviews with an environmental emphasis include J. Diamond, Guns, Germs
and Steel. A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years, London: Chatto
and Windus, 1997, Vintage 2005; J. R. McNeill and W. H. McNeill, The Human
Web. A Bird’s Eye View of World History, New York and London: W. W. Norton,
2003.
3. Doubts about the long-term availability of coal were expressed in the first quarter
of the twentieth century, but nobody acted as if they were real. Hence my use of
the verb ‘believe’.
 CHAPTER ONE

Resonances

F 1.1 Kleine Orgel (small organ) at St Jacobskirche in Lübeck.

Photograph by Wilhelm Castelli.

This is the Kleine Orgel (small organ) at St Jacobskirche in Lübeck,

dating from 1467 to 1636. There are some major sections such as the
upper set of pipes (the ‘Hauptwerk’) and a separate and lower set of pipes

1
2 G E H
which almost look like an separate instrument. As a metaphor, these
might represent major sets of disciplines like the natural sciences and the
humanities–social sciences. Authors may elect to play on one of these sets
of pipes or may try to use both, sandwiched between the weight of one
and the sharp ends of the other. Each separate pipe has its own sounding
note and harmonic resonances, rather like many academic fields where
each has their own special sounds: think of all the ‘environmental’ fields:
economics, engineering, sciences, ethics, restoration, let alone the many
other uses of the word. The player’s seat might also symbolise a society’s
attitudes: is it best to have a score, to which adherence is compulsory, or
is it a better survival technique to have a simple theme (such as basic
needs) and improvise on it, with chance and contingency playing a full
role?
Further, this is firstly an internal sound. When we represent environ-
ment in words and pictures we are talking to ourselves. When we use a
bulldozer, the case is altered, though we are saying something about our-
selves as well.

S 
In bringing into one focus the whole of the world over a long period of time,
certain assumptions are essential. Many of these are simply assumed within
many societies while others are debated within the scholarly community. But
without them, it is either impossible to write about humanity and its sur-
roundings, or else the reader is left without knowing what the author takes for
granted. So here are a few suppositions that will not be tested again in this
book.
The first is that there is indeed a material world. A long tradition exists in
western thinking that everything is only a product of Mind, either that of
humans or of God. By contrast, in the present book it is assumed that the
material world exists and that, for example, if humans vanished from the
Earth, there would still be other animals, plants, rocks and water. This does
not preclude the further assumption, also implicit in these pages, that the
materiality of the globe is too complex and too dynamic for humans to know
everything about, especially given their own limitations of brain capacity and
sensory equipment. With Giovanni Battista Vico (1668–1744) we might argue
that the human-made or ‘social’ world is something we have a chance of
understanding but the ‘natural’ world is the outcome of processes of which we
have only partial understanding.1 It is not difficult to sympathise with the biol-
ogist J. B. S. Haldane (1892–1964) who remarked that ‘my suspicion is the uni-
verse is not only queerer than we suppose but queerer than we can suppose’.2
The present volume endorses the concept of the reality of a material world
which, despite all our efforts to frame it culturally, may present its own limits
in its own way.
 R 3
Another basic notion is that humans act differently from other species in a
number of ways. The more fundamental religionists favour the divergence as
testimony of a divine mandate; their environmentalist equivalents are more
likely to see it as evidence of a drive to destruction. Within such a spectrum,
the scale and persistence of the human desire to control are relevant themes.
Where the non-human world is concerned, this is most popularly summed
up in the phrase ‘the conquest of nature’. In the frequently adopted dualism
of freedom and necessity, freedom usually implies the overcoming of nature;
when there is disagreement over which bits are to be subjugated, it often
involves the overpowering of other people first. In part, such processes ack-
nowledge that ‘humanity’ does not exist as a single entity but in the form of
humans (as individuals and as groups) driven by often conflicting needs,
demands and illusions.3 Thus, environmental history is made by individuals,
by groups small and large, societies, nations and international agencies: there
is much work to be done in investigating the scales of both conception and
execution of environmental changes.4
In finding a workable language for this book, the terms ‘human’ and ‘envir-
onment’ or ‘nature’ are difficult enough, even without finding labels for the
apparently hybrid forms which are emerging under the aegis of technolo-
gies such as micro-electronics and biotechnology. A vocabulary is necessary,
however, and preferably one which (for the present purpose) does not have to
resort all the time to quotation marks. Human will therefore be used to denote
the genus Homo, including its present single species; nature will be used of the
entire other material components of the cosmos; environment will refer to
those elements of nature which are in an ecological relation with humans, that
is, where there exists a possible transfer of energy and materials between them.
Culture is the learned behaviour of humans which is transmitted down the
generations. All of these can be the subject of non-material model-making in
the human brain. (A number of other terms will be defined or glossed as they
first occur.)
The behaviour of humans seems to be an interaction of the genetically
determined and the culturally learned, with one class of behaviour most
remarkably developed in humans being governed, as Charles Darwin said,
‘by that short but imperious word “ought” ’.5 Social restrictions on feeding
and reproduction are common in many species but the human unfolding
of this trait has led to ideas of morality which are applied to standards of
conduct6 towards environment as well as to other fields of the life-world.
A more developed, self-conscious form of morality is labelled ethics,
and there is a whole academic field of ‘environmental ethics’.7 These
constraints of right and wrong underlie many of the human actions upon
nature (and the absence of others) which form the bulk of this volume. A
few of the ingredients of any deliberations about environmental ethics
might be:
4 G E H
● Humans have shown moral behaviour for as long as evidence exists.
The boundaries of moral responsibility shift and, in the west, they have
stopped for a long time at a species barrier between humans and other
forms of life.
● Humans want incompatible things from their surroundings: they want
material resources (of which there are inescapable minima) but also the
company of other species and, often, intangible features such as beauty,
which is identified relative to particular cultures.
● Humans have the power of understanding what is happening (albeit
imperfectly) and using that power to regulate. At the same time, we have
the imaginative power to know what we are missing. Much of this is tied
up with purpose-centred thinking which, when compared with other
animals, humans deploy in abundance.
● Developed, reflexive ethics has many approaches of the -ism and similar
types: sentientism, ecofeminism, the land ethic, normative, deep ecology
are examples that do not exhaust the roll-call even if the reading list is
totally daunting.

Different mixes of these ingredients have produced different results over time.
Two main categories are:

● An ethic for the use of the environment: the world is a set of resources
for humanity to employ, though there may be limitations on that
use, such as ensuring their perpetuation (‘sustainability’) or securing
equitable distribution between various groups of people (‘justice’).
Terms such as ‘utilitarian’ and ‘instrumental’ are often applied to this
view.
● An ethic which applies to the whole of nature, including humans, and
which does not regard Homo sapiens as the culmination of evolution
but as one species among many. The world is not our oyster but a place
we share with the oysters: all species and ecosystems have an intrinsic
value. The most developed form is called Deep Ecology. Terms such as
‘impractical’ and ‘emotional’ are often heard and sometimes written
down.8

The ability to understand (even if only partially) means that simplified

models of the relations of humanity and the cosmos are many and varied,
and a few are mentioned here to give a flavour of the historical variety of
them.

● The earth is senescent, having been occupied and degraded for a long
time but there was once a Golden Age when humans and nature were in
harmony; originated in Classical Greece, still around today.
 R 5
● The notion of the sublime: that humans must relate to something
bigger than ourselves, such as Nature or God. The poetry of William
Wordsworth (1770–1850) is often seen as emblematic of the power of
Nature to convey moral imperatives.
● The idea of progress and especially the eventual perfectibility of
humankind. All human history is seen as progressing towards a better
state, not without stumbling along the way.
● The adoption of Prometheus as a mythic icon. Stealing fire from the gods
was just the first step in gaining tools that allowed mastery over nature;
there will be a technological fix for everything. (What happened to him
as a result is not usually mentioned by its advocates.)
● The idea that humans are on earth to divert or even thwart universal
processes. Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95: ‘Darwin’s bulldog’) was a
great advocate of the position that societies’ actions were about the ‘frus-
tration’ of the flows of the cosmos.
● The opposite view that humanity needs always to align itself with the
flows of the cosmos and disturb them as little as possible: the Tao and
Deep Ecology meet here.
● A model in which life on the planet works to maximise the conditions for
its survival, and contrary human actions will eventually result in the
demise of the species: the Gaia hypothesis. Nobody much discusses the
likelihood that Homo sapiens is destined to have a short (if fiery) existence
in evolutionary terms.
● The suggestion that the biophysics of the planet imposes limits to human
actions. In the past, these may have been at local scales and surmountable
by technology. Now, they are being seen at a global level, impelled by pop-
ulation growth and carbon-based economies. Usually labelled environ-
mental determinism.
● Fatalism: que sera, sera, or ‘God will decide, not us’, or a no-model model
in which history is simply ‘one damn thing after another’.
● That very few, if any, things are free of ambiguity. Human actions
produce up-sides and down-sides to almost everything. Mines are not
pretty but silver and salt mines provided the riches that eventually fed
Bach and Mozart, respectively.
● That the basic building block is always the notion of the Self as opposed
to another, and that binary pairs are a common outcome. The two com-
ponents are rarely of equal standing in human eyes.

There seems to be a number of common threads among these models. The

first is that environmental ethics are necessary: in general, there is a need for
‘oughts’ since random behaviour is not acceptable. The second is that there is
a concern for the future which aligns with the predictive disposition of the
natural sciences. They look first for cosmic order and then transfer that idea
of order (as in pattern, law, structure, construction, mechanism) in carrying
6 G E H
out out human intentions.9 Purpose usually involves control over nature such
that it is transformed into environment, and over environment so that it
becomes resources. And possibly over other humans so that they do not have
access to those resources.

 
No historical account can ignore the growth in the human population. The
outline of humanity’s major increase in numbers and the spread of the species
from its origins in sub-Saharan Africa to most parts of the globe’s land surface
is well known. The term ‘population growth’ is usually used, and charts the rise
of the numbers of the species Homo sapiens from perhaps 4 million in 10,000
 (12 ky) to 6,000 million (or six billion) in 1999 and 6.5 billion in 2006.10
Growth rates have not been constant: the fifth millennium  saw a gain of 50
per cent, followed by 100 per cent in each millennium after that so that the total
was 100 million in 500 . By contrast, the second century  was the time of
a slowing down of growth. This first cycle was largely a consequence of the
invention and spread of agriculture, which released controls on the densities
and growth rates of gatherer-hunters, and it mostly took place in Europe,
mainland Asia and North Africa. In the tenth century  another cycle of
growth began, running its course until a slackening-off around 1400, after
major disease epidemics. From 200 million in  400, a peak of 360 million
was reached in 1300, with a fall to 350 million in 1400. Europe and China were
the dominant contributors to this era of growth. The necessary concomitant
of this phase was the improvement of food production within ‘Malthusian
limits’, that is, environmentally produced upper boundaries of energy and
protein gain, although other interpreters prefer explanations based on social
and political structures. A third cycle can be postulated in which Europe leads
population growth from the fifteenth century onwards, with the world total
going from the 350 million of 1400 to the 6,000 million of 1999. In this stage
Africa and the Americas add to the growth and, indeed, have some of the fastest
rates of growth; in absolute numbers China is still a major builder. After the
fifteenth century, the intercontinental exchange of food plants allows more
intensive crop growth in many regions, and after the eighteenth century, any
economic enterprise is liable to be subsidised by fossil fuel energy.
Interruptions to the apparently inexorable growth of human numbers have
tended to be short-lived. Disasters such as major earthquakes, wars and
famines have been locally or regionally significant for a time but births have
generally made up for the lost numbers. The exception seems to have been the
plague, erupting westwards from time to time, losing demographic power
only in the seventeenth century. Its environmental relations are not obvious
if vectors such as the rat and dense habitation are excluded. Many chronic
diseases are more unambiguously linked to environment: malaria is one,
and others belong to the suite of ‘development diseases’, as where irrigation
 R 7
projects spread the incidence of schistosomiasis. As human populations press
more and more against the wild, then zoonoses are more likely to be trans-
ferred into humans, and viruses in particular may then show a remarkable
ability to undergo mutations, just as other organisms, such as malarial
mosquitoes can develop resistance to pesticides. Mutation has been a feature
of the virus causing HIV/AIDS in humans, which emerged in central Africa in
about 1959, with the syndrome getting its name in 1982. This disease has res-
onances with other major epidemics in human history: it is transmitted via
sexual contact like syphilis, affects children and young adults as does smallpox
and has a long incubation period like tuberculosis. In 1999, infection rates in
sub-Saharan Africa were 80/1,000, in the Caribbean 20/1,000, in south and
south-east Asia 7/1,000 and North America 6/1,000. South Africa and
Zimbabwe had 30 per cent infection rates. Populations continue to grow in
these areas, though at slower rates than hitherto; the effects, however, are con-
centrated on children, because many orphans are created, and in the working
population which lacks a proportion of young adults. Here, as elsewhere,
poverty is part of the complex.
Demography and demographic history have a distinct set of social contexts.
For example, much interpretation has been underlain by a demographic tran-
sition theory which makes the assumption that the falls in fertility in the west
since the nineteenth century will be echoed in lower-income economies as they
get less poor.11 Many funding bodies, too, were about ‘population control’ in
search of relatively painless ways of reducing growth rates in the south. In
general, until recent years, demography could be said to be strong on mathe-
matics and weak on interface with social theory; its interface with envi-
ronmental work was generally confined to the Malthusian assertions of
environmentalists who were convinced that population growth in all types of
economies was the root cause of degradational environmental change. Now
that rates of fertility are actually declining in most parts of the world,12 the great
surge of Malthusian environmentalism in the 1960–80 period can be inter-
preted as either (a) having been totally irrelevant scaremongering or (b) a bril-
liantly triumphant piece of consciousness-raising with positive consequences.13
Until the Industrial Revolution, plants and animals, wind and water were
the only sources of energy accessible to humans. One calculation suggests
that 314 square kilometres (km2) used as gatherer-hunters’ territory would
support three people in the Arctic, eleven in semi-desert, fifty-four in grass-
land and 136 in subtropical savanna. These numbers were exploded with the
coming of agriculture, often by a factor of 100, though not in the Arctic where
agriculture has never been successfully established. By the first quarter of the
nineteenth century the worldwide energy availability had increased by six-
fold. Thus, above-ground environmental constraints were obviously highly
relevant until the coming of fossil-fuel energy (either as power in, for example,
steam form or embedded in materials such as fertilisers) but thereafter began
to fade as clear-cut and immediate sources of limits.
8 G E H

M   –


The cosmos is a material entity with flows of energy: matter can be seen as
energy at rest. Humans, too, are made of materials and are fuelled by energy
intake. Humans tap into the material stocks and the energy streams in order
both to survive (as do other living things) and uniquely to advance cultural
ambitions. For our species, the use and control of energy is the key to much
of our use of planetary materials (which we label as ‘resources’) and to our
manipulation of the materials of nature.14 Inevitably, the more people there
are, the greater the volume of usage but the relationship has become more
exponential than linear since so many people have commanded much higher
levels than those needed simply for survival and reproduction.
Radiant energy from the sun can be fixed to a chemical form, oxidised to
provide heat and electromagnetism, and then transformed into kinetic
energy of the pushing and shoving variety. Formally defined as the capacity
to do work, most forms of energy gradually lose that capacity as they are
transformed, ending up as heat which is radiated to space. The measure of
the loss of the capacity to do work is called entropy and a defining quality of
living organisms is that they can temporarily defy entropy while building up
complexity and undergoing evolution. The starting point for practical con-
siderations is solar radiation which is fixed by green plants in the process
known as photosynthesis. Globally, photosynthesis is not very efficient if
looked at with an engineering cast of mind. The solar radiation reaching
outer layer of the Earth’s atmosphere is about 5,500,000 exajoules per year
(EJ/yr) and global net photosynthesis reaches 2,000 EJ (1 EJ1018J), so the
efficiency is about 0.3 per cent. The mass of animals which feed on plants
(which is most of them) is about 200 EJ, about 1 per cent of all the phy-
tomass. (For comparison, worldwide fossil fuel production is 300 EJ.) A his-
torical view of the relentless rise of humanity is given in the statistic that in
 1900 the biomasses of humans and wild vertebrates were equal but that,
by 2000, there was a difference of an order of magnitude, and further that
domesticated vertebrates exceeded wild species by twenty times. Humans’
interest in the energy content of plants and animals was for millennia in
recently captured energy coming from the last year in most plants, a bit
longer in animals and longer still with wood for fuel, but there was a massive
change when, in the eighteenth century, fossil photosynthesis became widely
usable in the form of coal: the timescale of interest was now geological as well
as biological.
The availability of energy is fundamental for human access to materials,
including the supply of more of it. There is firstly somatic energy: that of the
body itself, which can be expended in, for example, running after prey animals
or walking to look for plant foods, and which can be maximised by channel-
ing, as in using the spear or the bow and arrow. Then there is extrasomatic
 R 9
energy in which other energies are harnessed to human ends, such as the use
of draught animals, for instance, or with the energy of fossil fuels directed
through technology. In both cases, energy becomes a ‘binding resource’ in the
sense that without adequate somatic energy intake, we die and that a ‘modern’
lifestyle is possible only, when extrasomatic energy is available, usually in large
quantities. Energy surplus is therefore an important goal of many societies in
order to devote time to non-subsistence activities. Some gatherer-hunters were
said to be nourished on a few hours’ gathering and hunting per week, large
wheat surpluses fuelled the building of the Egyptian pyramids, and a coal mine
produces many times more energy than is needed to dig it. Manifestly, the idea
of surplus has an objective and measurable component (figures at the local
health club for calorie intake versus exercise levels might be an example) but
also has a social and cultural component: the quantity of ‘surplus’ energy used
in packaging in western economies is a matter of corporate policy rather than
necessity.
The idea of toothpaste in tubes inside cartons is a reminder that goods and
services all have an embedded energy content, that is, that energy has been
used to make and transport them (energy intensity, EI) and that some of that
energy may still reside in the materials (energy density). Worldwide plant
mass is a store of 10,000 EJ at any one time, a 100-tonne wagon of coal con-
tains 2 terajoules (TJ), a barrel of crude oil 6 gigajoules (GJ), a bottle of white
wine 3 megajoules (MJ), and a raindrop on a blade of grass 4 microjoules (J;
 106). In comparable energy density terms, each kilogram of crude oil
averages about about 43 MJ, natural gas 35 MJ, coal 23 MJ, air-dried wood
14 MJ, cereal grains 15 MJ, lean meat 7 MJ, fish 6 MJ, potatoes 4 MJ, vegeta-
bles 1 MJ, and human faeces 2 MJ. The energy intensities of materials vary
according to their methods of production and the technologies used, and
so vary through time and place. Aluminium, for example, has a high cost at
227–342 MJ/kg, compared with iron at 20–35 MJ, and steel at 20–50 MJ, and
with water at 1 MJ. Comparisons can be made for the energy intensities of,
for example, water and sewage at 17,000 kilocalories per dollar of ‘product’
(note the different units from previous data), through railways at 15 kcal/US$,
hotels at 11 kcal, education and medicine at 8 kcal and radio/television at
4 kcal, a position it shares with finance and insurance.15 It is valuable to know
that, in an industrial economy such as that of Australia, energy consumption
by final use (if calculated to include indirect and embedded energy) has been
dominated by households, which account for 53 per cent. By contrast energy
embedded in capital formation (infrastructural constructions like buildings,
roads and pipelines) was only 11 per cent. Most such calculations have an arbi-
trary cut-off point in the calculations: the energy costs of a slice of white sliced
bread can, at the extreme, be taken back to, for example, the energy cost of
digging the iron ore that made the digger that dug the phosphate that fed the
worker that drove the tractor . . . and so on. A comparable horizon has to be
fixed for each process. In an overall historical perspective, two major trends
10 G E H
can be singled out here: the proportion of energy use represented by food fell
as societies industrialised and, within industrial economies, energy intensities
declined in the later twentieth century as energy costs rose and technologies
became more efficient.
The history of access to energy can be seen as a set of additive stages in
which an economy adds new sources while not relinquishing all the older
technologies, even though they may become diminished in importance.
Gatherer-hunters are reliant on solar power as biomass which has mostly been
recently photosynthesised, with the exception of wood used in fuels and tool-
making and dry plant matter which is fired in the landscape. A few bones of
longer-lived animals were added to the fuel and construction repertoires in
the Palaeolithic of Eurasia. The whole system collects energy from large areas
as people move around. With the coming of agriculture, solar energy is still
crucial but it is collected over smaller spaces (such as in fields and in herds)
and so denser populations of humans can be supported. This era also sees the
use of falling water and wind energy in machines like mills and boats. The
tapping of fossil fuels on a large scale is a major move along the intensity gra-
dient since the energy densities of coal, oil and natural gas are many times
those of wood and other plant materials. Falling water plus concrete allowed
the installation of large-scale hydropower units in climatically and topo-
graphically suitable places. Electricity entered the mix in the nineteenth
century although it was initially nowhere near as important as it is today
where the post-industrial economy comes very quickly to a halt when it fails
(be in a supermarket when the tills get no power, let alone an underground

T 1.1 Gross energy (E) expended by humans in history

Period Number E in E/yr in J Notes
of years 1018 J
50,000–8000  42,000 2.5 6 Largely hunter-gatherers
8000 – 1 8,000 506 16 Mostly solar agriculture, some
irrigated
 1–1750 1,750 1,400 8  1018 Solar powered but increasingly
efficient
1750–1950 200 360 18  1018 Major years of industrial
economies powered by fossil
fuels
1950–2002 52 647 124 1018 High population plus fossil
fuels and other energy sources

The table uses data from a Population Research Bureau (www.prb.org) table of the number of
people who have ever lived and then multiplies that number by a representative figure for energy
consumption at each stage, bearing in mind that, after 1750, there are large disparities between the
populations of industrial countries and the great majority of people in developing nations whose
commercial energy consumption is small. Nevertheless, poor people’s environmental impact can
be very great.
 R 11
train or an airport). Thus, the new sources of the period since about 1950,
such as nuclear power and ‘alternative’ energies like wind turbines and pho-
tovoltaic cells, mostly generate electricity though a few heat water systems
directly. Uranium is a form of intensification: fissioning 1 kg of U235 releases
8.2 TJ of energy which is about 2.7  105 more than the same amount of coal.
The long-term trend is therefore towards the conversion of ever larger
amounts of more concentrated forms of energy.
Using estimated data, the quantitative energy use of different types of his-
toric economies can be outlined. Measurements in 103 kcal/person/day sug-
gests a level of 5.0 for gatherer-hunters, of which about 3.0 are needed for
bodily metabolism, and some of the rest comes as fire at the hearth and,
often, in the landscape. But there is little energy consumed otherwise. Early
dryland agriculture pushes the figure up to 12.0 so that there is a surplus that
allows many activities other than subsistence to be pursued and population
densities to rise. An advanced form of this type of economy, with better
water control and informed breeding of plants and animals can reach 25.0
and so allow a bigger leisured class. When fossil fuels enter the energy mix
then an immediate increase to about 77 kcal/day is possible, and in a fully
‘post-industrial’ economy, where electricity is a major source of energy for
all consumers, then 230 is an representative figure.16 If we think of these
numbers as surrogates for interaction with the environment, then the mag-
nitude of the more recent changes (in effect since 1950) immediately falls
into place in space and time. What Table 1.1 shows is that the cumulative
amount of energy expended by humans is not only very great but that the
last 250 years have seen the dispersal of almost as much energy as the pre-
ceding 1750 and about twice as much as the whole history of gatherer-
hunters who have occupied about 90 per cent of our species’s evolutionary
time. Nonetheless, the quantity of energy expended during the period of
solar-powered agriculture is by no means negligible. Since the coming of
fossil fuels, the amount of energy available to those in rich countries vastly
exceeds the availability to the poorer nations and thus average figures mean
little. Some emissions increase with income (sulphur dioxide [SO2], for
example) to a certain level and then begin to fall. Poor people, however, exert
very strong influences upon water, soils and vegetation and can bring about
change in very short times. At the other end of the scale, the EI of industrial
nations began to fall markedly after the oil-price shocks of the 1970s. It is all
more complex than a simple graph of commercial energy consumption
against gross domestic product (GDP). Access to, and control over, energy
sources allow humans to extend their reach in all kinds of ways. Few are more
important than transferring materials from one place to another on every
conceivable scale, including outer space. To take just one instance, about 85
per cent of the infrastructure of cities consists of mined products. There is a
secondary level, too: industrial manufacture of, for example, anti-malarial
drugs enables people to do otherwise impossible things like forest clearance
12 G E H
or waging war. What is clear in a historic perspective is the parallel trend of
loss of biodiversity and energy use.17
In sum, energy transformations provide a way of carrying thoughts into
action. In a world without humans, or in an early Holocene one with very few,
material transfers were, of course, taking place. The natural rates of sediment
formation, movement, and dissolved chemical content have been much
studied, as have the human alterations of the processes. Soils are formed at
rates that average about 0.25 millimetres per year (mm/yr) in farmed areas,
with a maximum global rate of 0.8 mm/yr. In the opposite process, weather-
ing strips about 0.1 mm/yr from the Earth’s crust (the maximum being about
10 mm/yr in the Himalayas), and the material is moved by water, wind and
ice. Most of it is deposited in valleys, at any rate temporarily, and perhaps only
one-tenth of the annually eroded material reaches the oceans. Within the
human-caused movement of materials, the balance of deliberate and acci-
dental transfers seems to be about equal at present; the rates are higher than
that of population growth and rates have risen by three- to ten-fold in the
years since 1920. In aggregate quantities, about 2–3  1012 tonnes per year
(t/yr) of soil and rock are moved by the mining and processing of minerals,
which amounts to some 0.2 per cent of the Earth’s surface. Data on these relo-
cations can be produced in great quantities and with increasing precision for
recent years; in historical contexts we need to remember that many are extrap-
olations from analogous situations of today and fewer are from direct mea-
surements of deposited and dated sediments. A list of the ways in which
humans change the ways in which sediments and dissolved chemicals move
towards the sea could apply to most eras from the beginning of agriculture
onwards, and possibly even before in a few limited places. They nearly all
changed gear upwards many-fold with the coming of steam power although a
few decelerated natural processes. While the outlines of the historic progres-
sions are clear, the detail needs cautious interpretation.18 In a similar way, a
natural world had species extinction and evolution, migrations on many
spatial and temporal scales; gradual long-term processes might (as with mate-
rial transport) be over-ridden by catastrophic events such as rapid climate
change, volcanic eruptions, major storms, and earthquakes.
Quantitative calculations of the costs and benefits of energy and materials
availability may well not tell the whole story. Many data for energy use focus
on commercial energy and so omit local sources of biomass fuels: an inhabi-
tant of a remote part of the Himalayas might have a high quality of life, pro-
vided enough wood is accessible, just as backwoods survivalists in Montana
rely on National Forests. Yet, for most of the high-income world, the flood of
energy supply since the eighteenth century has spawned the mythologies of
cornucopia which dominate many human–environment relationships today.
Yet there is no escaping the second law of thermodynamics – at every energy
transformation useful energy is transformed into heat which eventually finds
its way back out to space.
 R 13

T  
The sociologist Niklas Luhmann reminded us that we cannot talk to nature,
only to ourselves.19 His main conclusion was that we had come to simplify the
complexity of it all and so we labelled a number of channels; environmental
science and sciences; environmental economics, politics, ethics, religion and
sociology, to name only some. In each, we seem to strive for a zero–one or
binary resolution as in economic or uneconomic (a killer phrase for many a
project), right or wrong, and perhaps good or evil. This model is very useful,
and helpful metaphors can be constructed from it as in the analogy between
the on-off sounds in each separate pipe of a church organ (as at the head of
this chapter) and whether they make for harmony or dissonance. But there
seem to be other subjects of conversation which cut across these channels and
inform those parts of our culture which deal with the environment. There are
three categories of knowledge, for instance, that cannot be ignored in any
deliberations: facts, values and myths.
A factual approach to environmental history is an accepted route. The
information in it may be derived from work in the natural sciences or the pos-
itivist social sciences where that term includes historiography.20 Especially
where the natural science component is strong, there tends to be an ‘inev-
itable’ conclusion: ‘humanity is undermining its own resource base’, perhaps,
or ‘technological ingenuity has always provided solutions when their need
became evident’. The philosophically aware see in these latter statements the
operation of value. An environmental history which contained no implicit
statement of values would be almost impossible, but some approaches to both
past and present are firmly based on humans rather than on nature: religious
views with a hierarchy of god(s)–humans–animals–plants–rocks allow dom-
inance of nature by humans, albeit usually with some constraints though not
usually ones with the direr immediate penalties for transgression. Another
historiography could bring forward all those instances where natural phe-
nomena have controlled human affairs (at disasters and hinge-points as well
as long-term and gradual processes) with the value content that Mother
Nature is not to be gainsaid: in its extreme form this is called environmen-
tal determinism. Then there is the use of myths to sustain living among
difficulties and contradictions. ‘Myth’ is used here to mean a condensed and
vivid (poetic, indeed) story which encapsulates a story of events thought to be
undoubtedly true and which is just as relevant today as when first formulated.
Thus the myths about the expulsion from the Garden of Eden can be used to
explain why poverty and degradation are inevitable (for some),21 just as any
account of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods can be seen as an inspiring
vision for technological advance.
‘Facts’ are crucial to the models made of human–environment relations. In
some people’s perfect world, the positivist sciences sit outside society. Yet prac-
tically nobody would now prosecute the view that the human mind can be a
14 G E H
clean slate upon which the senses (probably aided by technology) simply
record the world around us, rather like burning files on to a newly unwrapped
compact disc. Eminent scientists, such as P. B. Medawar, have quoted Kant
(1724–1804) and Nietzsche (1844–1900) in support of the way in which cog-
nition is constructed out of many more elements than perception. Kant, for
instance, thought that experience was itself a form of knowledge that informed
understanding, and Nietzsche goes further in asserting that everything that
reaches consciousness is utterly and completely adjusted, simplified, schema-
tised and interpreted. He anticipated recent studies of the sociology and phi-
losophy of science by a hundred years in saying that there is a transition phase
(or in some cases a dissonance) between the reality of the material world and
its description by humans.22
Friedrich Nietzsche is often credited with the crystallisation of the type of
thought that spread from France in the 1970s and 1980s, in which any ‘grand
narrative’ was eschewed in favour of local and contingent truths; everything
was valid only in its particular historical context. The most articulate propo-
nent was Michel Foucault (1926–84) who thought that all knowledge was split
into discourses that were specific to time and place, and that they in turn were
at the service of increased production or, just as likely, harnessed as sources of
political power. Knowledge and power are then temporarily bound together
since ‘truth’ in any culture is a product of forces which work to legitimise some
ideas and repress others.23 The application of this notion to environmental
attitudes is obvious: think only of the European debates over the introduction
of genetically modified (GM) crops or the assertions that climatic change
science in the United States has been subject to McCarthy-like attack. Cynics
point out that, if all truths are relative, then the statement must apply to itself
and so there is a further layer of uncertainty. This chimes with Medawar’s view
that a scientist tells stories, albeit ones which are always read with scepticism.
They all agree that there is no ultimate, self-validating viewpoint from which
all other limited perspectives would suddenly fall into place. But while total
objectivity may be impossible, it may also mean an openness to the needs of
others or even a way to feel a way into the experience of others without any
excess of self-interest. The closeness of the material and the moral is shown
when we are dependent on others for survival but are grateful for it.24
The cultural strand of understanding human–other relationships has con-
tained the category usually labelled ‘philosophy’ since Classical times.25
Though often anathema to the practically minded, some of its notions invari-
ably underlie lived experience and form a part of inter-human communica-
tions. Immanuel Kant posed the question ‘how should I live?’ as central to
moral philosophy and so environmentally minded thinkers have quarried his
work, and that of many others, in search of a set of more or less universal
abstractions that might guide us in everyday life. The idea of abstraction is
important: historiography and the natural sciences maintain a roughly con-
stant level of abstraction whereas philosophy constantly seeks to excavate one
 R 15
more level of irreducible meaning. Word-based philosophers, such as Plato,
Bacon, Descartes, Rousseau and Heidegger, have all been targeted for their
possible application to human–environment relations. In North America,
more practical men like Thoreau and Aldo Leopold have spawned huge indus-
tries of abstract commentary which might well have surprised these adepts of
axe and gun. ‘Has there been any impact on impact?’ is a question implicit
throughout the empirical matter of the present volume.
The tension between the local–relative interpretations of the world and the
‘grand narratives’ has not prevented the believers in the latter from presenting
their case. One type of master narrative is that of the natural sciences. The
natural sciences’ findings are at the heart of the grand construction known as
the ‘Gaia hypothesis’, conceived by James Lovelock (1919– ).26 This inverts the
usual sequence in which climate demarcates the distribution and nature of life
for one in which life as a whole produces the global climate. It is argued that
the global temperature and the gaseous composition of the atmosphere, and
the salinity of the oceans would be different without the evolution of life forms.
Initially, the hypothesis was rejected by the scientific community because no
mechanisms could be found for linkages to produce the predicted effects. As is
often the case, evidence turned up once people started looking for it; in this
case a major discovery was that plankton in the oceans produced an aerosol
(dimethyl sulphide) which initiated cloud formation which, in turn, engen-
dered rainfall over the continents. Gaia can thus be seen as an holistic expres-
sion of a complex system of feedback loops that have the apparent ‘purpose’ of
keeping the planet safe for life. This latter idea is a piece of teleology still unac-
ceptable to many scientists, especially to neo-Darwinian proponents of organic
evolution; it is highly acceptable to many environmentalists since all forms
of life, and not necessarily the human species, are the benefactors.27 It is also
becoming more acceptable in ‘mainstream’ science under the label ‘earth
system science’ without any hint of goddesses or teleology. The Gaia concept
has also chimed very well with ‘New Age’ types of spirituality and, at one time,
was a good component of various types of advertising.
A few other evaluations of the world aspire to findings of a unitary charac-
ter: the energy-use history outlined in a previous section of this chapter is one
such. Another was the attempt to provide a monetary value for the ‘work’ of
the world’s ecosystems and for natural capital. This concluded that an annual
global gross national product (GNP) of 18 trillion (18  1012) US dollars was
far exceeded by a ‘natural’ value of US$ 33 trillion.28 (Although designed to
show how valuable nature is to human societies, the findings were also a chal-
lenge to those minded to convert the one category into the other.)
A socially based grand narrative can be founded on the idea that technol-
ogy is basically determinative: that it drives social change along before it. This
attitude is exemplified by the Indian former Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru
(in office 1947–64), who tried to combine science and technology with the
concept of planned development with a view to achieving a socialist pattern
16 G E H
of society. In 1958 he obtained the Indian Parliament’s acclamation for the
statement that, ‘The key to national prosperity, apart from the spirit of the
people, lies, in the modern age, in the effective combination of three factors:
technology, raw materials and capital, of which the first is perhaps the most
important . . .’ and in which ‘dams and laboratories became temples of
modern India.’29 He would perhaps not have wanted the loss of social control
which comes about from the restructuring inherent in high technology. This
includes the need to facilitate control from a single centre (for example, the
railways, air traffic control), the replacement of religion in the hierarchical
order of authority, the formation of large organisations with their own social
patterns, and the ways in which technologically based organisations tend to
dominate the socio-political influences that are supposed to control them.
Technology, it can be argued,30 creates a new way of building order, almost like
a new form of life, and social choices are introduced only after that fact. The
mechanical clock may have been the key to many social revolutions and cer-
tainly to industrialisation.31 Put more informally, Robert Oppenheimer
(1904–67, the ‘father of the atomic bomb’) is quoted as saying, ‘When you see
something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you only argue
about what to do about it after you have had your technical success.’32
Historically, technological determinism may have been held at bay by partic-
ular sources of authority but, when technology itself is the source of author-
ity, then control is virtually impossible. It is inconceivable to exclude the
natural world from the penumbra of effects.
The connections between the world and ideas about it seem strong: in a
time when the fragmentation of societies and the distancing of individuals
from one another are remarkably obvious, then ‘separate discourses’ seem to
be a set of ideas whose correspondence with the material world is good. Yet
there can be a double counterpoint. If it can be shown that some facets of
human behaviour are transhistorical and transcultural, then there are spatial
and temporal linkages. In these deliberations of the social-natural interac-
tions, there may be two processes which seem to be found across time and
space. The first is that societies may be prone to fragmentation, as when social
classes emerge based on, for example, birth or wealth or on technologies of
separation such as the mobile headset. The second is the opposite: a tendency
to coalescence, as happens, for example, with trade or with access to instant
electronic communication. There are analogous processes in the natural
world: the formation of species in isolated places is a form of fragmentation
just as their colonisation of new environments is a coalescence. Put the human
and the natural together and it seems likely that humans will alter, extinguish
and bring into being both processes. A set of ideas to deal with that situation
is needed: perhaps a case for ‘grand narratives’ can be made which needs to
formulate a framework in which to discuss an ongoing tension between the
two. Discussion at this abstract level carries the danger of forgetting that gov-
ernments very often lag behind social changes acceptable to their people but
 R 17
that corporations and individuals do not always respect the dicta of govern-
ments: both have environmental relevance.

L, , , , 

In the absence of humans, the world had a number of flows and cycles that are
largely local and unconnected with their ‘outside’. A heavy rainstorm will cause
some landslides that eventually contribute silt to a river which then deposits
most of it on its floodplain in the next episode of over-bank flow. But the phe-
nomenon is confined to the one river basin, albeit there may have been many
other such events in other basins. An isolated mountain range may function as
a biotic ‘island’ and some species (endemic species) evolve there which
are unique to that island and cannot disperse across the lowland habitats to
another mountain range. At a rather larger scale, the faunas of the great ocean
basins evolved separately, and only when canals like those at Suez and Panama
have been built has there been diffusion of species into the other ocean basins.
A very few species of higher plants are cosmopolitan in the sense that they are
found on all the continents except Antarctica: the common reed (Phragmites
australis) is one and a plantain (Plantago major) another, with the latter having
been spread by humans because it is a weed of paths and field margins.
There are processes which are worldwide but unconnected. All the major
rivers contribute some silt to the oceans but the majority of it falls to the sea-
floor soon after emergence into the lower-energy environment: the plume
does not necessarily join up with other such effluxions. On land, climatic vari-
ability may cause desertification but in different places at varying times; even
a worldwide climatic change may not be synchronous everywhere. There are,
too, similar species which are confined to one major region and cannot inter-
breed: flightless avian herbivores such as the emu, ostrich and rhea are exam-
ples from, respectively, Australia, Africa and South America. Moving to a
larger scale, the natural world has had worldwide and connected phenomena.
Warming one ocean produces effects in all the others, as is seen in the ENSO
(El Niño-Southern Oscillation) phenomenon; the minerals that escape from
geyser-like vents in the ocean floor will, in solution, find their way to other
oceans.
There are also truly global cycles and flows, where changes have global con-
sequences. The incidence of solar radiation upon the Earth’s atmosphere is a
major example and it is difficult to think of any corner of the planet that did
not change in response to the major cooling of the Pleistocene ice age. Another
great cycle is that of carbon, which is found in liquid, gaseous and solid phases.
It is present in several ‘pools’, such as atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2),
organic compounds in living matter and fossil forms of life such as coal and
oil, and as calcium carbonate (CaCO3) on the ocean floors. The importance
of carbon is immense: it is needed for photosynthesis; it flows between
human-dominated and nature-dominated processes, is at the heart of the
18 G E H
economies of the industrial world, and is implicated in current anxieties such
as global climatic change. Along with water, its flows are pivotal for the way in
which the planet works, and for many of the human activities thereon.33 The
carbon cycle is mirrored by some other elements, such as nitrogen and
sulphur and they all have in common an atmospheric pool which diffuses to
a uniformity of concentration: even if a great deal of them is injected into the
atmosphere by, for example, a volcanic eruption, it soon becomes spread very
widely.34 The impact of a comet or a truly massive volcanic eruption may have
global consequences: the global cooling of about –3 C in  536–45 resulted
from a ‘dry fog’ or dust veil which could have come from either cause.35
The majority of human impacts on nature for many millennia were on land
and in the near-shore area of the seas. Several were worldwide but none prob-
ably truly global (though a case has been made for the atmospheric conse-
quences of gatherer-hunters’ fire) until the effects of steam power began to be
felt in the late eighteenth century.36 Since then, the human mobilisation of
materials has equalled that of the natural world in some instances, and the his-
torical context of the higher concentrations of ‘greenhouse’ gases (especially
carbon dioxide and methane) is well understood. Concentration is indeed a
hallmark of human interactions with environment: at its simplest, a river can
process the sewage output of a couple of pre-industrial farms along its banks,
but a city of 500,000 people (or a few housed piggeries) is a different matter.
Humans have introduced one entire novelty: the formulation of substances
which are unknown in nature. Many chemicals used in industrial processes
are of this type, as are many polymers in everyday use such as PVC and other
plastics. The relevance here is that such compounds are unlikely to have the
kinds of breakdown pathways which ‘natural’ materials have attracted in an
evolutionary time-frame. Most complex molecules eventually form the sub-
strate for weathering, plants, animals, fungi and bacteria that break them into
simpler elements (which we often label ‘rotting’) but chemists have produced
molecules which are very slow indeed to break apart, usually by design so that
they are effective for longer. Poisons of the group that contains DDT are
good examples, for not only does DDT break down very slowly but its suc-
cessor compounds are sometimes more toxic than the DDT itself and have
diffused into most of the world’s ecosystems. The inventiveness of the chem-
ical industry is now continually challenged to produce effective but life-
friendly substances.
Climate is a phenomenon of all spatial scales and an essential element of
environmental history. It is important, however, to avoid crude determinism
in discussions of global climate. Many instances of human disaster seem to
coincide with various phases of the ENSO phenomenon: the two retreats from
Russia (Napoleon in 1812 and Hitler in 1942) coincide with the end of El Niño
phases; but, as one commentator points out, a combination of unexpectedly
poor weather and bad military judgements is probably involved.37 The wide
reach of El Niño and La Niña forces us to consider the ‘big picture’ in all kinds
 R 19
of environmental history as well as the local and the regional.38 The idea of
sudden environmental change, rather than a gradual transition from state A
to state B is at the forefront of current climatic change models, and so histor-
ical examples and their possible causes are being re-evaluated. Apart from the
obvious natural causes, such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic erup-
tions, phenomena like fireballs from extinct comets and oceanic degassing
are getting attention. Earthquakes may disturb ocean-floor sediments that
contain large quantities of hydrogen sulphide and methane which can cause
morbidity and death in living creatures. So, one suggestion is that earthquakes
in China in 1334 resulted in the recording in many places of dead fish, a red
and yellow sky, and a ‘corrupted atmosphere’ which not only sounds like out-
gassing but preceded the outbreak of the Black Death. So the chance event may
have widespread consequences when there is a disease pandemic or when the
crops fail. Most agricultural societies are buffered against a year’s failure and
can adapt to a long-term drift in conditions but a few years’ consecutive dis-
asters are likely to obliterate a way of life.39
The overall impact of human societies on nature has been subject to
attempts at measurement in recent years. Ideas include ‘the ecological foot-
print’ which is a measure of the area of productive land and sea that underlies
the consumption of energy and materials and compares the footprint of
human groups with the renewable capacity, showing that current consump-
tion exceeds the planet’s capacity to sustain such levels. The WWF has pro-
duced a ‘living planet index’ which shows the ‘average change over time in the
state of forest, freshwater, and marine ecosystems; it is basically an attempt
to quantify the extent and severity of biodiversity loss’.40 Time-depth is,
however, restricted to thirty years or so because of the limitations of statisti-
cal data but space can sometimes be substituted for time: the Greater London
area currently has a footprint which is 125 times larger than the actual area
that it occupies. Like many grand narratives, these measurements have grand
conclusions, usually of a pessimistic kind.
Two broad-scale features stand out: the first is that global ubiquity is now
present in a cultural sense, albeit as the result of a long history of convergences.
True, there are islands of resistance to the ‘common culture’ of western capi-
talism but the central elements of the knowledge of it are accessible to almost
everyone, even if they are prevented from being an active participant. The
second is that the world is in a physiological state (in terms of its species mix
and gaseous levels) which has no past analogy: there never was a time when it
was like this.41 Such knowledges have consequences for how we think about
the world as well as, perhaps, act.

A     

Keeping in mind the opportunities and the constraints outlined in this
chapter, we must now address the chronicle of human–nature relations
20 G E H
during the Holocene. The technological span from gatherer-hunters to today’s
electronic world is immense and we shall use energy access as a periodisation.
Each of the next four chapters will start with, and be dominated by, material
relating to the ecology of that phase in its broadest meaning: the basic envir-
onmental relations of the phase, its demographic characteristics and the social
properties which seem most relevant. There will then be an attempt to tease
out any signs of the two long-term interactions of nature and society which
can be realised as fragmentation and coalescence. To end with, the ways in
which that phase can be represented, both by its inhabitants and by us today,
are briefly highlighted before the outcomes of the era are laid out.

N
1. L. Pompa, Vico: a Study of the ‘New Science’, Cambridge University Press, 1975;
I. Berlin, Vico and Herder, London: The Hogarth Press, 1976 and 1992. A thor-
ough examination of realism and idealism in philosophical terms can be found
in F. Mathews ‘The real, the one and the many in ecological thought’, in D. E.
Cooper and J. Palmer (eds) Spirit of the Environment, London and New York:
Routledge, 1998, 86–99.
2. J. B. S. Haldane, Possible Worlds. And Other Essays, London: Chatto & Windus
1927; reprinted as Possible Worlds, New Brunswick, NJ and London: Transaction
Publishers, 2002. Haldane and his colourful wife Helen Spurway were often to be
seen around UCL in my undergraduate days. There is a dissection of the view that
‘nature’ can only be socially constructed in the essays in M. Soulé and G. Lease
(eds) Reinventing Nature? Responses to Modern Deconstruction, Washington DC
and Covelo CA: Island Press, 1995.
3. M. Bookchin, The Philosophy of Social Ecology, Montreal and New York: Black
Rose Books, 1990; J. Gray, Straw Dogs. Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals,
London: Granta Books, 2002.
4. See for instance the attempts at a ‘template’ for knowledge integration present in
B. Newell, C. L. Crumley, N. Hassan, E. F. Lambin, C. Pahl-Wostl, A. Underdal and
R. Wasson, ‘A conceptual template for integrative human-environment research’,
Global Environmental Change Part A, 15, 2005, 299–307.
5. In The Descent of Man, 1871, ch. IV.
6. The notion of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as polar antagonisms is an example of western ten-
dencies to divide everything into opposing twosomes. The idea of ‘man’ and ‘the
animals’ is one example, as are ‘economic’ and ‘uneconomic’ and many other
pairings. The emotional temperature of this dualism is raised when ‘good’ is
opposed to ‘evil’.
7. These include D. Jamieson (ed.) A Companion to Environmental Philosophy,
Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2001; P. Singer (ed.) A Companion to Ethics,
Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 1991, including M. Midgley, ‘The origins of
ethics’, pp. 3–13; M. Midgley, The Ethical Primate. Humans, Freedom and
Morality, London and New York: Routledge, 1994. My own Interpreting Nature.
Cultural Constructions of the Environment, London and New York: Routledge,
1993, ch. 5 has a more extended treatment, though several of the arguments have
moved on by now.
8. The charge of ‘emotion’ is often levelled at anybody arguing for nature at times of
conflicting views. It seems to me that (a) emotion is highly necessary: without it
 R 21
nothing at all gets up any steam; and (b) is the love of making money somehow
not emotional?
9. M. Midgley, Science as Salvation. A Modern Myth and its Meaning, London and
New York: Routledge, 1992. She points out as well that these are all metaphors,
‘but not optional, disposable metaphors’. (p. 10).
10. For the period up to 1975, a good source is C. McEvedy and R. Jones, Atlas of
World Population History, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978; thereafter the
numbers can be obtained from numerous website and commentaries thereon in
those of e.g. United Nations Population Agency, the World Resources Institute
and the World Bank. A standard interpretive history is M. Livi-Bacci, A Concise
History of World Population, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001, 3rd edn (first published in
Italian in 1989).
11. S. Greenhalgh, ‘The social construction of population science: an intellectual, insti-
tutional, and political history of twentieth-century demography’, Comparative
Studies in Society and History 38, 1996, 26–66. (De facto, it deals only with the
United States.)
12. M. Connelly, ‘Population control is history: new perspectives on the international
campaign to limit population growth’, Comparative Studies in Society and History
45, 2003, 122–47.
13. Without doubt the most high-profile combination was the Stanford biologist
P. R. Ehrlich and his book The Population Bomb, New York: Sierra Club/
Ballantine Books, 1968 and many subsequent editions and translations. A dis-
cussion of his work and publications is in I. G. Simmons, ‘Paul Ehrlich 1932– , in
J. Palmer (ed.) Fifty Key Thinkers on the Environment, London and New York:
Routledge, 2001, 252–60. Ehrlich worked in an atmosphere in which the work of
D. B. Luten was influential: it is collected in T. R. Vale, Progress Against Growth,
New York and London: Guilford Press, 1986.
14. Most of the numbers and not a few of the ideas come from the work of V. Smil,
especially his General Energetics. Energy in the Biosphere and Civilization, New York
and Chichester: Wiley Interscience, 1991; Energy in World History, Boulder CO,
1994, and The Earth’s Biosphere. Evolution, Dynamics and Change, Cambridge MA
and London: MIT Press, 2002. His works with a wider scope such as Global
Ecology. Environmental Change and Social Flexibility, London and New York:
Routledge, 1993, are always worth reading. See also J.-C. Debeir, J.-P. Deléage and
D. Hémery, In the Servitude of Power. Energy and Civilization through the Ages,
London and New Jersey: Zed Books, 1991 [first published in French (Paris:
Flammarion) as Servitudes de la Puissance in 1986].
15. These and other data for the period to the 1980s may be found in C. A. S. Hall,
C. J. Cleveland and R. Kaufmann, Energy and Resource Quality. The Ecology of the
Economic Process, New York: Wiley Interscience, 1985.
16. Plotted diagrammatically in my Humanity and Environment. A Cultural Ecology.
Harlow: Longman, 1997, p. 151.
17. J. Goldemberg, Energy, Environment and Development, London; Earthscan, 1996;
P. R. Ehrlich, ‘Energy Use and Biodiversity Loss’, Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society of London B 344, 1994, 99–104.
18. I. Douglas, ‘Sediment transfer and siltation’, in B. L. Turner et al. (eds) The Earth
as Transformed by Human Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990,
215–34. The pioneer work was R. L. Sherlock, Man as a Geological Agent, London:
Witherby, 1922.
19. N. Luhmann op. cit. 1989; of course people talk to plants and animals but we
might doubt whether this is actually communication. There is a good Gary
Larson cartoon which contrasts what ‘master’ says with what Rover hears.
22 G E H
20. There is an excellent review of the scientific approach to environmental
history in J. A. Dearing, R. W. Battarbe, R. Dikau, I. Larocque and F. Oldfield,
‘Human–environment interactions: learning from the past’, Regional
Environmental Change 6, 2006, 1–16.
21. See C. Merchant, ‘Reinventing Eden: Western culture as a recovery narrative’, in
W. Cronon (ed.) Uncommon Ground. Toward Reinventing Nature, New York and
London: W. W. Norton, 1995, 132–59. For her, there seems to be a very close iden-
tification between ‘western’ and ‘North American’ but if we look beyond that
there is a very grand master narrative indeed.
22. Possibly the best book ever from a practising scientist on these topics: P. B.
Medawar, Pluto’s Republic, Oxford University Press, 1982; see also N. Smith,
‘Nature at the millennium. Production and Re-enchantment’, in B. Braun and
N. Castree (eds) Remaking Reality. Nature at the Millennium, London and New
York: Routledge, 1998, 271–85.
23. C. Norris, The Contest of Faculties: Philosophy and Theory after Deconstruction,
London: Methuen, 1985; P. B. Medawar, The Art of the Soluble: Creativity and
Originality in Science, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969. The positive value
of postmodern thinking in environmental matters is explored in P. Quigley,
‘Nature as dangerous space’, in É. Darier (ed.) Discourses of the Environment,
Oxford: Blackwell, 1999, 181–202.
24. T. Eagleton, After Theory, London: Allen Lane, 2003.
25. The literature is enormous but three possible starting places are D. Macaulay (ed.)
Minding Nature. The Philosophers of Ecology, New York and London: Guildford
Press, 1996; V. Pratt (with J. Howarth and E. Brady), Environment and Philosophy,
London and New York: Routledge, 2000; D. Jamieson (ed.) A Companion to
Environmental Philosophy, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. The outstanding history of
environmental ideas before the nineteenth century is still that of C. Glacken,
Traces on the Rhodian Shore. Nature and Culture in Western thought from Ancient
Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1967.
26. Gaia was the goddess of the Earth in Greek mythology. She now has an enormous
literature at all levels of complexity and advocacy. Lovelock has written an auto-
biography, Homage to Gaia, Oxford University Press, 2000. In many ways, the
founding document is his Gaia. A New Look at Life on Earth, Oxford University
Press, 1979, but there is also his The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth,
New York: W. W. Norton, 1988; Gaia: the Practical Science of Planetary Medicine,
London: Gaia Books, 1991, and M. Midgley, Gaia: the Next Big Idea, London:
Demos, 2001. (Most of Lovelock’s own books have later reprints and editions.)
27. Bunyard, P. (ed.) Gaia in Action: Science of the Living Earth, Edinburgh: Floris
Books, 1996; the religious possibilities of Gaia as a metaphor even extend to its
creator, for Lovelock has written ‘For me, Gaia is a religious as well as a scientific
concept, and in both spheres it is manageable . . . God and Gaia, theology and
science, even physics and biology are not separate but a single way of thought.’
28. R. Costanza et al., ‘The value of the world’s ecosystem services and natural
capital’, Nature 387, 1997, 253–60; S. L. Pimm provides a summary and com-
mentary in the same issue, pp. 231–2.
29. Nehru is quoted in S. Visvanathan, ‘A Celebration of Difference: Science and
Democracy in India’, Science 280, no. 5360, 1998, 42–3; online at http://www.
sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/280/5360/42
30. This analysis follows J. Winner, The Whale and the Reactor. A Search for Limits in
an Age of High Technology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
31. M. Kearney, World View, Novato CA: Chandler and Sharp, 1984.
 R 23
32. The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase, Saying and Quotation, Oxford: OUP, 2002, 2nd
edn, p. 451. Oppenheimer made the remark in 1954 during investigations into his
security status.
33. V. Smil, The Earth’s Biosphere, Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press, 2002, ch. 5.
34. Idem, Cycles of Life, Civilization and the Biosphere, New York: W. H. Freeman, 1997.
35. See among many R. B. Stothers and M. R. Rampino, ‘Historic volcanism,
European dry fogs and Greenland acid precipitation, 1500  to  1500’, Science
222, 1983 411–13; M. G. L. Baillie, ‘Dendrochronology raises questions about the
nature of the  536 dust-veil event’, The Holocene 4, 1994, 212–18; E. Rigby,
M. Symonds and D. Ward-Thompson, ‘A comet impact in  536?’, Astronomy
and Geophysics 45, 2004, 1.23–1.26.
36. There is an excellent one-page summary by P. J. Crutzen and E. F. Stoermer, ‘The
“Anthropocene” ’ IGBP Newsletter 41, 2000, 17–18, though there seems no need
to introduce a term like ‘Anthropocene’ to anybody except geologists.
37. C. N. Caviedes, El Niño in History, Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida,
2001. See also M. Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the
Making of the Third World, New York: Verso, 2001; a semi-popular account is B.
Fagan, Floods, Famines and Emperors: El Niño and the Fate of Civilizations, New
York: Basic Books, 1999.
38. M. G. L. Baillie, ‘A view from outside: recognising the big picture’, Quaternary
Proceedings 7, 1999, 625–35.
39. Idem, ‘Putting abrupt environmental change back into human history’, in P. Slack
(ed.) Environments and Historical Change, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999,
46–75; J. D. Post, ‘The impact of climate on political, social, and economic
change: a comment’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 10, 1980, 719–23.
40. N. Chambers, C. Simmons and M. Wackernagel, Sharing Nature’s Interest,
London: Earthscan, 2000; WWF, Living Planet Report 1998, Gland: WWF
International, 1998, p. 2.
41. J. Friedman, ‘General historical and culturally specific properties of global
systems’, Review 15, 1992, 335–72; C. Chase-Dunn, ‘The historical evolution
of world-systems’, Sociological Inquiry 64, 1994, 257–80; C. Chase-Dunn,
S. Manning and T. D. Hall, ‘Rise and fall: East-West synchrony and Indic excep-
tionalism reexamined’, Social Science History 24, 2000, 727–54; H. Haberl,
S. Batterbury and E. Moran, ‘Using and shaping the land: a long-term perspective’,
Land Use Policy 18, 2001, 1–8.
 CHAPTER TWO

The gatherer-hunters and their world

F 2.1 Depiction of an owl in the Hillaire Chamber of La Grotte Chauvet-

Pont-d’Arc.
Photograph supplied by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication, Regional
Direction for Cultural Affairs – Rhône-Alpes, Regional Department of Archaeology.

This an image of an owl from one of the most famous caves in France,
La Grotte Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc in the Ardèche, 45 kilometres from
Montélimar. Chauvet has several very large galleries with more than 300
paintings and engravings of rhinoceroses, felines, bears, owls and mam-
moths dating to between 31,000 and 29,000 years ago, that is, Palaeolithic
in date. This is a finger painting on a scraped wall of an individual of Asio
otus, the long-eared owl (Fr: hibou moyen-duc), with its head at 180
degrees to its body.
Beyond the breathtaking impression of the ‘art’, there are at least two
questions of environmental significance here. The first, as with all such

24
 T -    25
early depictions, is the simple one of ‘what was it for?’ There is no agreed
answer (could there ever be?) but there is one likely certainty: that the
people who fabricated the owl and the other animals had a vivid aware-
ness of the presence and importance of the wild creatures in their lives.
This sounds like a cliché, but contrast it with the likely situation today,
where only a limited range of people could produce the equivalent.
The second question relates to some of the speculative scholarship that
inevitably surrounds such images, as it has at other famous sites in France
and Spain, as well as rock art out in the open in, for example, Africa and
Australia. This is concerned with the possibility of control: is the making
of images one way of trying to exert influence over animals which might
be food resources or potential enemies? Is the production of an image one
of the stages (here, quite a long way off) towards domestication? Perhaps
the inclusion of an owl argues against instrumental interpretations.
The environmental and cultural associations of owls are well known.
In forager cultures, such as the Kwakiutl and Tlingit of the Pacific north-
west of North America, the owl is a harbinger of danger and death, as in
many later agricultural societies, with some remnants to the present day.
The notion of the owl as a repository of wisdom derives mostly from
Classical representations of the one-eyed goddess Athene (bringer of
wisdom) who carried an owl on her blind-side shoulder, and it reported
the state of people’s souls as well as the weather. Owls thus showed that
piercing the darkness was a transferable skill.
A guide to the cave (which is not open to the public) is at http://www.
culture.gouv.fr/culture/arcnat/chauvet/en/index.html

‘J    ’

John Donne’s poems contain some environmental surprises, and his ‘joint
tenants of the world’ were the sun, and man, who outlived the stag, raven and
long-lived tree and so ‘there is not now that mankind, which was then’. So
might we conceive of cultural traditions which were entirely dependent on
recently fixed solar energy in the form of plant and animal tissues, though our
understanding of forensic archaeology leads us to think of such people as
having rather short lives compared with most species of tree, though of the
same order of magnitude as deer and raven.1
Beyond the life-span of the individual, the antiquity of human existence is
constantly being revised as more archaeological evidence is found and as the
techniques for determining age and genetics improve. As more and more
bones yield measurable DNA, for example, a lineage becomes clearer, though
not always one which accords with the archaeometric data. So the Pleistocene
speciation of the genus Homo and its immediate precursors is not agreed
upon, and any statement in print is hostage to the fortunes of bone-hunters
and laboratory finances. A majority view, perhaps, is that Africa was the
26 G E H
region of the evolution of H. sapiens by about 300,000 years ago (300 ky) and
that the species spread from that continent. By the time of the Last Glacial
Maximum (LGM) at about 22,000 to 20,000 years ago (in round figures
20,000 years before the present), H. sapiens has become the only member of
its genus: H. erectus in the Far East and H. neanderthalensis in Europe became
extinct, the one at about 90 ky and the latter at about 30 ky. The LGM may
have been something of a population bottleneck for Homo but was followed
by a major population expansion after about 16,000 years ago.

T    -

Until the early Holocene all humans practised the gatherer-hunter way of life
so that, if our evolution as a genus was perhaps a million years ago, then over
90 per cent of our evolutionary history has been as gatherer-hunters. A species
which was 100 per cent food collecting as it emerged from the Pleistocene,
however, was quite quickly converted to agriculture so that by  1500, this
life-way was restricted to uncultivable areas of the cool temperate, the Arctic
and sub-arctic zones, and to areas not yet deemed agricultural, such as
Australia and Argentina. In our own day the proportion of people with even
a dominance of hunting and gathering in their culture is less than 0.001 per
cent. In today’s terminology, it has not been ‘sustainable’ though for reasons
that may be more cultural than environmental.2

Evolution and dispersal

The complexities of the study of human evolution are marginal to most of this
book. What is germane is that humans survived the unfavourable conditions
of the various glacial maxima of the Pleistocene and, indeed, used the periods
of low sea-level to colonise new lands, Tasmania included. The southern
margin of an ice sheet filling the North Atlantic basin may even have allowed
European peoples to work along it (in about 20–16.5 ky) to North America,
much as the Innuit hunt the margins of the Arctic ice for seals and fish.3
Certainly, the southern margins of the great Eurasian ice sheets were inhabited
during the LGM by H. sapiens groups. Remains from 15 ky have been excavated
at Mezhirich and Pushkari in Ukraine where the tundra provided enough plant
and animal material for support as a seasonal occupation and the hunters may
have been specialised in killing mammoths: up to 650 mammoth bones formed
the skeleton of each ‘house’.4 Later in the Pleistocene, as the ice sheets waned,
the mammoth was a favoured item of prey in tundra and open-steppe envir-
onments in Eurasia and in North America, to the extent that humans are often
said to have been implicated in its extinction.5
The retreat of the massive ice sheets of the Pleistocene provided a sequence
of new habitats that could be colonised by foraging groups of humans as well
as by the wild fauna and flora. For none of them was it a stable world: ice-
retreat is not necessarily orderly and cumulative, sea and lake levels were in
 T -    27
flux, and faunal migration patterns were adjusting to new routes. It seems as
if human migration from East Asia via the land bridge to Alaska, possibly
during 25–14 ky, was periodically held up by the opening and closing of an
ice-free corridor south-south-east from the upper Yukon river to the meeting
of Alberta and Montana.6 Other migrations brought people to Australia by
boat certainly by 32 ky, though possibly by 60 ky. The climatic changes right
at the end of the Pleistocene included a very dry period in the western United
States area at 11,000  (before the present) which may have been implicated
in the loss of mammal fauna described below.7 Such was the success of human
migrations that most land surfaces of the Earth not covered in year-round ice
by the 10,000  mark were subject to the presence of Homo sapiens, though
often this was seasonally transient in any one place. This was a world in tran-
sition: almost every feature of an ecosystem was changing, including many
areas of low latitudes far from the reach of the Pleistocene ice. Humans failed
to navigate to the remoter parts of the South Atlantic and to much of Polynesia
(including New Zealand/Aotearoa) in this terminal Pleistocene–early
Holocene phase of being outward-bound, for the oceans were the great barrier
to movement. Nevertheless, from the margins of the shrinking Arctic ice to
the interior of tropical forests, there were human societies, many of whom
successfully adapted to rapid changes in climate and sea-level.8
This worldwide dispersal has meant that not all the people who have
recently been identified as gatherer-hunters have had the same kind of history.
There are groups whose whole existence has been a lineal descent from
‘ancient’ hunters of the early Holocene, but there are also people who have
lived in various degrees of contact with non-hunting societies, and those who
have been themselves herders or farmers in the past. Inevitably this led to
different relations with the natural world. Most studies have concentrated
upon the ‘ancient-lineage’ hunters who, in spite of their diversity of environ-
ments, seem to have certain cultural features in common. Their world view,
for example, emphasises that, although resources may be owned, the land is
held as common property. Nature is animated and mystical; the land is giving
and sharing (compare with the modern concept of ‘wilderness’) and, indeed,
there was a very early time when nature and humans were not separated but
out of which matrix the various distinctions have crystallised. Yet this origi-
nal time may persist into the present: in Australia the aboriginal song lines
saturate the land with significance.

The energy relationships of gatherer-hunters

A term often used of this phase of human culture is ‘foragers’, which reason-
ably describes people who ‘collect’ food from the wild rather than produce it
from domesticated species. A basic lineament of foraging is that people move
to where the resources are found and thus the environment in all its manifes-
tations is crucial in their lives. Such movements are made easier if there are few
material possessions to be transported and if only one baby has to be carried.
28 G E H
All movement is an energy cost, however, unless food is encountered en route.
This points up the core of gatherer-hunters’ existence (as, indeed, at root our
own) which is to maintain enough energy intake to survive and to reproduce.
Most able people in the group, therefore, will contribute to energy gathering:
the women, especially, often provide the essential ground-bass of calories in
the form of plant materials, while men supply the improvised melody of
animal meat and fat. The latter becomes more important towards the polar
regions where cold seasons necessitate higher calorie intake, a need best satis-
fied by the provision of animal fat. There are social contexts: young men may
hunt large animals to demonstrate their potential as fathers though, in more
general terms, material possession routes to prosperity are disdained. The
whole group may have reciprocality with other groups as insurance against
famine or water shortage and the internal degree of sharing is likely to be high.
Some groups move often so that resources garnered are consumed immedi-
ately; others move less (a few not at all) and rely more on storage of food which
is especially important in environments with a seasonal shortage.
The spectrum of energy costs is wide though not especially complicated.
The energy looked for is mostly ‘this year’s’ solar energy in chemical form
(seeds, nuts, fruit, animal tissue), though some previous years’ capture such
as older animals and the roots of perennial plants will also be sought out. So
finding the food source is a first cost, as is subduing it if need be. Recent
experience and stored knowledge are vital here and are an instance of a cul-
tural filter where a taboo can be introduced. The gathering of plant foods is
likely to give a net energy return of ten to twenty times at the camp gateway
but will be quite trustworthy. In spite of its higher energy content, the figure
for animals is about the same because reliability is lower, a daily success rate
of 10 to 30 per cent being normal.9 Coastal groups with access to whales as
well as fish may net (though not literally) a surplus of 2,000 times. Transport
costs are low because most foraging takes place within 5 kilometres of camp,
and people may come to the food. The energy costs of processing and
preparing food are not usually that high because either the materials are
eaten quite quickly or are subjected to a preservation method not involving
much human effort, such as sun-drying, smoking or burial. But some yams
contain alkaloids which have to be leached out and so washing, slicing and
boiling are essential. Provided populations are low, so that resources are not
over-used, there can be an energy surplus that leaves time for dancing, gam-
bling and sleep. Some energy surpluses go into periods of rapid population
growth though these seem often to have been checked by disease outbreaks.
This situation for early Holocene groups is clearly the outcome of many
millennia of cultural learning. Each band and tribe had its own stock of
knowledge about how to survive though, in the rapidly changing environ-
ments of the early Holocene, the authority of traditional wisdom must have
often been severely tested. The people of this era also built upon phases of cul-
tural evolution when there were bursts of innovation that added to their
 T -    29
repertoire of foraging skills. The Upper Palaeolithic (45–10 ky) seems to have
been the period of invention of specialised stone tools, slings, the bow and
arrow, harpoons, fish gorges, snares and pitfall traps, bone tools, and perhaps
the boat. This ‘explosion’ of ability can be summarised in the statistic that
the earliest stone tool-makers produced about 50 centimetres of cutting edge
from 2 kilograms of raw material whereas, at 25 ky, some 350 centimetres
could be made from the same amount of stone. Somewhere in this sequence,
or soon afterwards, the blowpipe and the ability to add poisons to darts and
arrows were appended.10 Inhabiting hostile areas like Siberia and crossing
short stretches of sea were now possible.
Between 12 and 10 ky comes another significant symbol of human–
environment relations: the domestication of the dog (Canis familiaris). Many
changes in animal habits and plant reproduction must have accompanied all
human settlements, but here we have the example of deliberate manipulation
of the genetics of a wild genus (in this case from the wolf family) to isolate
genetically a species and its varieties.11 In this case the object of attention was
obedient to human command, lived off reject food, could seek out and chase
other animals, was better at smell, might provide warmth at night, keep the
children amused and, if need be, go on to the spit. Early examples of domes-
tic dog come from a variety of places as far apart as northern England, Arctic
Siberia and North America, suggesting that the same process occurred inde-
pendently in widely separated cultures, and not that there was one instance
whose example diffused via any medium of travel or trade. In contrast, DNA
evidence has raised the prospect of a single origin of domestic breeds in East
Asia at about 15 ky.12

‘The first great force employed by man’

This was the title of the discussion of fire by the anthropologist Omer Stewart
in the seminal volume Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth in 1956.13
Much more is now known about fire in gatherer-hunters’ times, and it has all
confirmed and amplified the central importance of fire in that type of culture
and, indeed, in subsequent economies as well.
Fire has a natural ecology. It occurs at the margins of volcanoes but the most
widespread source is lightning fire. Lightning strikes which hit a suitable source
of fuel may cause conflagrations to take hold and spread: tundra, grasslands,
shrublands, all kinds of forest and even seasonally parched wetlands will burn.
The spectacular fires of tree crowns in a gusty wind are complemented by a
slow underground smouldering in peatlands. Plants and animals can become
adapted to repeated patterns of fire (the fire regime). For animals, the adapta-
tion is partly that of run or fly away unless they are predators: birds especially
have a feast. In the case of plants, evolution has resulted in species with
very thick barks, with fat leaves that protect reproductive organs, with seeds
that do not germinate unless fired, or with cones that open only if subjected
to a very high temperature: the pyrophytes. There are post-fire opportunists
30 G E H
that can spread from abundant seed or fire-proof rhizomes into bare areas:
bracken fern (Pteridium aquilinum) is one example, as is the aptly named fire-
weed, or rosebay willowherb, (Chamerion angustifolium). Plants that survive a
fire may benefit from the reduced competition and also from the mineralisa-
tion of organic material: leaves of shrubs may have 300 to 700 per cent more
protein than in the pre-burn state. Such nutritive levels, along with salts
in the ash, attract many grazing and browsing animals, together with their
predators.
Into this extra-human pattern is woven the millennia of human control of
fire, from perhaps 800 ky onwards.14 Our genus learned to preserve and trans-
port fire, and to create it. It was probably first used at the hearth for light,
warmth, cooking and to frighten away predators and, as such, doubtless was
instrumental in forming social behaviour. Its possession was essential for
moving out of the tropics, making possible the occupation of periglacial
environments such as those of the Late Pleistocene mammoth-hunters. Even
more important is the ability to use fire as a tool at landscape scale. This may
be a short-term management device as when a fire produces fleeing and con-
fused animals at its margins and in the aftermath a series of baked lizard dishes
from underground ‘ovens’. Animals may be driven towards hunters’ spears or
arrows, over cliffs or up narrow ravines, where the kill rate is much improved,
even if rather indiscriminate. Fire is also useful for discouraging insects and
for decontaminating a settlement area of, for example, fleas. In a longer-term
perspective, regular fires can produce a landscape attractive to game animals,
with perhaps high forest supplemented by zones of shrubs where the browse
is at the right height for, for example, deer species, and also patches of salty
ash are available. Edible pyrophytes are also encouraged. If we imagine such
processes being co-evolutionary with the speciation of hominins in Africa,
then ecological suites of humans–fire–plants–animals can readily be desig-
nated. This is a result of (a) one special property of fire: that it creates its own
fuel supply as it progresses, by heating up otherwise non-flammable materi-
als, and (b) one general property of resource exploitation: that once a regime
is established then going back to an earlier stage often constitutes exceptional
behaviour. Given the first quality, it is less surprising that most of the world’s
vegetation types can be set alight at one season or another. Given the second,
some human groups came to depend upon fire, so knowledge about its
management had to be preserved in the culture.15 The role of fire goes even
further. A regularly fired landscape acquires cultural significance because it is
first of all claimed for a human group by being burned over: this is an act
of possession-taking in the same way as later people might erect fencing.
Spatially isolated fires might also mark out territorial bounds: we hunt here.
Not surprisingly the landscape becomes symbolically valuable and the locus
of myths, possibly dealing with the origins of the group or even of humankind
itself. The potency of the material force is then interwoven with the authority
of human custom.16
 T -    31
Even in wet areas, examples of the importance of human-produced fire can
be seen. In the later Mesolithic cultures of upland Britain, 8500–5500 , evi-
dence for forest recession is quite plentiful: the pollen of forest trees is partially
replaced by species of the open ground; there are many deposits with charcoal
in them, and woodland is overtaken by bog vegetation. The upper edge of the
woodland was the main scene of disturbance. Such an ecotone is, of course,
always the most susceptible to climatic change, but this zone is also prone to
the kinds of disturbance in which fire is implicated. The clearest indications
of the processes at work come from central Pennine sites.17 At 6000 , a
pollen-influx diagram for Robinson’s Moss near Manchester proposes that the
upper level of the ‘lowland forest’ was at 425 metres above sea-level and that
of the ‘upland forest’ at 460 metres. This date, however, coincides with a
second temporary retraction of the limit of the upland forest which is associ-
ated with evidence of fire. This is seen by Tallis and Switsur18 as just one of a
series of fires in which burning: ‘probably prevented the upward spread of the
component tree taxa . . . right from the time when upward forest expansion
was just commencing in the early Flandrian’. [ early Holocene]
The principal woody species at the tree-line at 6000  was probably hazel
(Corylus avellana). Despite the fires, the tree-line moved up slowly between
6800  and 5500 , which probably signifies a continuing response to cli-
matic change. Given that exposure, rock type and slope are all additional vari-
ables, it is to be expected that the impacts of burning at the upper edge of
woodland are highly variable from place to place. Between 8000 and 6000 
on Dartmoor, hazel is dominant in the woodland community but its values
appear to have been negatively influenced by fire after 7500 .19
In many investigations, estimates of areas involved in disturbance rely
simply upon the degree to which certain pollen frequencies alter. The out-
standing example of a more reliable data-set comes from Waun-Fignen-Felen
on the Black Mountain of South Wales, where analysis of multiple profiles
within a small basin has allowed the construction of a series of diagrams
reconstructing the vegetation at 8000, 7500, 6500, 5700, 4700 and 3700 .
The actual edges of the vegetation mosaic are not mapped but, at 8000  for
example, the mixed woodland shows a burned-over opening which abuts a
small shallow lake of about 200 by 200 metres in size which contains an ‘early
mesolithic’ flint-knapping site. This site forms a nucleus for the spread of
blanket bog to the north-west but, on other sides, continues to be set in mixed
woodland until 4700  when mixed woodland appears to form islands in a
sea of blanket bog (the lake being now covered with acid peats), a reverse of
the position at 6500 . Fire is also implicated in the basal layers of the blanket
peat and played a role in its inception.
This growth of blanket peat took place in the presence of humans. If incep-
tion happened shortly after a major climatic shift to wetter conditions, such
as is postulated for the British Isles around 7500–7000 , then the role of cli-
matic factors must be suspected, as permissive if not necessarily decisive.20
32 G E H
The accumulation of water is enhanced in woodlands by the removal (by any
means) of trees. Deciduous trees act (a) as a shelter layer, intercepting precip-
itation and re-evaporating it from the canopy and trunk, and (b) as water
pumps, removing water from the soils via their root systems and transpiration
mechanisms. Experiments have shown that run-off increases by as much as 40
per cent after clear felling of deciduous forest. The pathways to peat accumu-
lation are to some extent more complicated than allowed in this brief descrip-
tion but prior to them all is the removal of woodland and/or the presence of
fire leading to waterlogging. Once that process has started, then the sequence
of biochemical mechanisms will usually lead to peat formation.
The possibility of reversal is shown when wood layers are found in peat
stratigraphy. These indicate that the peat was thin enough and dry enough to
permit recolonisation by trees: birch (Betula spp.) and pine (Pinus sylvestris)
are common species, for example, at Lady Clough Moor in the south
Pennines, while birch is at Bonfield Gill Head on the North York Moors.
Generally, recolonisation by trees coincides with lower levels of charcoal in the
peat, suggesting that fewer fires as well as (or even rather than) any climatic
shifts were a factor in their re-growth. To the populations of the later
Mesolithic, though, heather moors accumulating more humus and becoming
seasonally waterlogged (with underlying soils undergoing gleying [formation
of sticky clays]) and invaded by wet-tolerant sedges and Sphagnum must have
been a familiar part of their environment. There were also cotton-sedge mires
which were wet year-round, Sphagnum bogs, open hazel and birch scrub with
a variety of wet-tolerant ground flora species and a high proportion of dead
trees, as well as wet mires in water-collecting sites, Fire was a factor in a wet
climate and damp places. It may as well have been important in drier places
because its use in the management of oaks (Quercus spp.) for acorns is a dis-
tinct possibility.21
If upland England and Wales seem an unlikely places for fire manage-
ment by gatherer-hunters, Australia seems less so. In 1664, Abel Tasman
sailed along the west coast and reported fire and smoke everywhere; one late-
nineteenth-century European traveller was so struck by the amount of abo-
riginal burning that he wondered if the people ‘. . . lived on fire instead of
water’.22 The use of fire management of landscapes by a small population on
a wide scale, with high frequency and with considerable effects on vegetation,
is probably the world’s most obviously fire-created landscape, though with
savanna Africa a close second. (Europeans saw it as ‘devastated’ in Australia,
less so in Africa.) Not only was it a particular human-managed ecology but an
economy in the sense that rights of usage flowed from its deployment, and
emotional ties to the land resulted.
The European incursion into Australia went into a landscape shaped by
millennia of fire-use. Since 40 ky at least, humans have ranked with climate
as the arbiters of change in the ecology of much of Australia. Reports from
early visitors suggest that the firestick was an important accompaniment of
 T -    33
travel by aborigines, and that routes across country might be marked by
burned swaths. One investigation reported some 5,000 separate bush fires per
year in an area of 30 square kilometres. Some areas were not burned so as to
maintain a mosaic of vegetation patches, but a great number of plants became
more accessible and better yielding to the gatherer economy. Examples include
bracken fern (for its rhizome), wild tomatoes, wild banana, wild millet, and
especially the cycads of the genera Cycas and Macrozamia where fire aided all
stages of their growth and seed production. Fire cleared away the competing
plants, raised the output by about eight times and encouraged the seeds to
ripen simultaneously. Yet yam patches were kept free from burning. Firing
also aided hunting, for thickets of spinifex could be set alight to flush out
lizards, bandicoots and kangaroos; and the fire torch made night fishing pos-
sible. On the continental scale, burning has probably enabled the eucalypts to
spread into areas climatically suitable for rain forest. In today’s evaluations,
fire is a maintainer of biodiversity.
The cultural relations of fire are well documented for Australia. For the abo-
rigines, land with vegetation ‘litter’ on it was dirty – even disgraceful – and
needed to be cleared up. Fire made the world habitable because it was the
subject of predictive knowledge but it also rendered it understandable via a
corpus of legends and myths, including those of the foundational Dreamtime.
The spiritual world of the aborigine would collapse without it.
The absence of fire in post-European Australia has created problems, espe-
cially in fuel accumulations in the peri-urban bush, and burning has new
friends in the conservation movement who see it as the perpetuator of biodi-
versity because a mosaic of habitats supports a variety of specials, especially
mammals, and at least one species of tree (Callitris intratropica) is dependent
on it in the monsoon areas.23 So here is an example of the inseparable inter-
linkages between culture and environment: without both, there is a large
degree of dislocation of both spheres.
A third and final example is found in the moist evergreen forests of tropi-
cal Latin America, including Amazonia. The conventional scientific view of
such forests has been that that they were not flammable, provided they were
intact. Yet more recent research involving archaeological excavations, pollen
and phytolith analysis, and flood plain stratigraphy, as well as off-shore
coring, has revealed a picture of Late Pleistocene and Holocene vegetation
change which involves fire.24 The palaeoecological evidence allows the infer-
ence that not all the fires were ‘natural’ fires resulting from lightning, and that
human occupance of the forest zone preceded the development of agriculture.
Clearly, there were climatically drier periods when the frequent lightning
strikes would have been a major cause of fire in forests with a susceptible fuel
load.25 In lowland Panama, for example, there was a dry period with a cooling
of 5 °C in 16,000–11,000 . There is then evidence of human activity at
11,050  with charcoal and the pollen of sedges and Helicona species which
are plants of forest openings and edges. By 8600 , the human modification
34 G E H
of the forest was apparently systematic, with agriculture entering the region
(in the form of maize) at 7000 . The alteration of the forest was charac-
terised by repeated burning and the formation of small openings. In the
Manaus region of the lowland Amazon basin of Brazil, foraging societies who
used caves (such as Pedra Pintada) have left evidence of paintings, pigments,
carbonised fruits and wood in those sites, dating from 11,000–8000 .26 The
mode of utilisation of lowland tropical forests seems to have centred upon the
small clearing in which there was a form of horticulture even before the plant-
ing of full domesticates such as maize. This opening also acted as a magnet for
mammals such as white-tailed deer, peccary and agouti, so that the term
‘garden hunting’ is sometimes used. The importance of the garden led some
interpreters to suggest that hunting and gathering were never possible unless
there was access to cultivation as well, though the very early finds of human
presence rather suggest the opposite.27
There is no doubt that natural factors such as climatic drying and hurri-
canes can add to the fuel potential of lowland forests, and some tree species
have fire adaptations so, at some time in the past, fires have been a component
of the ecology of near-natural forests: in the terra firme of Brazil the return
period was 390 to 1,540 years under those conditions. That humans increased
the fire frequency in the millennia before agriculture now seems certain and
there must have been concomitant effects upon the fauna. Anthropological
studies in the 1980s have shown, for instance, that in Ecuador 230 inhabitants
of three villages killed 3,165 birds, mammals and reptiles in less than one year;
in Brazil, 8,850 kilograms of mammals were killed by one community in four
months of 1978, of which 70 per cent by weight was one species of peccary
(Tayassu pecari). Estimates suggest that, when hunting was done with spear
and blowpipe, the off-take of animals would have been sustainable. Changing
to the shotgun made the kill much more effective, with a yield of 1.6 kilograms
per hour of meat as against 0.53 kilograms an hour by the older ways. So, while
industrial-era technology has revolutionised hunting (and fishing, too, with
headlamps as a nocturnal aid), the foraging period had an impact upon both
landscape and fauna though, of course, nothing like the impact of European
colonisation and then later national programmes of forest utilisation and con-
version.25 But, given many centuries of occupation by gatherer-hunters
followed by horticulture and farming, the possibility exists that the Amazon
of today’s environmental concern is mostly a product of 300 years of depop-
ulation since European incursions for, by 1650, the population had been
reduced by 90 per cent and not many Europeans had penetrated by 1750. In
essence, the Amazonia presented to early science was an early succession
type of secondary woodland. Alexander von Humboldt’s early nineteenth-
century warning that not every tropical forest was primeval forest has been
borne out.29
The close relationships of fire, culture and economy in all these examples
allow us to think that the use of fire is as much a mental process as a technical
 T -    35
one. It is uniquely human and universally human: at once it widens the gap
between humans and other animal species but also links all humans in pro-
viding an element of control. Though it is often largely considered in the
context of pre-industrial economies, it is not absent now because controlled
combustion of fossil fuels is at the heart of today’s world even in more remote
zones. Further, there seems to be a linkage with climate still in the sense that
major forest-fire outbreaks still happen regionally in dry years, which them-
selves seem to be products of ENSO cycles, with worldwide fires in 1982–83
and 1997–98. Into post-industrial times, the imaginatively named ‘firewall’
has become a major feature of the electronic age.

Management and impact

Gatherer-hunter populations were clearly involved with the manipulation of
their environments. There seems to have been a scale of effects from a very
transient presence (as with the tundra dwellers of the ice margins in the
Palaeolithic) to an enduring source of makeover, as in Australia. This apparent
spectrum needs further examination, not least because gatherer-hunters have
been proposed as exterminators of genera of mammals as well as being
thought to have been conservationists with a special closeness to the natural
world. More detail must also acknowledge that they almost all lived on the
land surface but often near lakes, rivers and the sea.30 Thus, the focus on
gatherer-hunters as humanisers of environments is on their capacity to alter
the ecology of a region in a quasi-permanent fashion. A general framework
for the different types of change imposed by human groups might include
direct changes in animal and plant populations due to gathering or hunting.
The effects were very variable in time and space but might result in the extir-
pation of a whole species at local, regional, continental or even global scales,
depending on the abundance and distribution of that species. The use of fire
pushed alterations in the direction of permanence because human groups
came to rely on the spectrum of subsistence opportunities thus offered.
The most-discussed examples of extirpation come from North America
and Australia, since Eurasia and Africa seem to have lost fewer genera and
species in the wave of Late Pleistocene and early Holocene extinctions that
have been documented. In North America soon after 11,000  two-thirds
of the large (adult weight over 50 kilograms) mammal fauna disappeared: it
included three genera of elephants, six genera of armadillos, ant-eaters and
sloths, fifteen genera of ungulates, and many carnivores dependent upon
those groups. This mass extinction more or less coincides with one accepted
set of dates for human colonisation of what is now Canada and the United
States via the Bering Strait land bridge and an ice-free corridor just east of
the Cordillera. On the other hand, the rapid fluctuations in climate of the
terminal Pleistocene provide a possible explanation. Yet earlier swings of a
higher amplitude produced no such dramas of ‘overkill’. But were there
enough people to kill off all those animals? Both views have been extensively
36 G E H
canvassed, with the anthropogenic camp bringing in as validation the
extinction of the moa bird in New Zealand/Aotearoa, the megafauna of
Madagascar and dwarf elephants in Java and Sulawesi because they all
occurred soon after initial human colonisation of those islands. For the
Americas the unresolved arguments can be reconciled with the idea that the
climatic changes introduced considerable tension in the animal populations,
which were then more easily wiped out by a new and socially adept preda-
tor. On the other hand, the dominant Clovis culture seems to have been one
of generalised foragers and certainly not the first humans into the relevant
places. Because the controversy is between American scholars, however,
there has to be a loser.31 A version of the same debate has been conducted in
Australia where, in general, the climatic determinism hypothesis is strongest,
though one review of the data from all continents confirms that the advent
of humans in the Late Pleistocene brought about some rapid extinctions and
that the surviving fauna was suppressed to densities below those of pre-
colonisation times.32
Different technologies might lead to divergent ecologies. The adoption of
trapping technologies, as distinct from trying to shoot them with arrows or
darts, has a distinct impact on many mammal populations. Skilled trapping
reduces the energy expenditure of the families involved, compared with a hunt
that might involve (especially before the adoption of firearms) chasing
wounded beasts. The boreal forest Athapaskans (much studied in recent
times) rely very heavily upon trapping: it is not only an efficient way of
procuring many game species but has now become so tightly woven into their
culture that men will do it even when there is no real need. In the tropical
forests of Zaire, the Mbuti used nets to cull antelopes, with enough success
eventually to lower the kill rate substantially. An indirect effect would result
from any better technology which allowed greater success in animal hunting
that then led to a higher fat intake and thence to lower the age of menarche
and allow increased rates of human population growth, a process inferred for
the eastern Canadian arctic in the Holocene and the European Middle–Upper
Palaeolithic transition.33 A similar impact type might produce a different
ecology if the target populations had different behaviours. If all the pregnant
females gather together and that band is then killed in its entirety for more
than a few years in succession, then a decline in its abundance is probable
unless there is colonisation from adjoining populations. By contrast, if adult
males are the target for hunters who kill for status rather than for food, then,
in many mammal species, the males on the margins of sexual success may
move in and replace those taken out. Communal hunts seem to result in
higher kill rates which may also have its resonances today. Such apparently
profligate hunting has been documented unambiguously for the Great
Plains of the United States. Many excavations of buffalo kills reveal that herds
were stampeded (often with fire as an aid) into narrow canyons with a hide-
walled pound at the end, or into mires within sand-dune complexes, or simply
 T -    37
driven over cliffs. In one arroyo about 190 animals were killed in late June,
c. 8200 , from a herd of about 200 to 300 beasts, of which 37 per cent were
immature and 6 per cent juvenile. There were no foetuses, which allows the
inference (a) that gravid females were spared the drive or (b) that the embryos
were taken away to eat as a delicacy.34
There must be space, too, for different cultural attitudes. Clearly, the most
important of these is the presence or absence of a ‘conservationist’ approach
to animal numbers in which there is a voluntary restriction on off-take,
whereas other groups regarded high levels of killing as essential to ensure the
perpetuation of the target species: the more deaths, the more animal souls
to be reincarnated. Pressure upon resources (in which rising population
numbers might be implicated), however, is the most likely explanation for the
instances of excavated human skeletons with signs of violent injuries and
deaths. Examples have been found in Egypt (14,000–12,000 ) and Sweden
(7500 ); rock paintings in Australia from the mid-Holocene have been
interpreted to signify increasing levels of inter-group conflict.35
One outstanding example of the integration of a world of empirical knowl-
edge and of spiritual guardianship is the Koyukon village in the boreal forest
of Alaska studied by Richard Nelson. Human behaviour towards natural enti-
ties is based on spiritually based rules (including the treatment of usable and
unusable parts and the avoidance of waste) even when the white man’s tech-
nology is adopted. The result seems to be a model of what an ecologist would
call sustained-yield practices.36 By contrast, many other cultures were able to
exterminate animals on a large scale and that, sometimes after contact with
external traders, they did so, with the classic example being the penetration
of the Hudson’s Bay Company into what is now Canada. They traded in the
valuable beaver pelts and contributed to a condition in which the beaver
harvest in North America in the late nineteenth century was only about
10 per cent of its level a hundred years earlier because the animal itself had
become scarce or locally extinct. One interesting question is the level of its
population in, say,  1700, when it was abundant in the interior of the con-
tinent but less so in, for example, New England. Was this mostly due to con-
scious ‘conservation’ of beavers by the inland native people, using a variety of
cultural mechanisms such as rotational trapping and moiety totemism, or
was it rather a lesser ecological impact from a low population density, an
inefficient extraction technology, and the lack of external trade contacts that
would have provided a market for pelts?37 In general, wetlands are manipu-
lated less than dry ground, for obvious reasons. But if they dry out season-
ally, they can be burned: early Mesolithic (c.9000 ) people did so to
lake-edge reed fringes in northern England, just as Indians behaved in prairie
Canada within historic times. In central Australia, channels were dug in
swamps to encourage the expansion of eel populations. In Lapland, the Saami
(who were hunters of reindeer until they took up herding in the nineteenth
century) avoided the extensive use of fire in case it consumed the precious
38 G E H
pine woodlands. In some cultures, the great range of species available pro-
vided a steady flow of food without over-using any one species.38 In all, we
may suspect that low population densities made it much easier to live by
foraging, and that only in specific circumstances were populations of animals
and plants made regionally extinct.
One impression from many studies is that gatherer-hunters maintained a
closely woven set of relations with the non-human world and that this was
often, but not always, manifested as a form of respect. The foundation seems
to be a metaphor based on kin relations in which unconditional giving is
central, and often the environment is seen as a parent who never withholds.
The relationship seems to have been fragile, however, so that the intrusion of
agricultural economies, whether as, for example, farmers or as purchasers of
furs, tore its fabric easily.39 We are unlikely now ever to get enough data to
understand why this was so, even if, indeed, there was one all-encompassing
reason for it.

The diminution of foraging societies

There have been two major phases in which gatherer-hunters have disap-
peared. The first is quite obvious: the introduction of agriculture into Africa
and Eurasia in the early and mid-Holocene took over many such economies.
Many foragers became agriculturalists in the great millennia of agricultural
expansion from core regions.40 Near-recent evidence suggests that trading
goods often precedes invasion, so that the new economy may have conquered
by economic rather than military means. In some instances there will have
been a fertile seedbed (as it were) because not all gatherer-hunters had a con-
tinuous history of foraging: many moved into and out of herding and
farming.41 Some African hunters, for example, were once herders who had lost
their cattle, and the apparent loss in Newfoundland of the Beothuk Indians
and their ancestral groups may owe much to their adaptation to other ways of
life rather than to extinction.42
The second phase is the colonial era from about 1800 to 1945 when the
spread of industrial economies was accompanied by genocide together with
the loss of territory and autonomy. Perhaps 50 million tribal people were killed
by colonial settlers and capitalists, and many of them were gatherer-hunters.
They were also subject to introduced diseases, such as those that took off 75 per
cent of the Yokut and Wintun people of California in 1830–33 or that con-
tributed to the reduction in native Tasmanians from 5,000 to 111 in thirty
years, with final extinction in 1876.43 In an opposite case, the control of malaria
after 1947 in Boksu and Tharu at the foot of the Indian Himalayas meant that
agriculturalists from the Punjab could colonise the region.44 Even when the
European attitudes to hunting and gathering peoples (often lumped together
with other tribal groups as ‘savages’) had become more protective, that way of
life still diminished, not least because the thought-patterns of the nation-state
demanded assimilation, via school and mission.45 So what was once the only
 T -    39
way of life for humans is now confined to a few enclaves in remote and mar-
ginal environments or is a barely recognisable form of it. Nevertheless, such
peoples are still contributors to the making of environmental histories: the San
bushmen of Botswana have been in conflict with the national government
which wants them to move into new settlements and leave a Kalahari game
reserve, a change bound to have ecological effects, not least if diamond mining
is a successor land use.46

P : -    

Nelson wrote of the Koyukon Indians that they lived in a world of eyes in
which the surroundings were aware, sensate, personified. They could feel and
be offended so that they must ‘at every moment, be treated with respect’.47 If,
therefore, the ecological relationships of this world are to be explored, then
the social characteristics of any group must be examined with regard to their
ecological consequences: hunting and gathering is as much a system of think-
ing as a system of production. For most gatherer-hunters this separation of
humans and nature does not exist.48 At its most generalised, the cosmos can
be said to be ‘an organism at once real, living and sacred; it simultaneously
reveals the modalities of being and of sacrality’.49
We find that the cultural and natural worlds are distinct but that they inter-
penetrate constantly; each depends upon the other and they must maintain a
harmony. Any differentiation of the two worlds can be bridged by supernat-
ural means and the proper ritual. Thus, the beings of the wild function as val-
idators of what really matters and so the social and personal construction of
self and self-efficacy is negotiated not only with humans but with the entire
cosmos. There is, indeed, a cosmic economy of sharing which is managed
locally by political regulation supported by an appeal to individual morality.
Control of resources is vested in the whole group and administered by chiefs:
any power that is exercised has to be validated by a tremendous knowledge of
the entire ecosystem. The distribution of power is based on trust rather than
on domination by rank and this trust extends to the whole cosmos, including
the food sources which, for example, may be conceived as humans in tempor-
ary disguise that have chosen to don animal skins in order to offer themselves
to their human brethren. Similarly, the hunters’ weapons were means of
knowledge of nature rather than tools of control.50 The ecological outwork-
ings, seen from the rationalist perspective of many scholars, often have what
are viewed as conservationist principles: those of respect, of democratic
decision-making, and of the avoidance of waste. But not always: some groups
do not practise the conservationist tenets all the time and, in contact with
other economies, have been ready to abandon their former ways of thought
and action. If we are tempted to think of gatherer-hunters as maintainers of
equilibria or ‘the balance of nature’ then we need to recall (a) that many lived
in early Holocene environments subject to climatic and ecological change, and
40 G E H
(b) many of them moved in and out of agriculture and herding once
these were in contact with the hunters, and very many stayed in those new
economies. One attraction of newer ways was perhaps a greater sense of
control since, in full gatherer-hunter mode, the powers that animated the uni-
verse were in the end to be served by humans and not vice versa.
Nevertheless, there are some empirical conclusions that can be drawn:
hunters apparently need a knowledge of fewer species than agriculturalists
and so their taxonomies are different: they recognise fewer taxa at the species
level and none at varietal rank, whereas agricultural societies use both.
Any explanation, however, is likely to be as fully cultural as instrumental. Pre-
agricultural technologies often permitted long-distance travel, such as the
southward occupation of North America, or perhaps continued migration
into the British Isles after the drowning of Doggerland, but no examples of
long-distance species transfer are known, apart from the dog.

B  :   

’ 
The most famous lament of the breaking up of the gatherer-hunters’ world is
the speech supposed to have been given by Chief Seattle in January of 1854.
‘How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange
to us.’ It certainly conveys the notion of an ideological as well as a physical
tearing although it is a fake which, in this form, dates from a film script of
the 1970s.51
In the social arena, there is the image of the foragers as members of a co-
operative society with a felt flow of identification with the cosmos. There were
many commonalities of outlook and practice across the world as well as diver-
gencies, such as the roles of men and women. Often regarded as strongly
dichotomous, there are examples of men who gather and women who hunt.
Likewise, the quantity of possessions is very variable. It may well rise when
there is a long sedentary period during the year, as on the north-west coast of
North America, though this is the heartland of the potlatch celebration where
wealth is denoted by how much is given away in a party mood.
Ecologically, a fragmentation process seems to have occurred in the late
Pleistocene and early Holocene with the extinction of many genera of
megafauna, to which the label ‘Pleistocene overkill’ has been attached. This
seems to have coincided with the first appearance of humans, especially in
North America and possibly also in Australia. Overkill also occurs later in
islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. They may have lacked megafauna
(except for the birds of New Zealand), but their ground-nesting avifauna was
especially vulnerable. This happened too when the first humans were agricul-
turalists. Eurasia and Africa seem not have suffered on the same scale though
the mammoth’s demise is common to both. At later times there seem to be
the indiscriminate killings of the buffalo-jumps and other examples of the
 T -    41
massacres of large numbers of animals without regard for their future
numbers. If the animal population is large and the human population low or
at least mobile, then there may not be any discernable long-term effects.
Though reciprocality is still important, examples can be seen of stricter
land allocation. It has been argued both for near-recent Australia and
Mesolithic Scandinavia that the presence of cemeteries is an indication not
only of a sedentary phase in the yearly cycle but also of a land-claiming, in the
way that was not true of leaving bodies to the elements. It is easy to see fire in
this way, too, with the smoke signalling that this land is primarily ‘our’ terri-
tory. The domestication of the dog can be regarded in both ways: it is a
coalescence of human social qualities plus the sensory capabilities of a wild
animal but is also the detachment of wild creatures and their incorporation
into the human realm.52 The taming of wolves may have been a bigger jump
than is generally thought since many groups had a sense of ‘rightness’ for wild
organisms: plants may ‘belong’ in certain places and lose their virtue (in, for
example, medicine) if moved.

R   

In the spirit of asking ‘what do we think we know?’ there are two aspects to
ideas of presenting information about these people and their worlds. Firstly,
we need to think about how they represented themselves in various ways
which we can now find intelligible, and secondly how we have formulated our
ideas about them in ways likely to colour any accounts that are constructed.
Literacy came to gatherer-hunters only with contact with European and
North American cultures. Although there are transcriptions of what they said
about themselves and some pre-twentieth-century but post-contact writing,
the main conveyance of any reflexive thought and accounts of their groups’
history has been oral. This means that most were never set down in any form
and also that any interpretation of any surviving tales and myths is doubly
difficult: not only is there a cultural barrier to twenty-first-century ‘western’
readers but, as we all know, oral accounts of, for example, family history for a
couple of generations tend to be subject to differences in emphasis: which
great-great-uncle was really the black sheep?
A more widespread way for gatherer-hunters to express themselves has been
in visual terms. The cave paintings of the south of France and northern Spain
are well known and new examples are continually coming to light. Other forms
of art, such as carved ivory figurines, are also known from the European
Palaeolithic. Across much of Africa and also in Australia, there is ‘rock art’ in
which depictions of life are made on rock surfaces in a variety of mediums:
some in caves but many in the open air. Given the actions of weathering, some
commentators have suggested that this was a virtually universal practice.
Paintings are also found on bark, wood, bones and bodies. Carving and object-
making may also have had a role which is apparently non-instrumental. Two
42 G E H
observations need to preface any accounts of art: firstly that when the Altamira
caves in Spain were first discovered in modern times, the paintings were
assumed to be fakes: gatherer-hunters were too primitive to have produced
such work. Though such attitudes are less common, a kind of lowest-level-
possible attribution of ‘primitive-religion-and-hunting-magic’ purposes has
suffused much writing about these artefacts. Secondly, the category of ‘art’ as
we now see it may not be applicable directly to gatherer-hunter cultures. In a
world that does not differentiate between humans and the rest of the cosmos,
an apparent piece of ‘art’ may have had a functional role: what is crucial is that
it had a meaning. In recent times, that meaning may extend to being a form of
political action: we are here and we need you to take notice.53 But in another
commonality, much of the ‘art’ does depict environmental features, notably
animals, sometimes with, and sometimes without, humans.54 Even here, there
are at least two ways of interpreting the marks that have been made: it can be
seen literally in the sense that nobody can read art from the past and so a search
for meaning is useless and the phenomenon has to be enjoyed in existentialist
terms. But given a little ethnohistorical or ethnographic information, then the
desire to understand these complex interweavings of the real and the non-real
is strong. The range of depictions is very wide: astronomy, mixed human–
animal creatures, economically important animals and their opposites, and
possible states of altered human consciousness are all possible. A single
motif may have multiple meanings, as we discover with today’s equivalents.
Perhaps we need to avoid the term ‘art’ and, thinking of ‘painting’ or ‘engrav-
ing’, allow for the disappearance of much of the outdoor material and,
with Bahn, think that ‘at least that’s what it looks like to me, but what do I
know?’55
The generous variety of interpretative possibilities for the art of the far past
is exhibited in the many studies of the rock art of the caves of southern France
and northern Spain. The majority of them were created in the Magdalenian
phase of the Upper Palaeolithic, c.17–12 ky but examples of equally well-
produced images of animals from the Chauvet caves of the Ardèche region
east of the Massif Centrale have been dated to 32,000–29,000 , which
attracts the label Aurignacian, a period previously known mostly for its carv-
ings.56 The meanings attributed to European Palaeolithic art are too diverse to
be summarised here except to say that, quantitatively, most of the source
material relates to the world of wild animals, although abstract patterns and
humans are also present. The sense of connection with the world around the
makers has been enhanced by the discovery that at c.22,000–21,000 ky in the
Magdalenian and Solutrean, star patterns, such as the Milky Way and
the Pleiades, have been painted in caves.57 These, in one view, ‘helped to
organise the spatiotemporal structure of daily and spiritual life of Palaeolithic
man’. Here, we can emphasise that the majority of this type of art (whatever
that means) places humans within a frame of the rest of the universe; it is
notable perhaps that, today, we organise our relationship to time with ever
 T -    43
greater precision and frequency (I can see four clocks and three calendars from
where I am now sitting) but images of nature are far less pervasive for most
western people.58
The art of near-recent and extant gatherer-hunters is, of course, influenced
by the world outside the producer groups. Some of it, indeed, is produced for
a very affluent market as the price of Innuit soapstone carvings in the galleries
of Toronto or Montreal will confirm. Yet its expression of environmental rela-
tionships is not necessarily invalidated by its commercial position: perhaps
some buyers are attracted by the sense of connection that it gives them.
Pictorial art is better at expressing relationships than sculpture, however, and
the Innuit painter, sculptor and craftswoman, Kenojuak (1927– ) from Cape
Dorset on Baffin Island, who flourished in the 1970s, made many pictures of
humans and animals in which birds have a central role, though bears and seals
make appearances as well. Time after time, the sun, animals, occasionally
plants and often humans are linked either by theriomorphy (animal–human
hybrids) or, as it were, hold hands in the image. Once again, there is a non-
separation of humans and the cosmos, even though there is in some of her
work an endearing but not detracting sense of the domestic as well.59 Art in
the Canadian north is one of the ways in which the native peoples can project
their world view as being distinct from the dominant industrial culture to
the south.60
This leaves us to consider our own representation of foraging cultures.
It says much that, when the Altamira cave paintings were discovered in
Spain, they were considered to be a hoax. This illuminates the fact that hunter-
gatherers have been subject to extremes of cultural appraisal by outsiders,
including scholars. In the early twentieth century, for instance, they were fre-
quently regarded as savages of a miserable and primitive kind (by Sigmund
Freud, among many) whereas in the 1960s and 1970s there was rehabilitation
on the grounds that they had shown the possibilities of human life without
the inequalities of state and class societies, and ones whose attunement to the
carrying capacity of their environments had lessons for the late twentieth
century. There have also been national attitudes based on, most obviously,
colonial relationships and in societies with a dominant and explicit ideology
like the former USSR. Beyond these empirical matters, the ways in which
history is understood and, most importantly, written are bound to affect the
understanding and the representation of the peoples of hunter-gatherer
economies, both recent and in the early Holocene.61

O
Reminders: gatherer-hunter people represent at least 90 per cent of human
evolutionary history; they never had any significant impact on the oceans;
in  1500 they still occupied large areas of Australia, North America and
the southern cone of South America, along with regional patches of southern
44 G E H
Africa, Siberia and New Guinea. Elsewhere there were remnant groups in deep
forests, those who had gone back to foraging after a period of agriculture, and
some groups on coastal fringes like the Ainu of Hokkaido. Yet groups like the
Saami and the San were foragers from the Upper Palaeolithic to the nineteenth
century. Now, they are present in only a few places and are either being assim-
ilated into industrial economies or trying to distance themselves from perva-
sive westernisation.

Hunter-gatherers in their ecosystems

If we try to see people of foraging cultures set within ecosystems which are in
effect hybrid systems of culture and nature, then a number of salient charac-
teristics can be identified. The first (and most important in terms of compar-
ison with later types of economies) is the question of energy flow and the ways
in which this can vary for gatherer-hunters.62 Climatic change in the form of
increases or decreases of solar energy are clearly important and were probably
critical to the survival of some groups at the end of the Pleistocene. Viewed
scientifically, the use of fire in the Late Pleistocene and early Holocene affected
many ecosystem characteristics: species composition, rates and directions of
plant succession, permanently altered communities of plants and animals,
changes in soil properties, erosion rates and sedimentation rates in lakes and
estuaries, are all examples. Fire influenced biological productivity by favour-
ing plants of early successional phases, whose growth rates are likely to be
rapid. The use of fire at landscape scale seems to have been very widespread
so it appears culturally in many forms, especially in legend and in myth, a
strand of culture which does not die out with the diminution in the number
of hunters and gatherers on the Earth.
The second hybrid system is that of plant and animal populations within
the yearly orbit of a group of people. This is difficult to define because any
sharp boundaries of territories might be relaxed in times of need. There seem
to be many instances, however, of the management of animal and plant popu-
lations which include a determination to provide for the future by not over-
culling. Here is perhaps the biggest identifiable cultural thread in the entire
pattern, for many groups recognise this undertaking in their ethics. Beyond
the ‘conservationists’, however, there are people for whom environmental
restraint seems foreign. Some may well have disappeared on that account, in
ways not traceable in the archaeological record; others may simply have been
too few in number to diminish a common animal significantly.63 The North
American bison, for example, survived the transition from being hunted on
foot with the bow and spear (often with the aid of fire) to being hunted from
horseback with rifles; it succumbed (very nearly totally) only to the incursions
of an industrial economy whose use of the animals’ tissues was probably less
important than the symbolic satisfactions of killing a creature so closely iden-
tified with the native population. Moves towards domestication have been
inferred from sedentary groups because, in some places, people had no need
 T -    45
for an annual cycle of movement. The Indians of the Pacific north-west
(c.6000 ) and the Natufian culture of Israel and Syria (from 9600 ) are
examples. The overall degree of modification of the Earth’s surface through
time and space is rather patchy: there are many regional differences. If fire was
not used, then the timespan of alteration of an ecosystem was short: in warm,
wet lowlands it could have been measured in months. Elsewhere, a yearly cycle
would probably find a band of people returning to a familiar site and finding
biotic evidence of their last visit both in the settlement area and the local land-
scape. Further, we are reliant on patchy evidence from post-contact Europeans
and Americans, not all of whom had the professed objectivity of the anthro-
pologist, together with the uneven yield of even the most meticulous archae-
ologist who has actually written up the results of the dig: provisional views
must be accepted.
The details of thought and practice must have been highly variable. Yet one
feature stands out. Even if only one species was truly domesticated, then many
environments were truly tamed to some extent. Hence, much of the informa-
tion obtained from gatherer-hunters at ‘contact time’ was not from the
‘wilderness’, and these were not ‘empty lands’ but lands which were altered by
the humans living in them, and of which they felt they were a part. Agriculture
does not necessarily represent the beginning of either the apparent taming of
the land or of species, though it differs in many respects from its precursor
economies. Yet, of course, some 70 per cent of the planet’s surface was altered
practically not at all by the gatherer-hunters. Whether the burning practices
of this era were carbon-neutral in the atmosphere is a fascinating question but
unlikely to be determined because the early Holocene was a period of rapid
change in climate and land cover in which the carbon fluxes will have
swamped any human-produced effects.

Foundations of the foragers’ environmental history

One underpinning of the gatherer-hunters’ tenure of the Earth was a low
population density. An often-quoted figure for the average is 0.025 persons
per square kilometre in the Lower Palaeolithic and 0.115 per square kilome-
tre just before the spread of agriculture: a typical hunter-gatherer needed 26
square kilometres of land for subsistence. The estimated absolute number of
people on the eve of agriculture was between 0.8 and 9.0 million. Though not
axiomatic, a low population density is a likely ingredient of a light footprint.
These kinds of data have led to the notion that foragers lived below the carry-
ing capacities of their environments, with levels at 20 to 60 per cent of the
maximum economic yield being quoted. The mechanisms postulated have
been those of conscious population control (infanticide and abortion espe-
cially), the consequences of prolonged lactation, the effects of environmental
variability, and the incidence of disease, with zoonoses taking the lead. Small
populations can oscillate widely, going from x4 to –4 maxima and minima in
about 200 years, and few sources of evidence can document beyond dispute
46 G E H
the precise course of such fluctuations.64 Viewed globally, foragers lived in
separate worlds, with only limited contact at the edges of particular cultural
groups.
In the intellectual climate of the 1960s and 1970s, the existence of groups
with ‘affluence without abundance’ as Marshall Sahlins so famously put it, was
often taken as an example for industrial societies.65 Such societies failed to take
on board the need to keep moving (which would not have been easy for a
world population of around 5,000 million) and the desire not to utilise
resources to their full extent. Three or four decades later, we can observe that
the hunter-gatherers’ era was not necessarily one of taking the usufruct
without altering the natural world at all. For a start, there was no reason not
to alter the world because none of it was separate from the human members
of it. Though stability of the hybrid ecosystems was subject to regional varia-
tion, it seems likely that many of the foraging societies of the Late Pleistocene
and early Holocene would have qualified for the label of ‘sustainable’, using
today’s criteria: wherever they went, there were still ‘the stag, the raven and the
long-lived tree’.

N
1. J. Donne, ‘An Anatomy of the World’, lines 114–16 in The Complete English
Poems, ed. A. J. Smith, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971. It was first pub-
lished in 1611. The typical lifespans of deer and raven are perhaps fifteen years
but thirty years have been recorded in both cases, which brings them to the same
kind of level as prehistoric gatherer-hunters.
2. General works include R. B. Lee and R. Daly (eds) The Cambridge Encyclopedia
of Hunters and Gatherers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999;
C. Panter-Brick et al., (eds) Hunter-Gatherers: an Interdisciplinary Perspective,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Sometimes I have used ‘gatherer-
hunters’ as a reminder that gathering of plant materials is often more important
for survival than hunting animals, especially large ones.
3. The European Palaeolithic culture which is postulated to have travelled from, for
example, the Bay of Biscay to Newfoundland is called the Solutrean. The debate
over this possibility is vigorous. Evidence now in play includes palaeo-indian skull
shapes, dentition, DNA and the dialects of Algonquin Cree and Euskera (modern
Basque). The then current evidence and the restatement of the conservative posi-
tion that the Americas were populated exclusively from Asia is summarised by
L. G. Straus, ‘Solutrean settlement of North America? A review of reality’,
American Antiquity 65, 2000, 220–1.
4. O. Soffer and C. Gamble (eds) The World in 18,000 . Vol. One: High Latitudes,
London: Unwin Hyman.
5. There is a number of relevant chapters in O. Soffer and N. D. Praslov (eds) From
Kostenki to Clovis: Upper Palaeolithic–Palaeo-Indian Adaptations, New York:
Plenum Press, 1993.
6. The natural history, with some human history, is excellently interpreted in E. C.
Pielou, After the Ice Age. The Return of Life to Glaciated North America, Chicago
and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991. A more strongly archaeological
perspective is in S. Mithen, After the Ice. A Global Human History 20,000–5000 ,
 T -    47
London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003, chs 23–32. The immigration(s) via an
ice-free corridor constitute the conservative position mentioned in Note 3,
though modified by the presence of ice-free refugia down the west coast of North
America. There are complications involving very ‘early’ dates for settlements in
California, Pennsylvania, Chile and Brazil, as well as the unavailability of some
skeletal material for study since a Federal Act of 1990 in the United States requires
the permission of local native Americans to remove bones if there is any cultural
affiliation. See G. Haynes, The Early Settlement of North America, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002.
7. C. V. Haynes, ‘Clovis–Folsom geochronology and climatic change’, in Soffer and
Praslov op. cit. 1993, 219–36.
8. The tempo in northern Europe is explored by G. R. Coope et al., ‘Temperature
gradients in northern Europe during the last glacial–Holocene transition (14–9
14
C kyr ) interpreted from coleopteran assemblages’, Journal of Quaternary
Science 13, 1998, 419–33.
9. Some commentators have made the case for scavenging of dead corpses being
more important than hunting, at any rate in the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic;
they argue that the energy balance would be improved by eating well-dead
animals and that our far ancestors were uninterested in use-by dates. The fights
with bears, wolves, vultures, marabou storks and hyenas might have used up some
energy, however.
10. This archaeology is dealt with in the context of contemporary gatherer-hunters in
my Changing the Face of the Earth, Oxford: Blackwell, 2nd edn 1996, ch. 3.
11. ‘Each of these [400 at the present time] breeds owes its existence to artificial selec-
tion by man, because every dog, whether it is a Great Dane or a Chihuahua, is the
descendant of wolves that were tamed by human hunters in the prehistoric
period’: J. Clutton-Brock, A Natural History of Domesticated Animals, Cambridge
and London: Cambridge University Press and the British Museum (Natural
History), 1988, p. 34. Hard to believe as you watch a major dog show on televi-
sion, though less so in the 2002 film, Best in Show. See also D. Brewer, T. Clark
and A. Phillips, Dogs in Antiquity. Anubis to Cerebus: the Origins of the Domestic
Dog, Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 2001.
12. P. Savolainen, Y. P. Zhang, J. Luo, J. Lundeberg and T. Leitner, ‘Genetic evidence
for an East Asian origin of domestic dogs’, Science 298, 2002, 201–2.
13. O. C. Stewart, ‘Fire as the first great force employed by man’, in W. L. Thomas
(ed.) Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1956, 115–33.
14. The dates and places are constantly changing as the techniques for the recovery
of evidence improve. The 800 ky date comes from N. Goren-Inbar, N. Alperson,
M. E. Kislev, O. Simchoni, Y. Melamed, A. Ben-Nun and E. Werker, ‘Evidence of
hominin control of fire at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, Israel’, Science 304, 2004,
725–7.
15. J. Goudsblom, ‘People, fire and environment’, in J. E. van Hinte (ed.) One Million
Years of Anthropogenic Global Environmental Change, Amsterdam: Koninklijke
Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 1997, 17–27.
16. J. Goudsblom, Fire and Civilization, London: Penguin Books 1994.
17. J. H. Tallis, ‘Forest and moorland in the South Pennine uplands in the mid-
Flandrian period. III. The spread of moorland – local, regional and national’,
Journal of Ecology 79, 1991, 401–15.
18. J. H. Tallis and V. R. Switsur, ‘Forest and moorland in the South Pennine uplands
in the mid-Flandrian period. II. The hillslope forests’, Journal of Ecology 78, 1990,
857–83.
48 G E H
19. C. J. Caseldine and D. J. Maguire, ‘Late glacial/early Flandrian vegetation change
on northern Dartmoor, south-west England’, Journal of Biogeography 13, 1986,
255–64.
20. P. D. Moore, ‘The origin of blanket mires, revisited’, in F. M. Chambers (ed.)
Climate Change and Human Impact on the Landscape, London: Chapman & Hall,
1993, 217–36; A. U. Mallik, C. H. Gimingham and A. A. Rahman, ‘Ecological
effects of heather burning. I. Water infiltration, moisture retention and porosity
of surface soil’, Journal of Ecology 72, 1984, 767–76.
21. S. L. R. Mason, ‘Fire and Mesolithic subsistence – managing oaks for acorns in
northwest Europe?’, Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 164, 2000,
139–50.
22 Quoted by S. Pyne, Burning Bush. A Fire History of Australia, New York: Holt,
1991, p. 85.
23. D. M. J. S. Bowman and W. J. Panton, ‘Decline of Callitris intratropica . . . in the
Northern Territories: implications for pre- and post-European colonization fire
regimes’, Journal of Biogeography 20, 1993, 373–81; D. M. J. S. Bowman, ‘The
impact of Aboriginal landscape burning on the Australian biota’, New Phytologist
140, 1998, 385–410; D. M. Yibaruk et al., ‘Fire ecology and Aboriginal land man-
agement in central Arnhem land, northern Australia: a tradition of ecosystem
management’, Journal of Biogeography 28, 2001, 325–43; R. A. Bradstock, J. E.
Williams and A. M. Gill (eds) Flammable Australia: the Fire Regimes and
Biodiversity of a Continent, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002;
B. Gott, ‘Aboriginal fire management in south-eastern Australia: aims and fre-
quency’, Journal of Biogeography 32, 2005, 1203–8.
24. D. R. Piperno, ‘Phytolith and charcoal records from deep lake cores in the
American tropics’, in D. M. Pearsall and D. R. Piperno (eds) Current Research in
Phytolith Analysis: Applications in Archaeology and Paleoecology, MASCA
Research Papers in Science and Archaeology vol. 10, 1993, 58–71.
25. J. B. Kauffman and C. Uhl, ‘Interactions of anthropogenic activities, fire, and rain
forests in the Amazon basin’, in J. G. Goldammer (ed.) Fire in the Tropical Biota,
Berlin: Springer-Verlag Ecological Studies vol. 84, 1990, 117–34.
26. A. C. Roosevelt et al., ‘Paleoindian cave dwellers in the Amazon: the peopling of
the Americas’, Science 272 (#5260), 1996, 373–84. The main thrust of the paper
is towards the dating of human occupance of South America rather than details
of the environmental impact of gatherer-hunters, but there are a lot of data in it.
27. Summarised in R. C. Bailey and T. N. Headland, ‘The tropical rain forest – is it a
productive environment for human foragers?’ Human Ecology 19, 1991, 261–85.
Much of Human Ecology 19 (2), 1991 is devoted to this topic.
28. B. Winterhalder and F. Lu, ‘A forager–resource population ecology model and
implications for indigenous conservation’, Conservation Biology 11, 1997,
1354–64.
29. Quoted by P. W. Stahl, ‘Holocene biodiversity: an archaeological perspective from
the Americas’, Annual Review of Anthropology 25, 1996, 105–26. Population esti-
mate from W. M. Denevan, ‘The pristine myth: the landscape of the Americas in
1492’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82, 1992, 369–85. See
also J. S. Athens and J. V. Ward, ‘The late Quaternary of the western Amazon:
climate, vegetation and humans’, Antiquity 73, 1999, 287–302.
30. Some of the data are from archaeology, some from early European accounts of
contact and some from ethnographers working in near-recent times. All need
care in order not to see only what it is desired to see. The exceptions to living on
the land surface are a few fishing groups whose dwellings were on stilts over the
sea or fresh waters.
 T -    49
31. P. S. Martin and R. G. Klein (eds) Quaternary Extinctions: a Prehistoric
Revolution, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984. Three examples of the
many papers are M. W. Beck, ‘On discerning the cause of late Pleistocene
megafaunal extinctions, Palaeobiology 22, 1996, 91–103; J. Alroy, ‘A multispecies
overkill simulation of the end-Pleistocene megafuanal mass extinction’, Science
292 (5523), 2001, 1893–6 and A. D. Barnosky et al., ‘Assessing the causes of Late
Pleistocene extinctions on the continents’, Science 306, 2004, 70–5. For Australia
see among many, D. Choquenot, and D. M. J. S. Bowman ‘Marsupial megafauna,
Aborigines and the overkill hypothesis: application of predator–prey models
to the question of Pleistocene extinction in Australia’, Global Ecology and
Biogeography 7, 1998, 167–80; R. G. Roberts et al., ‘New ages for the last
Australian megafauna: continent-wide extinction about 46,000 years ago’,
Science 292 (5523), 2001, 1888–92. Also antipodean: A. Anderson, Prodigious
Birds. Moas and Moa-hunting in Prehistoric New Zealand, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1989. Overlap with a similar phenomenon in a hor-
ticultural group is in D. W. Steadman et al., ‘Rapid prehistoric extinction of
iguanas and birds in Polynesia’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
[of the USA] 99, 2002, 3673–7.
32. B. W. Brook and D. M. J. S. Bowman, ‘The uncertain blitzkrieg of Pleistocene
megafauna’, Journal of Biogeography 31, 2004, 517–23.
33. S. Cachel, ‘Dietary shifts and the European Upper Palaeolithic transition’, Current
Anthropology 38, 1997, 579–603.
34. G. C. Frison, Prehistoric Hunters of the High Plains, New York: Academic Press,
1978, 2nd edn, 1981. The volume edited by L. B. Davies and B. O. K. Reeves,
Hunters of the Recent Past, London: Unwin Hyman, 1990, (One World
Archaeology vol. 15) is mostly devoted to the archaeology of the High Plains.
35. There is a summary in W. J. Burroughs, Climate Change in Prehistory, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 272–3 which emphasises connections to
external forces such as climate and sea-level changes. There are examples from the
North American Huron, where post-contact evidence shows that absence of
skeletal evidence in burial grounds does not necessarily mean that warfare did not
take place, for the fatally wounded may not make it back home.
36. R. K. Nelson, Make Prayers to the Raven. A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. A totally splendid book.
37 C. Martin, Keepers of the Game. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, University of
California Press, 1978; and S. Krech, The Ecological Indian. Myth and History,
New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1999 are both concerned with Indian
behaviour in North America, especially under European influence. Recent papers
that discuss the impact of unaffected indigenous populations on western animal
populations include C. E. Kay, ‘Aboriginal overkill – the role of native Americans
in structuring western ecosystems’, Human Nature 5, 1994, 359–98; C. E. Kay,
‘Viewpoint: ungulate herbivory, willows and political ecology in Yellowstone’,
Journal of Range Management 50, 1997, 139–45; C. E. Kay et al., ‘Historical
wildlife observations in the Canadian Rockies: implications for ecological
integrity’, Canadian Field Naturalist 114, 2000, 561–83; B. S. Low, ‘Behavioral
ecology of conservation in traditional societies, Human Nature 7, 1996, 353–79;
P. S. Martin and C. R. Szuter, ‘War zones and game sinks in Lewis and Clark’s
west’, Conservation Biology 13, 1999, 36–45; R. L. Lyman and S. Wolverton ‘The
late-Pleistocene–Early Historic game sink in the Northwestern United States’,
Conservation Biology 16, 2002, 73–85.
38. R. K. Nelson, Hunters of the Northern Forest, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1973.
50 G E H
39. N. Bird-David, ‘The giving environment: another perspective on the economic
system of gatherer-hunters’, Current Anthropology 31, 1990, 189–96.
40. There is a good narrative sequence in the maps of ch. 64 of A. Sherratt (ed.) The
Cambridge Encyclopedia of Archaeology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1980.
41. Some San bushmen provided rain-making services to farming communities in
and near the Kalahari: P. Jolly, ‘Symbiotic interaction between black farming
communities and the south-eastern San’, Current Anthropology 37, 1966,
277–305.
42. M. A. P. Renouf, ‘Prehistory of Newfoundland hunter-gatherers: extinctions or
adaptations?’, World Archaeology 30, 1999, 403–20.
43. J. H. Bodley, ‘Hunter-gatherers and the colonial encounter’, in R. B. Lee and
R. Daly (eds) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999, 465–72.
44. M. Gadgil and R. Guha, This Fissured Land. An Ecological History of India, Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1993, ch. 7.
45. B. S. Trigger, ‘Hunting-gathering peoples and nation-states’, in Lee and Daly op.
cit. 1999, 473–9; R. H. Layton, ‘Hunter-gatherers, their neighbours and the
Nation State’, in C. Panter-Brick et al. op. cit. 2001, 292–321.
46. See The Guardian 5 March, 2004, p. 19.
47. R. K. Nelson op. cit. 1983, p. 14.
48. T. Ingold, The Appropriation of Nature. Essays on Human Ecology and Social
Relations, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986; idem, ‘From trust to
domination: an alternative history of human–animal relations’, in A. Manning
and J. Serpell (eds) Animals and Human Society. Changing Perspectives, New York
and London: Routledge, 1994, 1–22.
49. M. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: the Nature of Religion, New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovitch, 1959, quoted by M. Oelschlager, The Idea of Wilderness, New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991, p. 20. See also H. L. Harrod, The
Animals Came Dancing. Native American Sacred Ecology and Animal Kinship,
Tucson AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2000.
50. E. N. Anderson, Ecologies of the Heart. Emotion, Belief and the Environment,
Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
51. The saga is told in R. Kaiser, ‘Chief Seattle’s speech(es): American origins and
European reception’, in B. Swann and A. Krupat (eds) Recovering the Word:
Essays on Native American Literature, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1987, 497–536; There was a synopsis from the Washington
State Library on www.synaptic.bc.ca/ejournal/wslibrry.htm accessed on 25
March 2004.
52. Dog puppies are much better at locating hidden food than wolf puppies raised by
humans, with the inference that domestication has selected for a set of abilities
that enhance their communication with humans. See B. Hare, M. Brown,
C. Williamson and M. Tomasello, ‘The domestication of social cognition in dogs’,
Science 298, 2002, 1634–6.
53. K. Helskog and B. Olsen (eds) Perceiving Rock Art: Social and Political Perspectives,
Oslo: Instituttet for Sammenlignende Kulturforskning, 1995: the Alta Conference
on Rock Art.
54. M. W. Conkey, ‘To find ourselves: art and social geography of prehistoric hunter-
gatherers’, in C. Schire (ed.) Past and Present in Hunter-Gatherer Studies, Orlando
FL: Academic Press, 1984, 253–76; idem, ‘Hunting for images, gathering up
meanings: art for life in hunting-gathering societies’, in C. Panter-Brick et al. op.
cit. 2001, 267–91; H. Morphy, ‘Traditional and modern visual art among hunting
 T -    51
and gathering peoples’, in R. B. Lee and R. Daly (eds) The Cambridge
Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999, 441–8.
55. P. G. Bahn, The Cambridge Illustrated History of Prehistoric Art, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998.
56. H. Valladas et al., ‘Palaeolithic paintings: evolution of prehistoric cave art’, Nature
413 (#6855), 2001, 479.
57. M. A. Rappenglück, ‘Palaeolithic timekeepers looking at the Golden Gate of the
ecliptic; the lunar cycle and the Pleiades in the cave of La-Tête-du-Lion (Ardèche,
France) – 21,000 ’, Earth, Moon and Planets 85–6, 2001, 391–404; the paper has
a wide-ranging set of references to similar phenomena in other cultures.
58 I can claim to offset the time-conscious with twelve pieces of imagery with
‘natural’ themes: thirteen if you include a photograph of a dog. The calendrical
structuring of spiritual life in the west is an altogether more fragmentary affair,
especially since the Christian year seems to have been closely tied to the cycles of
pre-industrial agriculture.
59. J. Blodgett, Kenojuak, Toronto: Firefly Books, 1985. Her work appears in a wider
context in collections such as W. T. Larmour, Inunnit. The Art of the Canadian
Eskimo, Ottawa: Information Canada, 1967 and on the Cape Dorset website.
60. N. C. Doubleday, ‘Sustaining Arctic visions, values and ecosystems: writing Inuit
identity, reading Inuit art in Cape Dorset, Nunavut’, in G. Humphrys and
M. Williams (eds) Presenting and Representing Environments, Dordrecht:
Springer, 2005, 167–80.
61. A. Barnard (ed.) Hunter-Gatherers in History, Archaeology and Anthropology,
Oxford and New York: Berg, 2004.
62. Note that they are largely dependent on recently fixed solar energy, though wood
can be relatively old. The importation of industrial energies into hunting and
gathering societies has not always meant their complete absorption into the more
intensive economies. Iron tools, the rifle, the snowmobile and the outboard
motor have left some Innuit groups still able to function in a largely hunting
mode. Not that agriculture was ever an option in the high Arctic, of course,
though herding of caribou might have been, as with the Saami and similar
peoples of Eurasia.
63. See, for example, the nuanced analyses of hunter-gatherer behaviour in B. S. Low,
‘Behavioral ecology of conservation in traditional societies’, Human Nature 7,
1996, 353–79; B. Winterhalder and F. Lu, ‘A forager–resource population ecology
model and implications for indigenous conservation’, Conservation Biology 11,
1997, 1354–64.
64. See the essays in R. S. O. Harding and G. Teleki (eds) Omnivorous Primates,
New York: Columbia University Press, 1981.
65. M. Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, London and New York: Tavistock Publications.
 CHAPTER THREE

Pre-industrial agriculture

F 3.1 Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala: Nueva corónica y buen gobierno
(c.1615–16).
Page 32 of GKS 2232 4to, The Royal Library, Copenhagen.

The emperor of the Inca singing with a llama. The chosen llama was a
musical guide at court performances. The chronicler, Guaman Pomo de
Ayala was also responsible for the first map of Peru (in the sixteenth
century) and was probably an administrator in the Spanish government

52
 P-  53
of that country; he was though a native Andean. There are 398 full-page
drawings which form an integral part of his 1200-page Nueva corónica y
buen gobierno of c.1615–16.
The idea of the chief of the Inca singing along with (and apparently
taking the note from) a llama is somehow symbolic of the relationships
in domestication. While talking to plants is regarded in most post-
forager cultures as eccentric, talking to animals is not. So from the earli-
est communication between humans and domesticates (presumably
centred on command), there has evolved a diverse set of practices beyond
the, so to speak, instrumental. Not many cultures, however, cultivate this
kind of intimacy: a few people sing along with their dogs, and play music
to cows but to be led is unsual. It does signify, however, a closeness of the
human and non-human which was common in pre-industrial agricul-
ture but which began to disappear as the technologies of fossil fuels
appeared. In colonial regimes, however, these closenesses might be
victims of the social disruptions that occurred. Guaman Poma sought to
convince the king of Spain to halt the destruction of Andean society in
which the native Andeans were being exploited in the countryside and
driven to death in the mines. To escape a dire fate, they were fleeing to
the cities. Large-scale miscegenation, armed violence, the exploitation of
native labour, and the spread of epidemic disease were, in Guaman
Poma’s view, inimical to the survival of Andean cultures.
A digital version of the entire manuscript, with commentary, is to be
found on http://www.kb.dk/elib/mss/poma/index-en.htm, which is
run by the Royal Library of Denmark. The above illustration is on
http://img/kb.dk/ha/manus/POMA/poma550/POM0320v.jpg accessed
on 3 March 2006.

‘N   ’ ’

During the time of the hunters and gatherers, the biological evolution of the
human species more or less stopped. Thereafter, our adult bodies changed in
lifespan when immune systems became more effective or when some of us got
too fat, but the characteristics that mark out Homo sapiens in the writings of
physical anthropologists seem to be at rest. The millennia during which the
energy of the sun fuelled human life through the channels of domesticated
plants and animals produced a great variety of subsistence types and a posi-
tive coruscation of cultural diversity. These did not shift our basic anatomy
and physiology though, perhaps unlike hunters and gatherers, most later
humans have hoped to make a sacrifice every day to the god of the stomach.1
The transfer from dependence upon food collection to food production,
from the usufruct of the wild to the reproduction of the tamed, has misty begin-
nings with no sense of only one place nor any one time. We know of early agri-
culture only when it becomes archaeologically visible. Pouring into one small
54 G E H
pot the hectolitres of academic discussion, we reckon that by about 10,000 
there were some areas of the world that had shifted irrevocably to the new life:
the hill lands of south-west Asia, together with south and east Asia where much
land, now below sea-level, had added to the space for human colonisation.

T    

The irreducible fact is that a species which had been totally food-collecting
became largely food-producing. Even if large areas remained outside the agri-
cultural ecumene, the population growth inside makes them seem central to
any attempt at an overview. In 10,000  the world population was perhaps 4
million but in  1750 (an arbitrary but not unrealistic date for the onset of
industrialisation) it may have been 720 million and solar-based agriculture
was the economic foundation for that growth. The spread of agriculture was
not spatially uniform: domesticated plants and animals are not tolerant of
many environments, despite skilled breeding and worldwide introductions.
There are simply places that were too cold, too dry or too steep to grow crops.
Some areas might support domesticated animals, but others remained largely
wild or still subject to the hunters’ ways of landscape management. If there are
more people in less space, then we have the ingredients of a more intensive
land cover system, where ‘intensive’ means a higher ratio of human-directed
energy compared with natural flows;2 overall there was much more human
food in the world under agriculture than there was for hunters and gathers.
It follows that the likelihood of environmental manipulation is greater. This
apparent ecological simplicity is bound up with immense changes in culture,
reaching into depths of human cognition of the world with very far-reaching
consequences.

Evolution and dispersal

The history of the earliest agriculture is bound up with two processes: the inten-
sification of plant-use by gatherer-hunters and their adoption of permanent
settlements. The first centre of such developments to be documented archaeo-
logically was in the Levant of south-west Asia, with the site of Abu Hureyra in
Syria a key excavation. The core finding comes from the onset of the Younger
Dryas period in 11,000–10,500  when climatic conditions determined that
there was less food. The settlers had cared for wild rye and so intensified their
use of it and transformed it into a domesticated species. With the onset of the
Holocene at about 9600  there was an abundance of plant foods, and rye
seems to have been abandoned in the face of other choices, including wheat and
barley. The continued hunting of the gazelle was in decline by 8800  in favour
of sheep-herding. What this site (and a number of others in the hill lands
around the Fertile Crescent) demonstrates is that there were phases of interac-
tion: the harvest of wild plants, the cultivation of pre-domesticated varieties
and then the onset of full domestication.3 The earliest Holocene saw a dramatic
 P-  55
rise in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as well as a reduc-
tion in they year-to-year variability of the climate, both of which favoured cul-
tivation. Animals seem to have been domesticated later than plants, with an
emphasis on those species which formerly had been hunted, such as sheep and
goats, as well as easily tamed taxa like cattle and pigs. The reasons for the tran-
sition to domestication have been argued over for decades, but the currently
dominant ideas suggest that climatic change and population growth may be the
key elements in the shift. There were ecological consequences by about 8800 
which resulted in some settlements adopting nomadic pastoralism and others
budding off migratory groups to other regions. Institutionalised warfare now
becomes desirable so as to acquire possessions and territory. The environmen-
tal consequences almost certainly included the processes described in the Epic
of Gilgamesh (c.2700 ) where Gilgamesh defies the gods and cuts down the
forests, so they tell him that Sumeria will be plagued with fire and/or drought,
and indeed in Sumeria, the earth is turned white, which sounds like a reference
to salinification of the soils.4
Research in many fields has extended the list of certain centres of compa-
rable importance though none is earlier than the south-west Asian centres
unless the north China focus (based on millet) turns out to be equally ancient
(Table 3.1). The centres were independent of each other, as shown by the
different species domesticated in the earliest phases of each; the differences in
time suggest regional variations in the combination of environmental and cul-
tural conditions that led to the adoption of agriculture. The details of the
expansion of agriculture from its initial focuses to other regions during the
millennia before  1750 are given in many accounts.5 There were many
changes during that time, with developments such as irrigation and terracing
allowing its spread into areas hitherto occupied by foragers or herders. Food
production was characteristic of much of the world by that date: apart from

T 3.1 Dates of transition from intensive hunting and gathering to agriculture
(uncontroversial centres only; dates in years )
Centre of domestication Intensive foraging Agriculture
South-west Asia 15,000 11,500
North China 11,600 9000
South China 12,000 8000
Sub-Saharan Africa 9000 4500
South Central Andes 7000 5250
Central Mexico 7000 5750
Eastern United States 6000 5250

Deduct 1950 for approximate  dates, though 14C years do not correspond directly with calendar
years.
Source: Extracted from P. J. Richerson, R. Boyd and R. L. Bettinger, ‘Was agriculture impossible
during the Pleistocene but mandatory during the Holocene? A climate change hypothesis’,
American Antiquity 66, 2001, 387–411.
56 G E H
the areas incapable of supporting the growth of domesticates, only Australia,
parts of western North America, including California, and the southern cone
of South America had yet to receive the environmental manipulations associ-
ated with this type of economy. The evidence for the dispersion of agriculture
is not now confined to archaeology: genetics (especially the recovery of DNA
from organic remains) and linguistics are adding to the detail (and the com-
plexity) of the narratives.6 Stable isotope analysis has provided the remarkable
finding that around the North Sea at least the transition to agriculture was
sharp and involved even the coastal Mesolithic (forager) populations moving
from marine foods to terrestrial domesticates. The menhirs of Atlantic Europe
may even be demonstrations of the dominance of the new culture.7
The tensions between environmental and cultural explanations of how this
immense and far-reaching change came about are highly involving.8 One of
the earliest ‘why’ discussions was by Gordon Childe, who thought that the
climate of the late Pleistocene was becoming so dry that gatherer-hunters
congregated in oases where their density forced upon them new ways of sub-
sistence.9 Variations on this idea emphasised the possibility that the desicca-
tion caused the migration of plants and animals into the Fertile Crescent
zone where they were pre-programmed to be domesticates. A more cultural
approach simply argued for experimentation in survival under more difficult
conditions. It seems reasonable to argue that agriculture was unlikely during
the Pleistocene when climates everywhere seem to have been very variable and
the global carbon dioxide level low. Its terminal phase had high-amplitude
changes on scales which might have been decadal or even less. The Holocene
seems to have been (so far) a more stable interglacial than its predecessors, so
the agriculturalist’s vulnerability to weather has been reduced. Hence climate
appears to have been a key factor in the earliest appearances of the new way of
life.10 Warmer, wetter weather and less variability meant, says one writer, ‘it
was force majeure: in effect there was no alternative’.11
Other reasons for domestication are also held to be important, either
singly or in combination. There has been the claim, for example, that the
domestication of cattle was purely cultural: that the horns of the wild beasts
were lunate and so a connection with a moon goddess (whose monthly cycles
clearly linked her to earthly phenomena) was obtained by the taming of the
animals. There is also the possibility that status might be gained by taming
wild beasts rather than by killing them, though that sounds a bit unlikely
for the young men even if not for the children. Some plants may have been
brought in as high-value ceremonial objects (corn fermentable to alcohol
perhaps) and were then transformed to be staples. A stronger case is made for
the notion that population growth forced a crisis of subsistence: that the wild
areas could no longer support gatherer-hunters at their accustomed levels of
off-take and so an intensification was needed which led to farming. This con-
flicts with the view that the foragers limited their numbers to a level below
the absolute carrying capacity of the land, but even low rates of sustained
 P-  57
growth might have subverted any such intention. Darwinian evolution as a
thought-frame can be applied in suggesting that some biota were genetically
pre-programmed to co-evolve with human societies; advocates of this set of
ideas have to avoid teleology as well as the idea of 1:1 obligate mutualism.
Human responses to diseases are also present in this complex of thinking:
rising sea-levels and higher temperatures in the early Holocene facilitated the
spread of tropical diseases, such as some forms of malaria, to Palaeolithic and
Mesolithic populations with no initial resistance; and a great number of other
bacteria, protozoans, helminths and fungi must also have made similar jour-
neys, especially into irrigated zones. Schistosomiasis remains to this day a
disease of irrigated lands in the near tropics.12
The earliest cultural-ecological complexes of domestication are becoming
clear. Although difficult to document, there must have been a stage of info-
rmal husbandry when useful biota were brought to settlements (even to
seasonally shifting ‘camps’) and the usefulness of a sustained supply was
discussed. Grasses with large seeds in the temperate zones, and fast-growing
root crops in the tropics are examples. Ways of keeping up the supply might
include informal irrigation by channelling a stream’s sand and gravel deposits
or inserting plant slips into a midden heap. Conscious attempts to modify the
genetics were probably absent, though some selection might actually have
occurred if wild grass seeds with non-shattering heads were singled out for
planting, for instance. Much early agriculture in south-west Asia seems to
have transpired in hilly lands from the middle Euphrates through the Jordan
valley into southern Jordan with a distinct dry season bearing a vegetation
dominated by open woodland and steppe (hence the large-seeded grasses
ancestral to, for example, wheat) and populated with wild sheep and goats.
This contrasts with the likely origins of domesticated rice in China where it
formed part of a wetland complex that was exploited for its wild animals and
fish as well as the grass seeds.13
In environmental terms, the innovation never stayed put in the environ-
ments in which it first developed. In one group of expansions, the successful
amplification was into water control. Its most spectacular results have been in
the great river valleys such as the Euphrates, Nile, Yangtze and Indus, where
elaborate sytems of irrigation stored water from peak flows against a drier
season when crops such as rice and wheat might then benefit from a hot sun
under which to ripen. Raised-bed agriculture provided a long-term subsis-
tence base for the Maya in the swamps of Meso-America and for others to the
south. In both cases a set of humanised environments became characteristic
of the landscape. Another group of enlargements was into forests, where
systems of shifting cultivation became established. The clearing of trees and
the burning of woody material together formed a seedbed in which some vari-
eties of rice (as in Asia) or root crops (as in the Americas and Africa) flour-
ished until lower fertility or weed persistence forced the people to abandon the
clearing and create a new one. Though associated mostly with tropical and
58 G E H
semi-tropical lands, this system was present in European prehistory and in the
coniferous forests of Finland until the nineteenth century. The last major aug-
mentation of domesticate adoption has been the use of herded animals to crop
plants inedible to humans in lands that are very dry, such as the arid fringes
of savannas, steppes and semi-deserts, or very cold, like high mountain slopes
and plateaux or the tundra. This is collectively called pastoralism and the
animals herded range from the reindeer and yak through to the more famil-
iar sheep and goats.14 In the course of time, many have been in contact with a
different system and so trade developed: pastoralists and irrigation farmers
exchanging meat for grain, for example. It probably originated later than
settled dry-land agriculture and on its fringes.

Environmental relationships
The circumstances of the earliest stages of agriculture are different from
those of the point where reversibility (in terms of subsistence, environment
and culture) was no longer possible. As with large-scale fire management by
hunters, there came a point when current practices had to be maintained:
there was no going back. Agriculture has to survive pressures of three types:
extra-human, such as climatic change or freak weather; inter-human, such as
other groups of humans who raid, destroy, engage in arson or deprive of
water; and intra-human, where the cultivating group’s organisation of plant-
ing, cultivation, storage or distribution is poor. Reversions to earlier ways
occurred but they are inconspicuous beside the wider scene of the entrench-
ment of a domestication-based way of life.
The first generalisation of environmental significance is that humans create
new genotypes. There was experience with the dog and this was extended
to other animal species as well as to a fairly wide range of plants. The key to
genetic modification is the replacement of natural selection by cultural selec-
tion, through the medium of cultural identification of the desirable outcomes
and the controllability of the reproduction of the chosen species. Most of this
selection must have happened with the application of traditional knowledge
of a diffused kind, though it is not difficult to imagine the rise of specialists in
the breeding of dogs, horses and cattle: the Apis bulls of ancient Egypt were
bred for their special distribution of black and white in the coat and a black
spot on the tongue, and were buried with great ceremony at Saqqara when
they died. Sheep breeds appear in Egypt by about 2000  and several Roman
authors mention the different types of horse that were bred, sometimes in
specialised stud farms. Below the species level, many breeds, races and
strains were produced, though the definition of those terms is not a settled
affair. Selection also comes about accidentally. This was probably very impor-
tant in the initial stages of wild cereal husbandry, when the selection of non-
shattering seed-heads may just have happened rather than being planned.
There are numerous examples of animal young being succoured by human
communities and thus surviving to reproduce but many will have gone back
 P-  59
into the wild to breed. Staying around a settlement to breed is necessary for
the firstly accidental and then subsequently deliberate effects of human inter-
vention: women in Papua-New Guinea are recorded as suckling puppies and
piglets along with their own offspring.15 At all events, domesticates both early
and later need to be hardy because they have to survive the relevant selection
of new conditions of soil, temperature, humidity and infection by parasites
and pests. The must be adaptable to living together as fields of wheat or herds
of goats, be able to reproduce without too much human aid, and not require
inputs of tending beyond that which the human community can supply. In the
case of animals, they need to be non-territorial, respond to a herd leader and
be slow to flight when alarmed.16 They need to be energy-positive unless they
belong to very high-status groups or individuals for whom this is not a direct
concern.
As well as new genotypes, farming creates new ecosystems. Like breeding,
some creations are deliberate and some unintentional, though perhaps more
accidental consequences are found, or at any rate survive to be chronicled. As
with genotypes, many of these are deliberate and some accidental. A first cat-
egory is the permanent field in which a crop or crops are grown year on year
(or more frequently) with or without a fallow period. This alters most of the
characteristics of the soil and water regime of the field and adjacent area and,
in turn, may require further selection among the genes of the selected crop
plant. A variant of this system uses a shifting field which is abandoned when
its fertility falls: the tropical versions in forest and savanna are best known but
there was a version in Atlantic Europe, for example, that lasted until the nine-
teenth century. This used an outfield which was taken in from heath or moor
and planted with a crop but not intensively fertilised by contrast with the
infield which was permanently cultivated. Nutrients (especially nitrogen) had
to be recycled as manure from livestock and brought in from non-agricultural
sources such as turf, seaweed, shell sand and soil. This usually gave a reason-
able margin of energy gain over expenditure, albeit a system that was trans-
formed by the introduction of the potato, usually after 1800.17 If fertility levels
were maintained in agrarian systems with permanent fields, then it was often
possible to produce a surplus. This freed people from growing their own food
and so made possible many other kinds of land uses, as well as having social
consequences. Thus, societies had gardens for pleasure, hunting parks,
managed woodland, and land devoted to high-status but inessential crops, for
dyes, exotic fruits, drugs, and above all, cities. Though most obvious in, for
example, eighteenth-century Europe, the antecedents can be found in most of
the ancient riverine civilisations, such as Egypt, China and India.
The second class of relationships is the accidental. Many of these are appar-
ent from sediments accumulated since the earliest days of cultivation. Higher
rates of run-off entrain sediments and so floods are more frequent and erosion
on slopes enhanced, with concomitant deposition in valleys and at the coast.18
On-site, a whole class of plants and animals is classified as unwanted and
60 G E H
labelled as ‘weeds’ and ‘pests’. On ranges used by pastoralists, grazing above a
certain density and frequency means that some plants are unable to regener-
ate and their place is taken by species unpalatable to the herded beasts. Species
with thorns and spines are especially favoured in such places but, in very dry
sites, no higher plants may survive and so a move towards desertification can
be seen. An agricultural landscape is thus often one of a very large degree of
makeover by human influences, the more so if it has been thus used for
centuries, during which many environmental hazards have been faced and
probably overcome.19
Generalised outcomes of these types are, of course, the result of many mil-
lions of individual and group decisions over many millennia. It seems clear
that, just as farming created new genotypes and new ecosystems, it also gen-
erated new patterns of thought and behaviour. We cannot experience the psy-
chological climates that engendered early agriculture, though we might accept
the probability that there was an element of compulsion involved: think of the
weeding, the storage problems and the organisation of water control, the
disposal of wastes and the gathering of firewood, together with the likely
accumulation of rats and fleas. A fresh suite of mind-sets had to be adopted.
There had to be an ability to develop tools for the more intensive use of
plant resources: the digging-stick, plough, and sickle, for example. Foragers’
propensities became enhanced: the use of plants and animals as means to
allow individuals to acquire social prestige and power, and the development
of a form of social relations with biota are instances. Thus, once agriculture
had gained momentum and irreversibility, there were more food and more
people, more concentrations of both, more specialisation in food production
and consumption and in people’s occupations, more organisations allocating
resources over greater distances, and crucially a differentiation of power
among groups of people. Agriculture may even have spread into some regions
because it offered alcohol, opium and wine.20 Tim Ingold has argued that agri-
culture is a process of submitting to a reproductive dynamic in the natural
world rather than converting nature into an instrument for human pur-
poses,21 and that the idea that production is action upon nature is therefore
essentially recent. Yet, given the outcomes in terms of environmental change,
where might the difference be?
Many kinds of evidence are used to infer the nature of past experience. In
Neolithic Britain, for example, the interpretation of pottery remains has led
archaeologists to postulate the development through time of difference and
discontinuity in social life; in the later Neolithic the pottery remains suggest
that life itself became more complex and fragmented. Hence, what was, ini-
tially, a series of interlinked and synchronised temporal cycles broke down
after c.3000  and more effort was spent on people differentiating themselves
from other groups and leading to the single grave of an ancestor from whom
descent could be claimed.22 When early texts, such as those emanating from
Mesopotamia and ancient Israel, are added to the evidence, then, for example,
 P-  61
the drawing of boundaries now becomes vital: between the farmer and the
pastoralist, and within the cultivated area. The last becomes ‘home’ and the
rest is wild, with nature being the place of threats such as wild predators and
destroyers such as the locust. Nature does not give produce but it is won by
sweat and toil, and the home settlement becomes the all-important site of
transformation of the wild into the domestic.23
Humans have no innate agricultural calendar and so specialists who medi-
ated between the cosmos and the farmer about when to sow, to water and to
reap, and to whom to distribute the crop, acquired special importance: these
were probably the first priests. Written sources from the lands of the Hebrew
Bible, for example, go further and point to the importance of such castes in
controlling scarce foods, such as meat, by insisting that consumption be
viewed as sacrifices to gods to whose goodwill only the priests had access. This
may even have been taken to the point of dealing with scarcity of meat (pork
and beef come to mind) by forbidding its consumption, making it taboo.24
There seems to be a gap developing here between the existential and the con-
ceptual, and this must have widened with the invention of syllabic writing in
Sumer, about 3300 . Separations are encouraged, too, by the fact that an
early use of cuneiform script was to compile lists: something is either there or
not there, like pass lists after examinations.25 In alphabetic scripts, the written
words are separate from, and less than, the life-world but, at the same time,
they confer authority on those who can interpret them. When the Greeks from
Attica added a focus on the word, then the world-slicing techniques of phil-
osophy were launched. Philosophy bakes no bread, it is said, but once bread is
baked by others then philosophers have time to teach, write and think.26
With western monotheism, the philosophers and theologians posited that
human problems were now only soluble by the supernatural, thus drawing a
dichotomy which led to ideas of science and knowledge being the only way to
heal that division and recreate the original Eden. But any such progress of the
type advocated by Francis Bacon (1561–1626), for instance, was hindered by
the continuing separation of fact and value, a fragmentation given immense
prestige by Descartes (1596–1650) with his cogito, ergo sum.27
If the shifts in human social attitudes that result from pre-industrial agri-
culture have to be prioritised then perhaps the most important of all was pro-
natalism. From the control that existed in forager societies, there was a shift
to staffing the farming with children and the army with aggressive young men.
The environmental consequences were always notable and persistent.

Fire and the farmer

The control of fire represents a continuity between foragers and agricultural-
ists. In the earliest types of agriculture, sowing, planting and cultivating are
highly correlated with the practice of burning vegetation, which also corre-
lates to dependence on seeds and nuts. There is also a global climatic effect
because large-scale fires in shrublands and forests are commonest and most
62 G E H
devastating when an ENSO event brings dry conditions to one of the regions
that it affects, such as the western Pacific during El Niño years.28 The inter-
action of climate and human activity is probably behind the finding
that methane emissions to the atmosphere from biomass burning were high
in the years  0–1000 but reduced by 40 per cent in the next 700 years.
One interpretation stresses the influence of wetter climates and population
reductions in the Americas in bringing about a reduction in methane after
about  1500.29
At all events, fire remained a feature of the landscapes of pastoralism.
Rangelands were often burned to remove dead vegetation of no use to
grazing stock and to encourage grasses at the expense of thorny shrubs.
Often these lands had been occupied by hunter-gatherers and so the fire con-
tinued their practices. In the case of mountain transhumance, fire could be
used to keep back woodland in times of warmer climate, as it was on lowland
areas which provided wild foods for domestic animals, such as heaths in
England. ‘Slash-and-burn’ cultivation was a widespread type of cultivation
in which forest, scrub and savanna were first burned and then a patch of land
cultivated. It was practised in Neolithic central Europe, by Melanesians and
Maoris, in the taiga of Siberia, and in Finnish forests, such was the versatil-
ity of the system, provided there was space into which to move when the plot
was no longer prolific in its yield. Food was not the only product: during the
European Middle Ages, land around Montpellier (France) was burned to
promote the Kermes Oak (Quercus coccifera) whose beetle Kermococcus ver-
milio yielded a red dye (cochineal) for wool.30 If such systems became sta-
bilised, however, with the plots converted to permanent cultivation, then the
use of fire diminished. The same is true of ‘imperial’ fire, where colonists
used fire a great deal on their entry into conquered lands (in eighth century
Iceland it was used as a marker of possession of a man’s land)31 but then sup-
pressed it whenever possible, especially in woodlands and savanna, seeing it
as a deleterious influence. In Australia, the indigenous use of fire prepared
the land for European pastoralism rather well, and fire produced the ‘green
pick’ upon which cattle thrived. As the land filled up with colonists, control
became more difficult and required the transcendence of property bound-
aries and a degree of neighbourly agreement that progressively became
harder to achieve. Hence fire suppression took over as the dominant policy,
with all its potential for fuel accumulation and wildfires.32 A final landscape
use of fire is in warfare, where it can frighten horses, remove the sight-lines
of weapons, smoke out enemies and remove cover. ‘Firepower’ is still the
measure of military might, though not always of effectiveness. As cities grew,
their demands for fuel wood increased the pressure on local woodlands,
scrub and savanna, for it is generally not economical to transport it very far:
Medieval London received wood from a zone roughly 120 by 40 kilometres
in area, even at a time such as the year 1320 when the price index for
firewood (with 1261–1270100) was 277, compared with 166 for wheat.33
 P-  63
It is even possible that burning, together with deforestation and agriculture,
changed the global climate, populating the atmosphere with many aerosols.
Thus, the end of the Little Ice Age (LIA) in the nineteenth century is helped
along by the cessation of many practices that had resulted in the firing of
biomass.34
The role of fire in ritual should not be ignored. It has an important place
in Hinduism and Zoroastrianism, for example, and was at the centre of sac-
rificial rites in ancient Israel. Potters and smiths were fire masters and both
produced high value objects, especially weapons: the ability to produce and
to work iron was probably never a purely material process. Fire was a sign of
both ineffable power and divine anger: the whole is encapsulated in the myth
of Prometheus who stole fire from the gods to give to humankind, but who
then suffered nightly evisceration of his liver as a sign of Zeus’ anger. But by
then he had given humans ‘all the arts’. So the adjective has come to mean
large-scale and potentially risky human endeavour which brings about
changes of great magnitude, though many users ignore the second half of the
story.

Management and impact

Fire was only one technique harnessed by humans: metals, draught animals,
wind- and water-mills, the plough, explosives and paper-making do not
exhaust any list of inventions that had environmental consequences. Similarly,
it is not possible to list all the environments and all the makeovers for which
our species was responsible even before industrialisation. But we can give
enough examples to convey a story of massive change over a long period of
time, constantly bearing in mind that the predominant source of energy for
human communities was the sun, mostly mediated via photosynthesis but
also through wind and falling water. The environmental impact of humans
was nevertheless increasingly channelled through technology, and the posses-
sion of a hard metal such as iron is the key to many alterations and impacts:
the term ‘iron age’ deserves a wider circulation outside the discipline of
archaeology.
The main categories of land cover which require attention are firstly those
land-based systems that produced mostly comestibles but also other organic
products such as wool and cotton, namely rain-fed permanent cultivation,
irrigated cultivation and pastoralism, together with their intensifications,
such as colonial ranching. These are aided by accessory systems such as salt
production and the construction of ships and harbours. A second main group
includes land cover where the totality may be important, as with forestry,
hunting grounds and gardens; then comes the inorganic materials in the
instance of minerals and the construction of the mostly non-living urban
centres, with the largest cities having a higher inorganic content. Water man-
agement provides the link to a third totally organic unit, which is the use of
the waters of the planet for fishing and whaling.
64 G E H

Land-based systems for organic production

Rain-fed agriculture cannot be ousted from a leading position in the environ-
mental history of the pre-industrial world, even though irrigation agriculture
(discussed below) became immensely important. Since some rain-fed systems
may benefit from deliberate storage, and most need water control in the form
of drainage, the water content of a soil is on a par with its fertility. This relates
in part to the physical nature of the soil’s top horizons and also to its content
of plant nutrients. The management of these features starts with ensuring that
the soil is physically present: that it is not washed or blown away. Thus, the soil
cover may be important in preventing heavy rainfall from moving the soil into
the run-off. Simple mounding was widespread in Africa, with units as large as
2 metres across and 1 metre high. Here, too (in Zimbabwe and Zambia for
example) tree roots and live trees were left in cleared areas so as to retain soil
even when there is no crop. Leafy litter used as a mulch, in places as far apart
as Tanzania and some Pacific Islands, performs the same function. The move-
ment of soil downslope can be checked by the construction of terraces, of
which there are many different types. The origin of terracing is not precisely
known but the first examples are probably from south-east and south-west
Asia before  1. During pre-industrial times, the practice was common in
many environments other than sub-arctic and the extreme fringes of the cool
temperate zone, though the flights of terraces were never so elaborate as in
irrigated regions. South America probably displayed the widest applications,
in mountainous, dry and marshland environments.
Everywhere, keeping the soil high in nutrients produced a great variety of
practices: ploughing, fertilising (including manuring) and rotations are
simple terms for multifarious actions to keep nutrients in soils, to add to the
store, and to recycle whatever was not consumed by humans or stock. Pre-
industrial techniques encompassed composting, mulching, and the addition
of materials such as calcareous marls, shells and mud from river beds. China
provides good examples of the use of all of these. Above all, nitrogen levels
must be kept up and so fallowing, crop rotation, fixation by leguminous
intercropping, and the addition of animal excrement (including that of
humans) are employed, as they were in the crop rotations of medieval
Europe. Keeping down competition for the chosen crop is central and so
weeding and pest control have a very long history: children may not be able
to plough but they can scare birds. The improvement of yield took a number
of forms which included the selection of varieties most suited to a place (and
a culture), and the import of new crops which flourished in a different place.
Wet rice, for example, must have been a radical change for people hitherto
growing rice in temporary forest clearings. Some seeds turned out to be
revolutionary in their capacity for high yields and thus potential for trade.
The use of the grape for wine is a good example, transforming many
slopes between the Caucasus and the Mediterranean by about 2000  and
 P-  65
thereafter being spread into numerous environments35. Lastly, the manage-
ment of the crop after harvest is environmentally influenced because deteri-
oration by fungi and bacteria, and competition from, for example, rodents
depend on the local conditions.36
The impact of an agriculture uninfluenced by fossil fuels is by no means
minor because, in many environments, it has been continuous for perhaps
8,000 years. When an area is taken in for cultivation, its ecology changes
markedly. Most unaltered ecosystems have mechanisms for a ‘tight’ recycling
of nutrients between the soil and the biota but cultivation opens that system
to spatial translocation, so that soil particles and nutrients may move downs-
lope, then further down a river basin and possibly into the sea. Upslope fer-
tility will be lost even though it can be caught by terracing or diverted into
flood plains lower down the watercourse. Catastrophic loss at times of flood
is common. In case after case, the coming of agriculture and its development
under increasing population pressures are followed by higher rates of soil
translocation, some of which finds its way into lakes or into the sea: little re-
telling of this story is needed. What is often less well relayed is the capacity of
land to regenerate under a reversion to semi-natural vegetation or under a
management regime which minimises soil loss, as happened in many pre-
industrial cultures. Some examples of soil loss, as in the famous case of Attica
as described by Plato (‘only the bones of a sick body, all the fat and soft of the
earth having fallen away’) has been re-read as the result of earthquakes and
landslides rather then poor watershed management.37 In central Mexico in the
sixteenth century, high population densities tested some environmental
thresholds but the Spanish conquest took away such threats by reducing the
native population; when the conquistadores expanded livestock production
they introduced transhumance, which accelerated changes in plant species’
composition. In places this in turn led to degradation from overgrazing.38
Impact may extend to changes in animal populations as some species are
attracted to human presence and crops whereas others are frightened away or
killed. Domestic animals are often used as carriers of nutrients from forests or
open grasslands into enclosed agricultural lands and in the woods and pas-
tures they alter the species composition by their selective grazing and brows-
ing. An agricultural society may bring about chemical concentrations (though
not on the scale of industrial communities) which have environmental
impacts: the crushing of mineral ores will dump possibly toxic fines into
streams and townsmen will not often bathe in the river downstream from the
tanneries.39 In times and places of aridity, it is perhaps possible that extra dust,
from bare areas of marginal cultivation, and herding would contribute to an
atmospheric burden that was by nature global.
Technique is not the whole story in the environmental relationships of pre-
industrial agriculture.40 Inside a social group, arrangements may alter envi-
ronment relationships: the roles of individuals may vary with small distances
of space and time (he/she may be a slave, a squatter, a peasant or a hired
66 G E H
labourer) and thus exert different pressures on a local ecosystem.41 Indirectly,
population growth is affected by the efficacy of patterns adopted to ensure the
survival of newly born children: if they work, then the environment is subject
to further immediate pressures. At times of acute food shortage, famine foods
may be subject to rigorous cultural evaluation: a product such as milk might
be unacceptable even if life-saving because its nature or its acquisition is
subject to powerful prohibitions. At another extreme, groups (perhaps com-
monest in Melanesia) which emphasise the necessity of social ties through the
lavish exchange of gifts may create environmental change in the acquisition of
the materials given away. Sometimes they are the same materials as are used
in economic transactions but which are transformed by the social and cere-
monial context.42 In shifting agriculture, the decision to move on may be
brought about by the incidence of fleas or the occurrence of a death just as
much as by the falling fertility of the plot or the rampant success of weeds.
War, too, may alter land cover indirectly: in the Balkans various episodes of
conquest moved out one population to be replaced by another: for example,
farmers were replaced by transhumant herders whose impact on the forests of
the higher slopes was profound.43 In earlier times, the incursion of the
Visigoths into Italy in the fourth century  removed the imperial protection
of water management systems and allowed the return of wetlands, the flood-
ing of plains and even landslides as at Piacenza in Emilia.44 Likewise, the
‘scorching’ of the earth of northern England (after an uprising put down by
Norman troops) in 1069 led to the spread of scrub and rough grassland, both
detectable by pollen analysis.
Environmental relationships may be different through space when one
economy may be possible but is not adopted for cultural reasons. The non-
use of milk in a swath of central Africa and most of east and south-east Asia
has been explained on ecological and pragmatic grounds but the categorisa-
tion of milk as unclean (cattle may be kept but the milk not taken) is prob-
ably more powerful. The introduction of dairy produce into parts of
south-east Asia as ceremonial items in Indian-origin religion during the
early centuries  lasted only about 1,000 years, for instance45. Hinduism,
argue two Indian writers46, is well suited to differentiated land conditions
since different castes can occupy dissimilar niches and adapt to the particu-
lar ecologies of hunting and gathering, plough agriculture, and shifting cul-
tivation. In the Andes, a self-sufficient Inca community (the Ayllu) ideally
had access to pastures, potato lands, irrigated maize fields and land for
cotton and coca. It was also a spiritual entity that worshipped the natural fea-
tures of the unit, especially the places where the founding ancestors had
emerged from the earth in order to provide irrigation water. Work on irri-
gation canals then became restricted to men of a certain spiritual and legal
status. After the Conquest, the Spanish retained much of the social structure
tied to irrigation rather than replace it with a European style of legal owner-
ship of rights47.
 P-  67
Transformation of relationships may be internally generated over time. In
Iceland in the Middle Ages, the word náttúra took on the meanings not only
of the objective conditions of human life but also the ideas of a natural ‘pecu-
liarity’ or ‘quality’ as well as a supernatural being or power. The sea was part
of this ‘natural’ world and to fish was to engage in an appropriation of the wild
which exposed people to dangerous forces beyond their control, such as
jumping whales and polar bears. If starvation threatened then fishing might
be taken up but at some times of famine even the easier route of hunting small
animals was occasionally eschewed in favour of the choice of enduring hunger
and staying in bed. Farming, by contrast, was an ‘inside’ activity which was
domesticated, settled and controllable. Hence, when people had to retreat
from upland grazing (atréttur) during periods of climatic downturn, such
as the Little Ice Age, they retreated into the settlement to protect the agricul-
tural core rather than adopting new shepherding practices that would be
better adapted to changing conditions48. The introduction of a new religion
can produce rapid change. Within a 45-kilometre radius in Senegal, there
have been contemporaneous wet-rice communities and drained-land areas
devoted to groundnuts. The introduction of Islam made some, but not all, of
the Jola people give up palm wine, pigs and ducks and adopt the trade-
oriented production of groundnuts; so, in the same regional conditions, con-
trasting economies have transformed environments in highly contrasting
ways.49 Culture may determine that the landscape of one period may be
regarded as iconic and almost everything else is a degradation: hedged enclo-
sures of early modern England and the combination of corn, vineyards and
olives of Renaissance Italy are two examples.50
The position is summarised by the way in which technology and symbolic
practices, such as ritual, are often regarded as equally necessary and effective.
To modern western eyes, technology is essential but ritual is effective only in
the symbolic realm. In pre-industrial societies they are usually inseparable: in
the case of the Mnong Gar of Vietnam, the technology of burning the forest
had to be right in order to achieve a total destructions of the trees but it
was also essential to call on the whole human and spirit community in a co-
operative effort.51 Christian imagery opposed the wolf and the lamb and so
wolves became, as it were, demonised and killed as symbols as well as preda-
tors on deer and sheep.52 Likewise, meteorology might be moral in the sense
that bad weather was sent from heaven as a punishment for human failings
and transgressions: medieval Europe, pre-industrial China and twenty-first
century Louisiana are instances. The reception of the Lisbon earthquake of
1755 shook science, religion, and the literary world alike, and may in fact have
dented the optimism of the Enlightenment.53
The management and impact of water control for farming cover a great
variety of practices. At one extreme was the creation of virtual aquariums in
the form of flooded fields, dry for only limited periods; at the other is the cre-
ation of ridges of soil dry enough to grow crops in what was essentially a
68 G E H
permanent swamp. Thus, irrigation as commonly conceived is but one type
(albeit a very important one) of regime within a wide spectrum of patterns.
Some brought water, some carried it away and some did both. The classic his-
torical locale for irrigation farming is Ancient Egypt. The Nile floods were
diverted into a system of canals and ponds whch held water back primarily to
irrigate the cereal crop. To produce the fields and watercourses, of course, the
existing vegetation of the valley had to be cleared (there are tomb paintings of
scrub clearance) and the animal communities extirpated: hippos and croco-
diles are poor companions to cereal-growing. Simple flooding plus ponding
allowed the irrigation of some 8,000 square kilometres of land, but the advent
of water-lifting devices such as the shaduf from c.1570  and the animal-
powered saqiya from c.320  each added about 15 per cent to the irrigable
total. Irrigation methods spread around the Mediterranean with Roman and
Muslim conquests: in eastern Spain, the Moors intensified and adapted the
pre-existing Roman systems. Here, their first main stimulus seems to have
been a royal whim to display exotic plants in palace gardens but then they were
responsible (by about  960) for the introduction of many new cultivated
plants: lemon, apricot, rice, cotton, bananas, cauliflower, watermelon, egg-
plant, henna, safflower and jasmine do not exhaust the list. Spinach and sugar
were added before 1038.54
South and Central America display management techniques at their most
diverse. Canals were dug and maintained for agriculture in the mountain
areas and for the royal baths in Mexico but much food production came from
a large range of irrigation methods that used pits dug in dry river beds, sub-
surface irrigation using gallery flow and floodwater retention. The latter
encompasses one continental speciality, namely the raised field lowland
system in which the surplus water is confined to canals and crops are grown
between on raised ridges. The canals might be dug right through swamp soils
to bedrock and the displaced soil used for the planting beds; or the swamp
soil might be pared off and ridged leaving canals to form between. Called
chinampa in central America, both types were common in Classic Maya times
 300–1000. About half of the area around Lake Titicaca in  1000–1450
was part of a canal system that both drained and irrigated; its high altitude,
however, made it vulnerable to any changes in climate towards cooler and
wetter conditions.55 A similar diversity of water control for the production of
taro in Polynesia was found: raised beds and pit cultivation drained water and
impounded it respectively, on islands with different rainfall regimes.56
In a classic description of wet rice cultivation in Indonesia, Geertz sug-
gested that terraced fields with a controlled water supply were, ecologically
speaking, aquariums. Although dried out seasonally after harvest when
ploughing would incorporate the stubble back into the soil, the water was
the key element because it not only allowed the plants to grow but functioned
as a medium for nitrogen-fixing blue-green algae and the water-fern Azolla
filiculoides as well as a source of animal protein such as fish and shrimps. Like
 P-  69
all such systems, it was labour-intensive and depended upon complex social
systems of water control. It could always be intensified in times of increased
demand and its survival suggests an adaptability and resilience of a very high
order.57 One source lists twenty-six management practices common in South
Asia wet rice cultivation58 and the key element was keeping up the nitrogen
levels, something that was recognised as crucial (though the term nitrogen was
not, of course, used) along with water temperature by the Chinese of the Han
Dynasty (206 – 220); leakage of nitrogen to urban centres was in part
restored by the use of composted human excreta. The potential for wet rice to
promote environmental change extends outwards from the realigned drainage
systems on controlled slopes to a manipulated landscape focused upon the
flooded fields. These were surrounded by forests that were the homes of shift-
ing cultivators but which might in time be converted to terraced fields and
become home to the dam, the sluice gate and the treadle pump.59
Lest we are too easily lost in wonder, the literature on irrigation systems is
peppered with references to failure. Many irrigation systems are vulnerable to
drought: in 1413 the Valencia region suffered famine because there was not
enough water to power the flour mills.60 In Meso-America there was periodic
famine (for example,  1446–54) caused by stress on productivity or by the
demands of unequal distribution of harvests, by the lack of royal munificence
at difficult times and by locusts, flooding, drought, frost and hurricanes.
In the Nile valley, the bureaucracy of the Old Kingdom seemed unequal to
coping with large-scale disruptions when the annual flood was meagre,
though the relationship to political instability at the same time is uncertain.
The Nile broke down again in the fifteenth century when about half the pop-
ulation was eliminated by the Black Death: the central control of irrigation
was unable to contain local conflicts and so manage the system with a smaller
labour force. Hence agrarian output fell by about 70 per cent. Scholars dis-
agree on the causes of the breakdown of the Lake Titicaca systems around
1480: climatic cooling is one possibility but this is disputed by proponents of
evidence of political instability at that time. The repeated references to polit-
ical factors in breakdown suggest that any cultural discussions must include
the structure of political life.61 The cultural and technological achievement of
the societies of some of the major river valleys, such as Egypt, Mesopotamia
and the Indus, led the scholar Karl Wittfogel (1896–1988) to term them
‘hydraulic civilizations’.62 He believed that only centralised authoritarian gov-
ernment, including many civil servants, technical experts and unfree labour-
ers, could run them successfully. The control of water and the control of
people went together. Inevitably, counter-examples have been provided of
powerful regimes that did not develop irrigation, but the notion that the sur-
pluses created by successful irrigation helped to consolidate the power of those
at the top of, as it were, pyramidal societies has not died. It is clear that in the
major Old World river valleys, those with power on Earth received their
authority from those on High and that the relationship had to be good. Thus,
70 G E H
all such societies ran on a fuel of technology, tax, royal power, magic and pro-
pitiation of the gods of Earth, sky and water.63 The existence of central pol-
itical control is also found in Polynesia but here it is associated with the
dry-land agriculture that is most prone to crumble under drought, hurricanes
and rapid population growth. Chiefs in such systems are the most likely to
embark on the aggressive acquisition of territory in order to keep their power.
So a drought that produced crop failure might also trigger a predatory war of
territorial expansion.64 The role of religion is brought out by the suggestions
that wet rice in Sri Lanka was introduced together with Buddhism.65 The
founding texts prescribe begging for the monks and so perhaps highly pro-
ductive farming made dependence easier.
There are alternatives. In Bali, the productive system was an engineered
landscape of rice fields, irrigation channels and tunnels, threshing soci-
eties and markets. The symbolic network is even more complex because it
embraces the production system, the wild flowers and transcendental con-
cepts as well. At the apex of it was the Temple of Crater Lake. This institution
had no control over any irrigation system and no coercive powers but it could
create new systems, control water flow and decide disputes. In effect it regu-
lates the flow of holy water from hilltop to the sea.66 There are choices within
the same environments, too. In Al-Andalus (Islamic southern Spain), Muslim
culture produced two different types of water distribution systems: a Syrian
type and a Yemenite type. (At heart, the one distributed water proportionately
and the other sold it.) The difference persisted after the Reconquista in the thir-
teenth century and its remains persist. A development like the qanat, adapted
to very arid areas of the Near East and Mediterranean was taken to Spain in
the eighth century along with the Arab conquests; from there to the Canaries,
Peru and Chile with the hispanic conquests and eventually to Mexico’s
Guadalajara region during its colonial period (1521–1821). The culture
changed but the technology remained virtually the same.67 In China’s Miju
River basin, the period from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries wit-
nessed a shift from a community-based system of water management to a
tightly bureaucratised one, as land was developed and native vegetation
cleared.68 Long-lived success leading to surpluses and the reinforcement of
elites undoubtedly happened, and later in the chapter there is some discussion
of stratification in pre-industrial societies and the environmental effects of
those social separations.
The ecological basis of all forms of pastoralism is the transformation of cel-
lulose, inedible by humans, into meat, milk, blood, horn, hide and dung. The
vegetation in these regions was usually low in stature And the regions were
often cold, dry, mountainous, high altitude, high latitude or swampy or,
indeed, some combination unsuited to domesticated crop production. The
wide variety of environments led to the selection of many different species of
domesticates and some remained semi-wild in the sense that there was
little genetic selection: the reindeer and the camel are examples. The list of
 P-  71
pastoralism’s animals is very long: cattle, sheep and goats are the most numer-
ous, but horses, camels, reindeer, mules and donkeys, llama and yak are all
used.69 Though able to eat a broad spectrum of plants, many exert constraints
on their management by needing fresh water daily or at other intervals that
depend on the lushness of the vegetation. Management is helped by species
which are gregarious and have a herd leader. The chosen beasts are not always
native species: the domesticated humped cattle of Africa (the zebu strain)
seem to have been imported into the Horn of Africa as part of Indian Ocean
trade and to have diffused from the east rather than from any northern
imports from Egypt and the Middle East.70 The history of pastoralism also
includes changes through time. In south-west Asia between 6000 and 3500 
ovicaprids were dominant, with some cattle; from 3500 to 1900  there were
more equids and a high level of mobility, and after 1500  the camel became
a staple in arid regions.
In contrast to the rice terraces of China or Bali, the management and impact
of pastoral agriculture seem small. Yet over large areas and through many mil-
lennia, the production of food and other materials from domesticated animals
has been a significant environmental force. The stereotype is derived from
nomadic pastoralism, with a group of culturally distinct and self-contained
people following an annual cycle around remote parts. Most pastoralists had
some knowledge of plant production, might have engaged in it and almost
certainly traded with its practitioners. Further, pastoralism took other forms:
there were sedentary groups as well as those who seasonally moved to good
pastures, often at high elevations (transhumance). The origin of pastoralism
in the Old World is generally thought to post-date settled agriculture and to
have started on the fringes of the farming cores of south-west Asia, though one
school is more convinced by the case for the west and central Sahara from
about 4500 . We might add examples like the rabbit in medieval Britain,
which was cosseted in carefully managed warrens but where in the Lakenheath
Warren of the Breckland (Norfolk) in the seventeenth century the wind
carried loosened soil 4 miles (6.4 kilometres) to affect 4,000 square metres of
land, including 800 square metres of arable, and houses collapsed under the
weight of blown sand.
The management of pastoralism mostly started with animal breeding. It
was desirable to breed individuals with the lowest possible need for water but
with good resistence to heat and disease. Inevitably, the major impact was on
the vegetation grazed by herds on their daily, seasonally or yearly movements.
Different animals have varying eating habits (cattle pull off leaves rather than
nibble them like sheep, for instance) and plants are variable in their resistance
to repeated mastication. Hence, lush edible grasses can be replaced by short
wiry species, thorny shrubs can colonise grassland and, in extreme conditions,
plants may be lost altogether and open soil remain. This is then prone to
erosion. In a transhumance system in Argentina, grazed slopes with grasses
were found to erode whereas those with trees stayed intact. The unanswered
72 G E H
historical question is whether this system was modified by the Hispanic con-
quest or whether this has been a feature since the system evolved.71 That such
patterns are not constant is shown by the prehistoric period in the Zagros
Mountains where, in 6500 , keeping animals was essentially a supplement
to a village-based crop agriculture. As the village population expanded and
animals had to be moved over larger distances, then the organisation of labour
had to be modified to move larger herds over longer distances: nomadic pas-
toralism was the result.72
Relations between humans and domestic animals can be very close, and it
is not surprising that many features of human culture impress themselves on
to the animals and on to the ways of keeping them. The size and strength of
animals can be impressive and, in farming societies such as those of ancient
Egypt and Mesopotamia, there was an unbroken nexus between the power of
the bull, fertility, and kingship: wild bulls must have been ‘the largest,
strongest and most successfully libidinous animals familiar to the founding
peoples of most ancient civilizations’.73 Those characteristics were taken into
the pastoralism groups that lived at irrigation’s margins: the bull has cults to
this day around the Mediterranean. The first letter in western alphabetic
systems is a bovine head: in cuneiform it is ∨¨ (an inverted triangle with two
dots over it), in Greek on its side with curved horns and in Latin on its back
as A. The connections between cattle and kingship in many African societies
are close: the prosperity of the kingdom, the fertility of animals, humanity and
crops all depended on the repeated performance of ritual activities which
linked kingship to cattle through the idioms of pastoralism. Where life
depended upon cattle, then women tended to be excluded from pastoral activ-
ities but when the effects of capitalism, colonial policies, and Islam are taken
away, then women may have had great influence in political and economic
realms. All pastoral groups, however, demonstrate practical knowledge of
their animals, and with cattle especially there are often symbolic systems of
naming, identification and classification which add up to a resilient adapta-
tion to the environmental conditions.74
In many pastoralist societies, the meat of the main animal is rarely eaten: the
sustained yield products are more valuable and so smaller species may be kept
for flesh. Many groups, however, do accord their focal taxon the privilege of
being sacrificed ceremonially. This is especially true of the role of the scapegoat
in which the failings of people are laid upon an animal which is sacrificed. In
the case of the Inca, llamas deemed to bear human sins were eviscerated and
the innards washed out of the city down the river. In addition, llamas evoked
songs and poetry, and a red llama joined the king in song at certain cere-
monies.75 Nobody knows how these close and complex relationships turned
some nomadic pastoralists into aggressive entities. Between  1000 and 1400,
those of central Asia shifted from running protection rackets on caravans, to
unleashing attacks on centres of civilisation to their east and to their west.
Competition with agriculturalists for land with both potential uses may have
 P-  73
been the environmental linkage but seems unlikely to be the whole explana-
tion: fidelity to an image of the imperatives of power derived from the posses-
sion of animals (in this case the horse) might well be another likely ingredient.
Hints have been given that none of these food-producing systems remained
static. During pre-industrial times, one of the most widespread changes was
one of the forms of intensification in which more crop per unit area per unit
time was demanded, either because of factors such as population growth, of
withdrawal into a smaller area because of environmental change, colonial
demands, or entry to a cash-crop economy. In the case of pastoralism there is
the convenient term of ‘ranching’ but, in dry-land and wet-land agriculture,
intensification occurred before the waves of European-style industrialism
reached them. One example of intensification of dry-land agriculture that
needed no fossil fuel input is the enclosure movement in lowland England and
the coeval increases in productivity that have attracted the label of ‘revolu-
tionary’. In parts of England (though by no means all), the end of the Middle
Ages saw a pattern in which common fields were the basis of food production.
They were ‘common’ in the sense of being communally managed and often
‘open’ in the sense that there were no fences or ditches between holdings.
Between 1500 and 1800 most of these areas were transformed into separate
properties under private ownership, usually with hedged and ditched fields.
This movement meant more control over a central aspect of productivity,
namely that of soil fertility. The key element is nitrogen (though the farmers
of the time were unaware of the science, they knew about the pragmatics) and
there had been many ways of keeping its levels up. Fallowing was a key prac-
tice because soil nitrogen could then accumulate by bacterial activity; folding
animals was another, because cattle and sheep tended to eat more during the
day but excrete equally by day and night so manuring the field in which they
rested; and planting leguminous crops such as peas and beans fixed nitrogen,
though these crops soaked up other elements, such as potassium, and grew
best on limed soils with a controlled acidity. The adoption of new crops was
usually made easier by private ownership and so the turnip, swede and mangel
became available from the 1620s onwards though, initially, they were not
popular outside East Anglia. Their leafy growth helped slow down nitrogen
loss from leaching and kept down weeds. In the seventeenth century clover
was added to the suite of available plants: it can fix 55–660 kg/ha/yr of nitro-
gen (N2) against the 30–160 kg/ha/yr of peas. Both could be grazed and so
fallow was replaced by manure production.76 From the end of the eighteenth
century, the rising populations were then supported calorifically by the potato
though its greatest contribution came in the succeeding decades. New vari-
eties of corn and animals and the concentration of manure by stall-feeding
cattle added to the rises in outputs that turned farming from something
largely directed at self-sufficiency into a series of commercial operations
aimed at a much wider set of consumers.77 In environmental terms, the new
patterns reduced soil erosion, especially on lighter and thinner soils. Animals
74 G E H
such as the skylark and corncrake diminished in number though edge species
such as the fox, whitethroat and blackbird increased, as did the rabbit at the
expense of the hare.78 On the edge of the city, the common land of a commu-
nity could be enclosed for gardens, ‘for show and pleasure’ in a double insult
to the poor.79
A different kind of product and a different spatial scale are represented by
the early history of sugar production, which is essentially an addictive luxury,
never having been a cheap source of energy80. It was introduced into the
Mediterranean under Islamic influence but then Hispanic merchants and
adventurers were responsible for a trans-oceanic breakout. By 1452 there was
a water-driven sugar mill on Madeira, and the island was exporting to England
by 1456. Madeira devoted itself to a monoculture and the levadas which ring
the slopes represent a re-shaping of the island’s slopes and watercourses (there
are some 700 kilometres of conduits and tunnels) to irrigate the cane. Gran
Canaria had its first mill by 1484 but in both cases the need for wood to boil
the cane began to limit production: it took 100 cubic metres of fuel wood to
crystallise 1 tonne of sugar. Westward shifts then included Brazil where the
forests supplied the fuel from the 1620s. Sugar transformed the economy and
ecology of West Indian islands, such as Barbados, where a variety of export
crops were replaced after 1660 by a sugar monoculture. The consequences of
a very rapid removal of forests (they had all gone by 1665) were dire in the
sense that the crop quickly ran into economic trouble because there was
insufficient wood and the soils were depleted of essential minerals. In order to
combat the latter, cattle were imported in large numbers but their heroic
efforts at dunging were too late. Environmentally, the disappearance of the
forest took with it two species of tall trees plus shrubs and ground plants. The
woodpigeon had gone by 1654 together with so many birds from forest-
canopy habitats that there was a noticeable absence of bird song on Barbados.
Such animal species as were left were increasingly referred to as ‘pests’. The
vacant ecological niches meant that two-thirds of the flora now came from
outside, including acacias, guava, grasses and tamarind. The soil lost its fertil-
ity and was itself washed away, with cane planting in trenches exacerbating the
rate of downslope movement. Watercourses draining forested watersheds
might have concentrations of 280 milligrams per litre (mg/l) of sediment but
bare slopes would raise that to 26,000 mg/l.81 The European (and especially
English) sweet tooth exacted a heavy price environmentally as well as in more
directly human terms.82
In neither early modern England nor the West Indies were these changes
brought about by a shift in access to energy sources nor by external environ-
mental factors. The notion of culture embraces institutional arrangements
and so the favourable attitude of the Portuguese and Spanish royalties
towards trade and exploration was helpful to the colonisation and sugar
growing in the Atlantic islands and Brazil; the acceptability to all Europeans
of slavery meant that immense supplies of cheap labour could be obtained
 P-  75
for work in the subtropics. But the improvements in sea-going vessels (and
especially the Portuguese caravela) acted as catalysts in opening up the widest
oceans to navigation.83 In the case of enclosure, there needed to be agreement
between landlord and tenants, and within the tenantry, for the procedures
to be implemented which often fell out in favour of the better off and the
dispossession of the poorest who were most likely to depend upon common
rights. This was worst in the case of the enclosure of heath and moor where
many controls on, for example, small-scale cultivation and on grazing had
not been enforced and a marginal existence had been possible. The broader-
scale enclosure by Act of Parliament characteristic of the nineteenth century
was an even worse time for such poorer people. Both examples show, how-
ever, that cultural attitudes are often paramount but that a technological shift
will produce an apparently sudden change in the conception of what is pos-
sible. Acquisitiveness then kicks in with some force.84

Accessory changes
Pre-industrial communities were not simply isolated patches of environmen-
tal change at intervals across the world. They exchanged ideas, people, species
and goods. Lists of examples would be endless: the worldwide travels of the
Chinese and the Portuguese in the fifteenth century, Bronze Age trade
between the British Isles and the Black Sea, the Silk Road between Europe and
China, the Muslim introduction of sugar into the Mediterranean, slave trades
across and out of Africa, are all examples. All kinds of scales and all levels of
environmental linkages were found.
One example of a commodity that was bulky but still precious enough to
be traded over long distances was salt. It was extracted from underground
brine wherever that was possible and its value was such that in the sixteenth
century 48 kilometres of wooden pipe for the brine were built from Halstatt
to Ischl (Austria) and a canal constructed from Lüneburg to Lübeck in north
Germany. Another major pre-industrial source was sea water, evaporated by
the power of the sun in warmer climes such as the Bay of Biscay and the
Mediterranean and by burning peat, wood or coal beneath clay or lead pans
of brine in cooler regions.85 Such was the demand for one of the chief pre-
servers of foodstuffs that the Roman Empire imported large quantities from
the The Wash on the east coast of England, and in medieval times the same
area was largely controlled by a few monasteries which needed the salt badly
enough to transport it to southern England.86 Since the ratio of discarded silty
material from the brine to extracted salt was very high, there were large quan-
tities of waste material. Some of this was added to the coastline to form a
raised ridge about 1 kilometre wide and 25 kilometres long parallel to the
coast (called The Tofts); other disjecta can still be seen forming parallel
mounds some 20 metres long and 3 metres high. If the demand for salt fell,
then the ponds could be coverted to grazing land or, as in the Mediterranean,
to oyster beds. For high-volume materials, water transport was vital, and there
76 G E H
is another environmental consequence in the modification of waterways by
dredging both inland and at the coast. Rivers, harbours and estuaries silt up
by movement of suspended matter along coasts and down the courses of rivers
as well as filling up canals. To keep them clear, the cheapest way is scouring:
damming up a good head of water and then releasing it so as to exert
maximum flushing power. This was practised for example in China in the six-
teenth century along the Xuzhou branch of the Yellow River when it was vir-
tually reconstructed under Pan Jixun, a feat which included as one of its minor
achievements the dredging of 35,000 metres of riverbed, possibly using the
iron ‘river-deepening harrow’ which was made by the thousand.87 In the slow-
water context of The Netherlands, the Dutch invented machines which loos-
ened the mud at high tide (for example, the krabbelar or ‘scratcher’) so that it
might be flushed out on the ebb, perhaps aided by a tidal reservoir whose con-
tents added to the scour. A floating horse-powered bucket dredger (the
Amsterdam mud-mill) was in use before 1600.88

Whole environments: forests, hunting and gardens

Environmental management in the pre-industrial millennia often extended to
environments where the organic whole was as important as any component
product. In all three cases there might well be an immediately useful output
such as wood, food and herbs but the whole might well reflect the owners’
culture in being an exhibition of non-material values, such as pleasure or
status. In agrarian economies, forests have been prized mostly for their prod-
ucts rather than their presence. Individual trees can be manipulated to
produce, for example, axe handles or tethering posts for animals.89 On a wider
scale, the contest between their usufruct and their potential as agricultural
land generally ended in forest removal. (The period of greatest destruction
starts in about 1800 and is dealt with as part of the discussion of industriali-
sation.) In 1700, the Earth held perhaps 6 x109 hectares of ‘primary forest’,
2 x 109 hectares of ‘secondary forest’ and 1 x 109 hectares of ‘unexploitable
forest’.90 Before 1800, wooded land on a world scale was seemingly illimitable.
Locally, though, the loss of tree cover might cause concern: in England,
maritime supremacy was threatened by the lack of oak for shipbuilding, In
eighteenth-century Sweden iron production was reduced by central govern-
ment edict so as to curtail the demand for charcoal, and in Mauritius there was
concern that the rainfall of the island was diminished by cutting down trees,
an idea extended to British India. We do not know whether the wholesale con-
version of forest to garrigue for Roman charcoal production caused concern
but it created large areas of saltus that contrasted with the previous silva.91
Large timber is needed for big buildings though even a farmhouse would eat
up 330 trees92 and a cathedral’s roofing, vault frames and scaffolding could
require the import of the right size and shape of timber as in the case of the
straight poles needed for Ely Cathedral in England which came from
Scandinavia. Ships’ masts needed straight trunks from, preferably, coniferous
 P-  77
trees, so opening trade from Britain with the Baltic and Russia and eventually
with North America and the Malabar coast of India. The special shapes
needed for larger wooden vessels after the fifteenth century came best from
oaks in wood-pasture, where they had space to grow in a more crooked
fashion. Money might then be made by opening out woods and selling the
timber, grazing beasts on the grassland and the harvesting the larger oaks in
due course, all to supply the 20 hectares of mature oak needed to build a
seventy-four-gun ship of the line.93 Smaller trees supplied many other needs
including, for example, fuel, implements, fencing, containers. To get a renew-
able supply of a variety of lengths and widths, coppicing was often used. When
cut at the base, many species send forth a multiplicity of shoots which can be
harvested on a rotational basis at the desired size. This technique might also
be used along with pollarding and shredding to take leafy branches for animal
fodder. Another source of loss was fire. Many coniferous forests are fire-
adapted but times of particular drought might allow immense fires: some
correlation with ENSO events is therefore likely. Warfare, too, consumed
woodlands by fire when opponents were smoked out, and instances are
known from the Classical Mediterranean to the Seven Years War of the eigh-
teenth century.
The protection of watersheds for ‘modern’ reasons is shown in seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century Japan, where much cutting on steep slopes was for-
bidden and restoration enforced where there had been clear-felling and
shifting agriculture, thus laying the foundations of midori no rettō, ‘the green
archipelago’.94 In India, King Ashoka protected all four-footed creatures of the
forests that were neither useful nor edible but this Buddhist act (c.256 ) was
unusual because the preservation of forests was more often as a land resource
primarily devoted to hunting. Hunting wild animals by violent means for
pleasure was largely an aristocratic pastime and, in some societies, the killing
of a large predator was a rite of passage for young men. The management of
hunting at its crudest might involve the capturing of an animal to be released
in front of the hunters but a more usual practice involved management of
habitat so as to foster the chosen species. In many regions of Europe after
around  1000, red deer (Cervus elephas) became the most esteemed quarry
and so predators were themselves killed, cover was maintained for laying up
and breeding, and there might be closed seasons so that reproduction was as
successful as possible. Louis XIV of France (1638–1715) spent three to five
days a week chasing deer and is credited with killing 10,000 of them over fifty
years.95 Common people were excluded whenever possible because they might
poach the animals (incurring heavy penalties for doing so) or might attempt
to convert land to crops or pasture domestic beasts. Thus, large areas of terrain
might carry some form of designation in which the hunting interests of
royalty were paramount though these might be delegated to lesser groups. In
medieval England the king had the rights to the red deer but lesser nobles
might be granted the right to chase lesser animals; some bishops had to make
78 G E H
do with rabbits. Eventually, many landowners created parks by fencing in
order to keep their deer under control, with one-way leaps to encourage deer
to enter but not to leave. Such parks might also be reserves of timber and
grazing, just as larger areas of royal hunting ground might be sold off to
replenish the royal purse. In many places these parks became the scenes of the
killing of driven animals and even ‘hunts’ by women, and were eventually
segued into public open space. St James’s Park and Hyde Park in London were
once royal hunting parks, for instance. In certain limited circumstances,
netting might be allowed as noble but mostly was condemned as suitable only
for ‘. . . fat men, old men, idle men and churchmen . . .’ Falconry, on the other
hand, was always esteemed: the Altai saker (Falco cherrug altaicus) was the
great pride of Arab falconers, just as the merlin (F. columbarius) was for ladies,
with the peregrine (F. peregrinus) as ‘jentyll fawcoun’, for a prince.96 Thus,
some species were singled out for special recognition, whether as prey or as
aids to the hunters, as were many specialised breeds of dogs.
Gardens, in contrast, have a wider social spread. The word is etymologically
akin to ‘yard’ and betokens an enclosed space. Within are grown plants for
utility (such as fruit, vegetables, herbs) and pleasure, (such as trees and
flowers) along with expanses of grass and water. Early examples are found in
Mesopotamia and Egypt, and there is a continuous history in most agricul-
tural societies of having an equivalent plot of land near the back door of a res-
idence. Only rarely does subsistence depend upon the garden, and it is more
likely to yield herbs and spices for flavour and herbs for medicines; the rich
are likely to cultivate exotic crops, such as vines and peaches in northern
climes, aided eventually by expanses of glass.97 The energetics of gardens
demand an intensive input of labour so that they rank among the most
manipulated and managed of all environments. So much is obvious of kitchen
and cottage gardens but it is largely true of the multi-hundred-hectare gardens
of great houses and palaces throughout Eurasia and the Americas where a park
might be turned into a ‘landscape garden’ by the planned planting of trees, the
diversion of watercourses and the removal of the dwellings of the poor. A big
enough expanse might also retain some of its wild species to be hunted or to
be a reserve of timber and grazing by way of ancillary income. As shooting
technology evolved in the later eighteenth century, then birds like the pheas-
ant could be reared en masse to provide park-based sport for even the visually
challenged gentleman, just like the red grouse on the uplands of Britain in the
nineteenth century.98 The rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate
are likely to have different ideas about the relative importance of dietary sup-
plements and visual, olfactory and tactile pleasures. The poor might concen-
trate on vegetables, herbs and perhaps chickens and a pig, whereas the rich
have the run of exotic fruits, smooth lawns, belvederes, ponds with brilliantly
coloured fishes, arboretums, mazes and jardins d’amour. The conflation of the
park with the garden in the English landscape garden of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries shows the social implications very well: it was above all a
 P-  79
symbol of exclusion and separation even if no village had actually to be razed
and rebuilt out of sight in any particular instance.99 In its apparent informal-
ity, rigid lines nevertheless persist in avenues of trees framing the approach to
the great house, in the classical form of the house itself, and in walled kitchen
gardens. No mazy lines were found in that other nexus of the exploding world
of the Renaissance and early modern times, the botanic garden. Its origins
seem to have been in the herb gardens of the medieval monasteries of Europe,
which exchanged plants over a continent-wide zone.100 The gardens were then
transformed into a site for curiosity (both proto-scientific and popular) and
later into a kind of market for the exchange of species between continents as
European exploration opened up new trade and new empires. Culturally, it
became a microcosm of what might be achieved by way of improvement of
the natural order (provided that the right people were in charge) perhaps even
to recreating the Garden of Eden. Such possibilities were also explored in
poetry and painting and, in essence, they and gardening can be regarded as a
cultural continuum.101
The cultural context of forests is also complex and historically very deep. It
tends to be recounted in terms of those attitudes which made for clearance
and those which helped protect the trees. There is, naturally, a tension between
the two but one which is resolved in favour of control and consumption if
there is any doubt. The Benedictine orders had no doubt that the reclamation
of all wild places was holy labour, and woodland was included: the Abbot
blessed the woodcutters and their implements because, ‘. . . a wild spot . . . is,
as it were, in a state of original sin.’102 There is a take-up of those kinds of ideas
into the Puritan view of the forests of North America, the clearance of which
was an act of redemption and clear sign that a divine purpose was being ful-
filled: progress, control and usefulness were the watchwords. It is an interest-
ing speculation as to what extent these outlooks drew upon a deeper fear in
European history of the woods as places of terror, with dangerous mythical
inhabitants whose lineage might well be descended from hunter-gatherers.
The resonances of Little Red Riding Hood may well go beyond even the more
springy branches of feminist theory. The protectionists can point to political
writers such as John Evelyn writing in seventeenth-century England not
merely about the likely shortage of oaks for ships but of trees as visible
symbols of human society. The oak became a symbol not only of maritime
power but somehow standing for the nation, like John Bull and roast beef. Add
to that the undercurrent of feeling from the colonies that forests and rainfall
were somehow connected, and the likelihood of keeping woodland rather
than felling it is increased. Stir in the probability of profit and the prospect of
pleasure and landowners began to initiate plantations, and governments to
look towards some kind of ‘scientific’ forestry: all this before the end of the
eighteenth century. In such circumstances, the approbation of Romantic
poets such as Byron or Wordsworth: ‘one impulse from a vernal wood may
teach you more of man . . . Than all the sages can’ is soon forthcoming.103 This
80 G E H
can be seen as a counterbalance to the notion that the clearance of forest and
the cultivation of land was a founding myth in western history from Classical
times onwards.104 Trees, woods and forests, then are tied in with our individ-
ual psyches and our national ethos, and fully amplify W. H. Auden’s more
recent poetic assertion that ‘A culture is no better than its woods’.105
A cultural context for hunting might run to many pages. The male ego is
much implicated in the sense that hunting for status seems likely in hunter-
gatherer times, that male aristocrats were the chief pursuers in cultures such
as that of ancient Mesopotamia and feudal Europe, and that in many places
the ability to kill large predators was an important rite of passage especially to
high office such as kingship, so one form of control is mirrored in another.
The pleasures of the hunt spun off into other activities, as noted by the
sixteenth-century Indian king Rudradeva of Kumaon: ‘The sentiment of self-
importance makes the enjoyment of women all the more pleasant after
hunting’ and in Europe, courtly love was often part of the experience.106 There
are wider social incorporations as well. In Classical Greece, the hunt was seen
as the triumph of the rational and humanist over the bestial and irrational,
but the medieval Christian view was somewhat modulated by the many
legends of the saving of the white hart, which had become a religious or royal
symbol, and that of St Eustace, who was converted by a vision of Christ in the
antlers of a stag that he was hunting; thereafter the wild beasts in the arena
would not touch him. Eventually, hunting might become a symbol of the
tyranny of the aristocracy and poaching acquired a risky respectability among
the peasants and any minor gentry who might feel excluded. The rise of
science loaded the scales a little further in favour of the wild animals though,
in the nineteenth century, Darwinism provided a counter-weight.107

Inorganic production: minerals and cities

The attraction of rock as a resource goes back as far as humanity. Once
farming became well established, then ores were sought so that first bronze
and then iron might enter the tool-kit. Stone’s durability attracted the builders
of monuments and other important buildings, and shiny forms of rock joined
gold and silver as precious items. Salt from underground deposits was always
sought since production per man-hour was higher than coastal salterns.
‘Mining’ has strong industrial associations but it was widely practised in pre-
industrial times:

Man puts his hand to the flinty rock and overturns mountains by the roots.
He cuts out channels in the rocks, and his eye sees every precious thing.
He binds up the streams so that they do not trickle. 108

The Classical economies of Greece and Rome were famous for their wide use
of stone and metals, and the flood of silver and gold from the Americas
worked as a spur to European colonisation during the fifteenth and sixteenth
 P-  81
centuries. The amount of environmental alteration caused by the extraction
of rocks of all kinds was very variable but usually nothing was allowed to get
in the way of the cheapest route to mining and processing. Where a small
local quarry was concerned, then there was no huge impact, but a major
quarry was there for all time. Deep mining required timber for shoring
tunnels and shafts and would probably need some form of drainage. Hence
the impact of mining extended to the surrounding area as effluent water
was led into streams and rivers, forests felled to provide mine timber, and
heaps of solid wastes piled up near the mine entrance. Wherever smelting
occurred, then these processes were intensified and air pollution might well
be added, with waste gases adding an especially toxic element detrimental to
most forms of life. Pliny the Elder ( 23–79) noted the use of bladders as
respirators by the workers in zinc smelters. As examples of the reach for inor-
ganic materials, we can note Roman mines as deep as 150 metres in Etruria
and five to six hundred Bronze Age mines in Austria each using 20 cubic
metres of timber per day. Medieval tin mining in England consumed farm-
land at 120 hectares per year, and a Cistercian monastery took 40,000 cart-
loads of stone to build; toxic gases affected cattle for an 11-kilometre radius
around a lead smelter in the Tyne Valley of northern England. Moreover,
there was an incipient trade in fossil fuels: these were to become the foun-
dation of the Industrial era but, even before, say, 1750, coal was in wide-
spread use where its transport (especially by water) was cheap: the River
Tyne exported 40,000 tonnes a year in 1700. Thus, London brought in coal
by boat (so it was called sea coal to distinguish it from charcoal) to supple-
ment its wood supplies, and a number of medieval and early modern procla-
mations against its use were made, mostly to no avail, so that corrosion of
buildings was noted by 1661. In more minor usages of fossil hydrocarbons,
seepages of tar from oil shales in China helped caulk ships, and natural gas
was led from surface leakages into bamboo pipes and thence burnt as street
lighting as well as used to boil brine in the refining of salt. Seepages of crude
oil were also known, and in the eleventh century  it was thought that they
would replace pine wood when the forests were exhausted; the oil was seen,
however, as a source of ink, not energy. Marco Polo talked of the black stones
that kept a fire going better than wood and gave out great heat. In 
800–900 Islamic rulers of the Baku region (now Azerbaijan) developed the
production of crude oil on a commercial scale for medicine, to burn, and for
weapons. They also knew how to distil it for the lighter fractions. Neither
culture seized upon the use of hydrocarbons to generate steam on an indus-
trial scale: the earliest uses of steam technology were developed from the
seventeenth century onwards, in Europe and their floresence is one of the
great environmental manipulations of the Holocene.109 The cultural context
is, as always, complex but two points can be made: why do some substances,
such as shiny metals and jewels, attract human attention to the point where
everything, including the environment, can be sacrificed in order to possess
82 G E H
them? Secondly, in pre-industrial times, it was mostly the slaves who worked
in mines.
Slaves are useful in cities, too. The concentration of people brings a con-
centration of materials, some of which need preparation, as with peeling and
chopping vegetables, and others need disposal such as excreta and general
rubbish. This is just a microcosm, of course, of the ecology of a city. It is a crys-
tallisation of energy and materials which it stores for varying lengths of
time.110 The pre-industrial city has a high organic content because much of it
is usually built in wood and thus has a relatively rapid turnover of its storage
components, not least because severe fires are frequent. The city must take in
enough energy to feed and perhaps warm its inhabitants, build enough struc-
tures to house them and their industries, and dispose of harmful wastes. This
ensures the creation of many microhabitats. Under calm conditions, a late
medieval city might build a heat island of 4 C, and the higher temperatures
allowed urban vineyards to persist into the Little Ice Age in western Europe.
Much of the heat came from wood: processing London’s beer and bread
requirements in 1300 for a population of perhaps 80,000 would have required
about 29–32103 tons of wood per annum, equivalent to at least 518,000
acres (209,631 hectares) of coppice.111 When, in the eleventh century, herring
was the chief source of animal protein, its preservation by smoking needed a
good deal of fuel, a demand somewhat diminished by a shift towards meat in
the mid-fourteenth century. Warmth encourages many species, most notably
fleas and mites, and it is not noted that rats and mice often die of cold. Towns
with poor waste-disposal systems need scavengers, and the pig, feral dogs and
birds (in Europe notably the red kite, Milvus milvus) all helped. If sewage went
into backyard cesspits then the organisms that cause human diseases, such as
dysentery and cholera, were encouraged. The reject material from the butch-
ers and the tanners needed a reasonable flow of water to wash them away to
be someone else’s problem or food for the gulls. It is easy to overstate however,
the contribution of urban centres to worldwide environmental change, for
until the nineteenth century most of them would now only rate the label of a
‘small town’: as late as 1700, only fourteen cities exceeded 200,000 inhabitants.
A city might well control the land cover of a large surrounding area though in
medieval Europe the monastic contribution to land-use patterns was proba-
bly every bit as great.
The culture of cities is a topic that has spawned an immense literature
though most of it deals with the nineteenth century and after. But one appar-
ent paradox comes down to us. On the one hand there is the phrase Stadluft
macht frei, in which the towns’ escape from many of the bonds of feudal
society is celebrated: the town was a place of innovation, both technical and
social. In symbolic opposition, many cities in many cultures were walled:
partly to keep out enemies but mainly to control who entered and left and to
make sure they paid the appropriate tolls.112 Some at least of the freedoms
were illusory or at any rate bought at premium prices.
 P-  83

Water and life

All societies have to have access to water to function. Indeed adult humans
must have roughly 2 litres per day if they are to stay alive.113 The planet has
great quantities of it but 97 per cent is in the oceans and 2 per cent in polar
and mountain ice; of the rest, 95 per cent is in underground aquifers. The
encounter with human societies is therefore mostly in the weather which
cannot be controlled, and in surface run-off which is a more likely scene for
attempts at manipulation.114 Intervention in the hydrological cycle must be of
great antiquity though no one knows when the earliest attempts took places:
small-scale attempts to divert a stream into a stand of wild grasses that might
yield harvestable seed heads might have followed the success of the grass stand
in attracting grazing animals, but this is highly speculative. Nevertheless,
effective water management became crucial in many solar-powered agricul-
tural societies, as discussed above under irrigation. The energetics of water
management are much helped by the pull of gravity, and so water from springs
and precipitation needs only a little help to be poured, so to speak, into con-
tainers on its way from hill to the sea. Getting rid of too much water generally
means enlarging the containers and speeding the water on its path or the one
chosen for it. Freshwater ecosystems are usually high in biodiversity and wet-
lands high in biological productivity. Water for direct human use, by contrast,
is best if low in biodiversity (especially of bacteria but nobody wants frogs in
the fountains, either) but all kinds of content are acceptable downstream pro-
vided that swift flushing takes place. Moving water against gravity led to some
early technologies being used in irrigation and also to the development of the
windmill which, like the watermill, might be used to grind corn or mineral
ores but might also lift water from areas subject to flooding or overall soggi-
ness, as with the medieval reclaimed lands around the North Sea in England,
The Netherlands, and Frisia.
The management and impact of water management therefore centre upon
three phases: supply, storage and removal. The supply may be to people, to
crops and to industry, and the removal from farmland, industry and urban
concentrations. Storage is less necessary in climates with year-round rainfall
and constant levels of demand, but this leaves a large number of societies
wanting to even out the supply. The requirements are also different upstream-
and downstream: supplies need if possible to be pure (though high mineral
content may help farmers) but the fluid needed to disperse toxic substances
need not be all that pure. Until the arrival of steam it was only by water that
bulk, low-value goods could be economically moved any distance at all. The
river lock and the canal are environment-altering pieces of technology that
catered to this demand. Apart from irrigation agriculture, the outstanding
example of water management must be its supply to cities. The Romans are
famous for their construction of aqueducts into cities and garrisons, and for
their ability to remove sewage (in such diverse places as the cloaca maxima
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of Rome itself and the multi-seat flushing latrine at Housesteads Fort on
Hadrian’s Wall in northern England), to the point where it took some time for
the equivalent achievements of medieval cities and monasteries to be recog-
nised. Among many examples, the Consiglio Generale of Siena in the early
fourteenth century had been responsible for the construction of 25 kilometres
of underground channels (bottini) to bring water to public fountains and also
dedicated at least one to industrial supply via the guild of the Arte della Lana.
In London at about the same time, the Great Conduit in ‘Cheapeside’ was a
‘Cesterne of leade castellated with stone’ and its supply was contested between
the ordinary people and the brewers, a competition seemingly ended only by
the Black Death.115 All such supplies needed upstream diversions of streams
or springs.
Another direct impact on freshwater life has been the demand for fish as
food. Preserved sea fish and locally caught fish such as eels, carp and pike were
highly desirable, especially if meat was sacrce or prohbited. So weirs and traps
were elaborated and ponds dug, from China to Ireland. In the 1600s the
demand for carp (Cyprinus caprio) turned the eastern edge of the Paris basin
from woods and wetlands into ‘mist-shrouded expanses of water and reeds’.
Both habitat manipulation and their classification as ‘pests’ meant that beaver
and otter were subject to population decline: beaver were classified as ‘fish’ in
Roman Catholic Europe and thus were substitutes for meat on fast-days.
Management in France failed to prevent over-fishing, provoking a full-scale
royal ordinance in 1289.116
Springs and watercourses invite propitiation: metal-using prehistoric cul-
tures threw precious objects into water, the Romans at Bath in England ven-
erated the goddess of the hot springs. The centrality of the Nile’s water in
Egypt was shown in rituals that related water to the hope and promise of life
beyond the grave. During Roman rule (200 – 200 was the peak time)
there were processions in honour of Isis in both northern Egypt and central
Italy in which a pitcher of water was carried by a cult official; the water made
visible the god Osiris.117 The religious rite of baptism is an obvious successor
and fits well into a land where water was scarce. Water plenty that needs
control also spawns a hierarchical mind-set: the example of Bali has already
been mentioned (p. 70), and the covenants of governments of the Netherlands
meant that from medieval times water engineering was part of the national
psyche, and its practitioners were allotted high rank. In thirteenth-century
England, all royal ponds south of York were co-ordinated by William, the
King’s Fisherman. Consider then that the pitcher of water and the sea-bank
are entirely isomeric: both of them contain and make control of the liquid
possible.

There go the ships . . .

‘. . . and there is that Leviathan: whom thou hast made to take his pastime
therein’, runs part of Psalm 104, summarising two important parts of human
 P-  85
relationships with the sea.118 Even if not potable, seawater can bear vessels, and
yield salt, fish, whales and other forms of marine life. All require technology,
aim to exert control, and have some impact upon the natural systems. At
the margins of the oceans, the extraction of salt resulted in the transformation
of upper salt marshes into dry land. In addition, many fish traps were set up
in intertidal zones to catch fish left by the falling waters and, of course, har-
bours were constructed and piers led out to protect harbour entrances. Fish
populations may not have been affected much by the traps and nets but from
modern experience we know how the movement of sediments along a coast
can be affected by training walls. In pre-industrial times these effects were
lower in magnitude but not absent. Whaling was carried on from medieval
times and the oil much sought for lighting; yet again, the populations were
probably little affected in the long term except in very popular hunting
grounds, such as the Bay of Biscay. Fishing was not normally managed in any
modern sense, nor were the animals bred for particular qualities, and so the
whole process has been much like hunting and gathering without the conser-
vation elements discussed in chapter 2. Many a medieval commentator
echoed a view that there was masterless wealth. Yet, in the thirteenth century
the commercial herring fishery of the southern Baltic disappeared when there
was enhanced run-off from land clearance in the Odra and Wisl/a basins; the
breakdown of herring stocks in the North Sea and off Skåne around 1400 may
have come from an interaction of heavy fishing and climatic change. As often
in later eras, one response was to search for stocks further away: off Iceland
and Newfoundland, for example.119 A European movement between  500
and 1500 from subsistence to artisanal and then to commercial fishing saw
impacts on progressively more pelagic species. As early as 1376 an English
document inveighs against the use of a beam trawl, which dragged up from
the bottom of the sea ‘all the bait that used to be the food of great fish’. The
herring was the heart of massive trade, as improvements in boats and preser-
vation methods became common; allied to changes in weather and climate,
the herring fisheries of the southern North Sea broke down after 1360 and
those of Scania between 1410 and 1420.120
Apart from the harbours, sailing ships are environmental factors only in a
secondary sense, if we accept the power of the oceans to process the wastes
ejected from the vessels. The development of the technology of the ocean-
going vessel is critical and, though the Portuguese carrack leads the top list,
the contribution of Islam was great: in the tenth century, several dozen kinds
of boats (all carvel-built) were catalogued and most had the lateen sail later
added to the square rig by the Portuguese. In Egypt, forests for the production
of construction timber were cultivated, to grow Acacia nilotica (in Arabic,
sant) but much more wood had to come from the western Mediterranean
provinces such as Al-Andalus in southern Spain. Dockyards with a military
function were the dar al’sen’a, which (via the Arsenale of Venice) give us today
the power and might of a great British football club.
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Human cultures and the sea are prone to romantic interpretations. The
early modern period and the nineteenth century alike purveyed the image of
the British as an island race with salt in their blood, which is no doubt why
the navy had often to press-gang men into its service. Small ships no doubt
provided an escape from conformist pressures, and all voyages and explo-
rations were an outlet for the authoritarian personality once he [sic] had
become the skipper, and in English at least ‘the ship of state’ figure of speech
conveniently overlooked the less savoury aspects of service at sea.121 Thus,
fear is probably bound up inexorably with navigation: the vastness of the seas,
their power to overwhelm, and, even for the stay-at-home, the risks of invest-
ment in maritime trade. The anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet who wrote ‘The
Seafarer’ probably both echoed and prefigured a widely held view when he
sang that,

He knows not,
Who lives most easily on land, how I
Have spent my winter on the ice-cold sea,
Wretched and anxious, in the paths of exile
Lacking dear friends, hung around by icicles,
While hail flew past in showers.122

So in pre-industrial times, the seas were open to partial control at a few places
on the coasts, but worldwide, very little. Beyond the sight of land, there
appeared to be practically no human influence upon the ecosystem processes
produced by evolution. That was an illusion even in medieval Europe yet still
an attitude to be perpetuated right into the middle of the twentieth century,
when the ships still went but the leviathans (and many other species) became
fewer and fewer.

D  

In one sense at least, this pre-industrial world has not disappeared. Though
there cannot be any terrestrial ecosystems that have not received the impacts
of industrialisation, many parts of the world function largely on flows of solar
power and not on fossil fuels. Many forest areas, unmanaged grasslands,
mountains and icefields receive only a fraction of their energy inputs via tech-
nology from coal, oil or natural gas, and so belong to this era rather than that
of fossil-fuel-powered industrialisation. Areas of crop production have been
moved towards dependence on oil and its products (usually termed ‘mod-
ernisation’) but there are still places where its penetration is shallow and
second-hand, so that human and animal power are dominant. Metals are
ubiquitous, but then iron was very widespread in most cultures before the
eighteenth century, albeit in much smaller amounts than in later centuries.
Nevertheless, the incidence of pre-industrial agricultural systems (‘traditional
 P-  87
farming’) is declining, often as local subsistence is abandoned in favour of par-
ticipation in wider markets by producing cash crops.
The ‘old ways’ have a certain romantic appeal, especially from a distance.
Where they resulted in a landscape with high aesthetic appeal and therefore
likely also to be one which attracted well-heeled tourists, then the pressures to
maintain such technologies and social structures have been high. Farmers are
paid subsidies to perform in a manner reminiscent of the past, for example,
by eschewing certain types of machinery, fertilisers and pesticides or by using
high summer pastures otherwise abandoned. So far the most obvious mani-
festation has been in ‘organic’ farming which usually accepts machinery but
not bagged chemicals so that its energy inputs are lower than inten-
sive ‘modern’ farming, but not at the levels of pre-industrial ‘subsistence’
farming.123 All, however, operate in a matrix of an industrialised world. Such
places, though, are appealing to well-off travellers: an advertisement for the
‘real’ Spain or Thailand is likely to lead to a landscape with relatively low levels
of modernisation of the rural economy, and very likely some poverty as well.
A last manifestation of the former ways is seen in groups with an ideologi-
cal rejection of today’s practices. Probably the best known of these are the
Amish cultures of the north-eastern United States, where the stricter adher-
ents travel in horse-drawn vehicles and eschew inventions such as the zip fas-
tener. Their farming methods, too, rely more on manure than on bags of
nitrogenous fertilisers.124 In consequence, they are the focus of a lively tourist
trade and are gradually marrying out; disappearance or Disneyfication seem
likely fates. Occasionally to be seen in western countries, too, are communi-
ties of the type left over from the alternative societies of the 1960s and 1970s.
The majority of those self-sufficient communes have disappeared but a few
remain in favoured climates and live by producing their own food, with a little
surplus for sale or barter. It is difficult not to suspect that they receive cash sub-
sidies but most rely on generating their own electricity, if they use it. Again,
the matrix is important: if the axe slips then the local Accident and Emergency
Department is no doubt a welcome sight.
Overall, therefore, we can discern islands of lower energy-intensity systems
within today’s world. These have more affinity with the pre-industrial rural
world and its environments (much less so with its cities) than those of today.
Some commentators regard them as seedbeds for a post-industrial future,
others as mere relics of the past, preserved for those on holiday or for chil-
drens’ history lessons. Such places (often in island form) are the common basis
for imaginary places where conditions are usually better than the prevailing
reality.125

S   

The Silk Road can be used an an image for the transfer of materials and ideas
which inevitably will lead to economic and ecological change. It connected
88 G E H
China and Europe overland and was active from Roman times until the four-
teenth century . News of Chinese technology and materials (rhubarb as well
as silk) came westwards, as did pathogens such as bubonic plague; Buddhism
and Islam went eastwards. It was open when empires created stable conditions
such as the pax romana and the pax mongolica, themselves sources of coales-
cence of economies and ecologies as well as the mixing of human genetics.126
The romantic view of this route makes it a symbol for the many channels of
trade and exchanges of materials and thinking that stitched together parts of
the world during the agricultural era. Less romantic and more effective were
the volcanic eruptions which disrupted climatic conditions over wide areas for
a few years at times when vulnerability would have been high:  536 was one
such (though that might have been a comet), 1258 and 1783 were others.
Thick ‘dry fogs’ were one widespread consequence and cold winters another.
The 1258 eruption in the tropics was certainly recorded in the tree rings of
Mongolia.127
There were different scales at which human societies coalesced during the
era of solar-powered agriculture. Obviously, it happened at local levels as the
population grew and people came into contract with their neighbours, with
whom they traded, fought and married. Larger-scale coalescences involved
migrations, when a culture was taken long distances, as with the Austronesians
who voyaged from Taiwan to Easter Island/Rapanui one way and Madagascar
the other. Nation states evolved from smaller kingdoms and principalities and
some aspired to become empires within which there was a dominant culture,
as with Rome. Empires might be contiguous pieces of terrain or separated
patches linked by sea or land communications and thus not always very
different from trade routes organised by one powerful elite: the transition of
India from a company fiefdom to a jewel in an imperial crown was relatively
simple. Trade often started as the transfer of precious goods and remained
thus while the carrying capacity of ships remained small and included the car-
riage of slaves as one of the most ubiquitous of cargoes. Three-fifths of the
people who crossed the Atlantic before 1500 were African and only they made
sugar and tobacco successful export crops. Simple exploration led by curios-
ity was a relatively rare determinant of pre-modern expeditions. The immense
voyages of China’s circumnavigations of 1421–23 seem to have left only a few
memorial stones and perhaps some DNA.128 The acquisition of materials or
the conquest of peoples were usually part of the leaders’ instructions even if
they were cloaked with religious motives, as when Islam and Christianity both
assumed that each of their faiths was destined to become the sole religion of
humanity. There was, however, no global consciousness before the coming of
cheap print, faster communications and better education, all following indus-
trialisation: the earlier era was a series of separate elisions rather like the blobs
in a lava lamp. Some bubbles were large, however: in the time of the maximum
extent of the Roman, Mauryan and Han Empires, a precious object might be
traded from Galloway in Scotland to Seoul in Korea. In the thirteenth century,
 P-  89
there was a world system in which its eight ‘circuits’ allowed trade (in expen-
sive items at least) from England to Indonesia. Chase-Dunn and Grimes iden-
tified twelve such entities (which they called ‘political/military interaction
networks’) and, by  1500, nine of them could be identified largely as a single
network, with only Indonesia, the Far East and Japan standing outside until
the nineteenth century.129 After 1500, largely regional trade became world-
wide, though with some areas of greater intensity than others: few merchant-
men voluntarily put into Tierra del Fuego. Yet by 1500 the older practices of
simple bringing-together of merchants had been amplified and overlain by
the transfer of technology such as the gun, and diseases which brought about
exterminations of peoples in the Americas, Caribbean and Pacific.130
The results in environmental terms are well known. The highest profile is
accorded to the transfer of species between continents, particularly where a
large-scale export crop was emplaced. Sugar is perhaps the best example but
there are several others, such as tobacco and maize. Tea and coffee were
expanded well beyond their original scales and ranges of production as
well. The range of species introduced to Europe, for example, is very wide.
The main crops of the Neolithic came from south-west Asia (that is, wheat,
barley, pulses, sheep, goats and cattle), and the Mediterranean zone acquired
sorghum from Africa as well as rice, cotton and sesame from south Asia. In
Classical times, the empires took in fruit trees such as apricots, peaches and
walnuts, pears and oranges from Asia. Muslim expansion took with it sugar,
the citrus family, rice and cotton. A selection of these crops was then taken to
the Americas (sugar and cereals being the most important but also sheep,
cattle and the horse) accompanied by many diseases of humans which proved
efficient at killing off 60 to 90 per cent of native American populations.131
Exotic animals populated aristocratic menageries: George III of Britain had a
zebra, for example, and there was a royal zoo at the Tower of London between
1235 and 1835.132 The ecosystemic effect in terms of coalescence was the
spread of large-scale cultivation which involved the disappearance of native
vegetation and, fauna and its replacement with a relatively uniform set of
exotics, as described for sugar on p. 74.
There was transfer of ideas, too. Without doubt, the people of the Hebrew
Bible put into place the idea of time as linear (though not infinite) rather than
as annually renewed, as had been the case with many foraging groups, and
this basic notion became virtually universal (excepting notably in Hinduism)
with the spread of European and Mediterranean cultures. Where an empire
holds sway, then it can enforce (usually with varying levels of success) its
hegemonic modes of thought which may well extend to the natural world. In
theory, for example, Muslim and Christian worlds should have pursued the
idea of the stewardship of nature rather than its conquest, though hard-and-
fast evidence is hard to find.133 In a classic paper, Lynn White argued that
Christian thought (as seen in iconography) favoured technology and that
therefore it was at the basis of the ‘ecological crisis’ of the twentieth century;
90 G E H
many trees have been felled in refuting and restating that controversy, which
resonates still.134 Empires of all kinds (Venetian, Dutch, British and French
especially) encouraged trade and territorial expansion, and the city’s place as
a site of technological innovation was enhanced with every vessel that
arrived.135 Their scientific elites influenced governments with ideas which
sound very modern and environmentalist and were often a direct response to
the destructive environmental policies of colonial rule.136 Lastly, there are
deployments of thought and practice that are capable of bringing about
greater coalescence but also deeper division. The development of measure-
ment (including that of time) in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance of
western Europe turned that culture into one that put quantification and
visual apprehension at the heart of modes of thought which were then taken
on everywhere else.137 Map-making can be seen as one expression of this and
one which, while allowing navigation and exploration, also permitted the
drawing of accurately placed boundary lines: Gerard Mercator’s (1512–94)
sixteenth-century contribution deserves special mention.138 Ambiguity of
coalescence and division includes the transfer of species in the sense that,
although the world is the more uniform in its crop distribution, the produc-
tion methods induce a separation of masters and servants (indeed, slaves in
some places) and a separation of profitable crop and unnecessary nature. At
an even deeper level, much of western culture in general is underlain by the
thinking of Classical Greece, which included environmental matters: the
names of Aristotle and Theophrastus are usually included in any discussion
of environmental ideas.139

A  

One of the abiding themes of the world’s agricultural millennia must be the
separations that became possible. Certainly by the early seventeenth century,
when John Donne wrote of his world ‘tis all in pieces/all coherence gone’
rather than of its ‘joint tenants’ and when J. S. Bach separated the fundamen-
tal harmonics of nature from those of a musical instrument in ‘The Well-
Tempered Clavier’ in 1720–40, the creative arts seemed to have latched on to
a resonating theme in human history. As populations grew and diversified cul-
turally, and as access to resources became differentiated within and between
societies, the developments typified by the discussion of coalescence came
into tension with those of stratification and fragmentation. Archaeological
research has pointed out the way in which the fragmentation of objects – with
parts being buried with the dead – both differentiated and cemented a social
identity in Neolithic Europe. This suggests that there were social practices
which effected both tendencies at the same time.140 One major avatar of frag-
mentation in western societies has been the growth of individualism where the
rise of the private sphere in Europe between 1000 and 1800 anticipates the
many trends of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This emergence had
 P-  91
periods of acceleration, as in the wake of the Black Death when there was less
feudal control and the family unit became dominant. Much of this was
cemented by the rise of the ‘artist’ (as distinct from the artisan) in the
Renaissance and the affirmation of the standing of the individual human in
the Reformation and the Enlightenment.141
There are many archaeological examples deriving from ‘prehistoric’
farming cultures, when it appears that the division of land resources between
groups becomes important and that markers need to be visible symbols of
such division, whether they be burial mounds on conspicuous sites or ditches
dug across the landscape. Few social historians fail to point out the way in
which separations of role and withdrawals of behaviour come along with suc-
cessful agriculture. It appears to hasten the dominance of men, for example,
and sharpens the focus on the rich as they sequester resources which then
appear as conspicuous displays of power. The grain surpluses of the Nile valley
are thus transmogrified into the pyramids and the other galaxies of treasure
designed to procure eternal life. Such societies often felt threatened and so
engaged in warfare with their neighbours which, in turn, required a pro-
natalist policy to sustain the warrior element in the population. Smaller-scale
actions have also attracted notice: the withdrawal of the lord and lady from
the common hall of the medieval manor to their private room (‘the solar’)
behind the dais, and the early modern development of the corridor in large
houses are further examples. Increased wealth meant an ability to own and
organise land for pleasure as in hunting parks and landscape gardens, and to
exclude the lesser folk from them by means of restrictive (and indeed often
draconian) laws.
The environmental consequences of these social crystallisations were
many and varied. Agriculture provoked a cultural evaluation of non-crop
species, with many of them being regarded as ‘other’ and therefore liable to
be extirpated. ‘Predators’, ‘weeds’ and ‘pests’ became sharply differentiated
in a way not native to foragers. Inevitably, some became extinct. The best-
known examples are perhaps the ground-dwelling birds of Polynesia, whose
species diversity plummeted under the land clearance and the introduced
rats of colonising people. Small populations of easily killed animals suc-
cumbed relatively quickly, as the history of the dodo, another flightless bird,
shows. Our focus is often on the visible loss of tree cover and its fauna (as in
the Caribbean) or the disappearance of a noted species (as with the retreat
of the elephants in China) but we need also to remember the multiplicity of
fungi, bacteria and other micro-organisms, and the complex communities
in which they lived that were also farmed out of existence. Farming may leave
fragments of earlier habitats in which a species is isolated so that the breed-
ing population is too small and too genetically uniform to survive for long,
just as it may improve the chances of species which flourish in edge habitats.
In Europe the common fox (Vulpes vulpes) is one of the latter category. The
highest profile of all such retreats has been given to forest cover though, as
92 G E H
Michael Williams shows, the industrial era has been the time of most clear-
ance. The calculation that a hand-powered pitsaw can convert trees to planks
at about 100 to 200 board feet per day, whereas a water-powered saw of 1621
can raise that figure to 2,000 to 3,000 board feet a day, is indicative of the
advance of technology, though it is eclipsed by the steam-powered band saw
of 1876 at over 20,000 board feet.142 The result in pre-industrial times is
summarised by Williams as,

. . . the pre-agricultural closed forest probably once covered 46–28

million km2, and more open woodland 15–23 million km2, and these
have been reduced by 7.01 million km2 and 2.13 million km2, respec-
tively. Other evidence based on historical reconstructions of clearing
supports the general magnitude of change as being between approxi-
mately 8.05 million km2 and 7.44 million km2. . . . [there was a] global
reduction of between 7 and 8 million km2 of closed forest, and between
2 and 3 million km2 of open woodland and shrubland . . .143

The other great change was in wetland habitats, where there were world-
wide shifts in land cover and land use on a variety of spatial and temporal
scales. Attention has been centred on massive schemes in Russia, China,
Holland, England and the United States in times before steam power was
available to pump up water and so drainage relied on gravity or wind-mills
and to a lesser extent horse mills.144 Many habitat changes were enormous
(much of the central Netherlands was stripped of peat bog for agriculture,
and also mined for the peat)145 but so were the smaller projects, which dried
out ponds and odd bits of reed swamp which might well have been a refuge
for migrating waterfowl. The same is true of patches of semi-wild vegetation
left from earlier land-use regimes, such as lowland heaths in Europe,
home to birds such as the nightjar (Caprimulgus europaeus) but which are
cheaply convertible to cash crops and grassland without the use of industrial
power.
Such lists are potentially endless and ought not to exclude the seas where,
for instance, the silt run-off from the land can affect the breeding success of
fish or even the food webs of adults; it is even possible that over-fishing can
be achieved in pre-industrial times if a heavy effort coincides with alterations
in water quality or with climatic shifts bringing about alterations in water
temperatures. But they all stem from basic human states of mind and
actions. The most important is that there were no overriding cultural
reasons why nature should not be altered by breeding of species, by extirpa-
tion of pests or by ‘improving’ the land cover. The second was the ability to
bring about the changes, increasingly through the use of technology as a
pathway through which to direct human and solar energies. In the linking
across the double helix there was an acceptance of the results, both social and
environmental.
 P-  93

R  

There is no shortage of self-representation of human and nature during the
agricultural era. There is writing in many scripts, pictures in several media,
and sculpture. Much of this is direct portrayal: of the way to reclaim marsh in
China, or of the desired landscape of Renaissance Italy. There are also indirect
messages, as when medieval Christian iconography showed that it was the
elect that had the technology: it was not the Devil’s work at all. There is also
the tantalising message of the image-rich walls at Çatalhöyük (in south-
central Turkey) at 9500 : men hunting, vultures and headless people are
depicted. One interpretation is that hunters became sedentary and then began
to domesticate, and that making pictures of wild nature was a way of taming
it in the mind (basically, overcoming fears) before taming the actual organ-
isms. On this hypothesis, the shifts in the mind came first and were followed
by the biological changes.146
Out of the material that populates thousands of libraries, museums and gal-
leries (and not a few private and sometimes illegal collections), perhaps some
selection can be made. The first item might be the portrayal of landscape as a
major feature in a picture rather than simply appearing as a backdrop. Art his-
torians are apt to disagree about such matters but let us plump for Giorgione’s
La Tempesta (The Storm) of the late fourteenth century. There are human
figures that might signify both fertility and destruction and there is, indeed, a
stormy sky. We can, though, read into it a moral ecology of birth, fertility,
destruction and change. They are all interwoven and so it is truly ecological,
with the natural world having a significant part.147 The second item is the
appearance of the kind of empirically based and systematic writing that shows
the emergence of the underpinning concepts of modern science. Competition
for the Founding Father [sic] award is fierce and who is to say whether
Newton, Galileo, Bacon or Descartes ought to claim the podium? Possibly it
was Newton (1642–1727) because he showed that the known universe could
be represented by equations and was therefore knowable; maths and physics
could become instruments of human happiness. But given that we want an
environmentally oriented hero, let us spotlight Stephen Hall who was elected
to the Royal Society of London in 1717. He laid the basis for work on the
human impact on air quality and vegetation change, not least by influencing
colonial authorities in France and Britain.148 The rise of the natural sciences
as the primary way to represent the world is, however, a nineteenth-century
story, as is Adam Smith’s view of the Industrial Revolution as a salvation for
humankind. We must not forget that writing is an essential medium for sci-
entific developments because, among other things, it enforces autonomy (and
allows permanence) for all manner of thoughts where definition and accuracy
are essential, as it has done since (at least) the time of Plato.149
Such discussions make us realise that what we have now is a narrow band
of material, from the people at or near the top of any hierarchy: a history
94 G E H
written by the victors, so to speak. Many groups are little represented:
women come first to mind, but the colonised and enslaved are also under-
mentioned. The native people of most regions were stigmatised as backward
and ‘savage’ and only recently has Traditional Ecological Knowledge been
revalued. Their environmental attitudes are often found in folk tales and folk
songs, as with the God of the Stomach in Note 1. Thus, the image of the
llama singing along with the Inca king shows at once the importance of a
domesticated and hence controlled animal but also one which had some-
thing to tell even a king.

O
As cultures became differentiated, so describing and interpreting their history
becomes more complex. To end this chapter, three themes will be condensed
from the mass of ideas and data available. An empirical picture from standard
historical information will be given first, looking at the actual extent to which,
by about  1750, the world was physically changed. This is followed by a dis-
cussion of the technology by which this was achieved but which discusses the
conceptual impact of technology as much as its actual physics. It acts as a
bridge to thinking about changes in the human imagination during the agri-
cultural era which had relevance for environmental change. The obvious
point at which to stop is the emergence of a written philosophy of the envir-
onment. The cliché has it that philosophy bakes no bread, but once agricul-
ture is established, philosophy springs forth in abundance.150

The world on the cusp of industrialisation

There are two main ways of assessing the state of the world in about 1750. The
first is look at current indicators of human-driven environmental change,
such as population, carbon dioxide or sulphate emissions and see if they were
showing upward trends by 1750; the second is to inspect maps of land use and
land cover for that date as a prelude to tracking change in later centuries. In
the case of the first, the picture is relatively simple: population has clearly
started to take off towards its global explosion after about 1850. It was not,
however, launched upon the steepest part of the curve. None of the other main
indications, within the limits of accuracy of their reconstruction, shows any
major rises in the eighteenth century with the exception of nitrous oxide
(N2O) which is probably correlated with the area under agriculture, the intro-
duction of legumes in crop rotation and the use of animal manure.151 A map
of the land cover of the Earth in 1700 would show some very definite areas of
cultivated land and pasture land, in places where we would expect: Europe,
south and east Asia and Meso-America, with a fringe in eastern North
America and a scattered presence in the southernmost parts of Africa. But
many maps underestimate the human presence: many savannas, for example,
were the sites of shifting cultivation, a practice also found in boreal forests.
 P-  95
Many maps show tropical forests as if they were virgin lands whereas it is likely
that some at least were quite intensively occupied (see pp. 33–4). Add in those
lands where fire was still an important tool for hunting and gathering popu-
lations, as in Australia, and the world’s land surfaces show ample traces of
enduring human presence, the more so since the stability of agriculture was
high in places such as the Nile valley, the wet rice lands of southern China or
the formerly wooded areas of north-western Europe. The seas are generally
left out of any discussion but land-use changes may well have added to arti-
sanal fishing in impacts upon some fish populations; the early dynamics of
whale populations are speculative but the shift of whaling centres from the Bay
of Biscay to the Atlantic and then to the Arctic might be interpreted as moving
on from depleted populations to untapped resources.152 Certainly, elephant
seals and penguins were cropped in large numbers during the eighteenth
century in the remote Falkland Islands.153 Nor do most accounts include
mining which changed land surfaces and contributed wastes to land, water
and air, and the islands of Polynesia and Micronesia are mostly too small to
appear on world maps but had long histories of profound human-induced
change.154

Technologies of a solar-powered era

Many technologies were introduced in this era. Some hunter-gatherers’
devices were greatly ‘modernised’: the hollowed-out log eventually becomes
the ocean-going galleon, and fire was deployed in the service of shifting agri-
culture. But the list of new ways of altering the natural world is very long:
metals, the plough, gunpowder, mills, water-lifting, surveying and the classi-
fication of plants are just some of the developments. Most of them increased
human access to energy sources: by tapping draught animals, wind or water,
for example. Some improved the energy intensity of crops by introducing
plants with a greater photosynthetic area than their predecessors: maize is one
instance. Animals with a greater efficiency of conversion of plant to animal
tissue were also worth taking around the world: cattle are representatives.
More interesting than mere chronologies of inventions and their dissemina-
tion is the effect of technology on attitudes to the natural world. Writing, for
example, is more than a set of graphic techniques, for it always enforced a sep-
aration of one entity from another in a way not necessary in oral communi-
cation; this led to the analytical thinking encouraged by the list, the formula
and the table.155 This activity, it has been argued, is a great way of separating
the objects of the world into those which belong to humans and those which
are definitely ‘other’. Technology, as both a social force and a social product,
can be seen in the example of the mechanical clock which made possible the
tighter co-ordination of more complex communities; it could also be a
mechanical representation of the universe or an automaton for entertain-
ment, but especially a celebration of human mastery over nature.156 Though
John Donne’s world may have seemed lost, the Renaissance was also busy
96 G E H
formulating a more worldwide and less regionally constrained view of the
cosmos. The organism with an autonomous mind and a map was now dom-
inant, aided by the clock, as we have seen, and also by good navigation, more
precise astronomical observation, selective breeding of crops and the begin-
nings of the chemical analysis of substances.157 Here was conceived the envi-
ronmental world of what J. F. Richards calls ‘the unending frontier’.158 Not
that such calculating rationality was universal: the great Lisbon earthquake of
1755 evoked a great deal of sensational journalism, attitudinal theology and
plain panic as well as helping to formulate the scientific turn in the philoso-
phy of Immanuel Kant.159 Another natural phenomenon, the resurgence
of the Little Ice Age created tensions after about 1560 which, it has been
argued,160 resulted in the blaming of witches for climatic anomalies and their
consequent persecution.

The emergence of philosophies

The combination of tools, ideas, trade and hegemony seems to have resulted
in the emergence of actual philosophies of environment. Some of these were
local and pragmatic but others achieved widespread adoption.161 In China,
for example, Taoism’s creed of going with the flow of nature, following the
model of water, was a major philosophical system. Its emphasis on quietism,
however, did not seem to stop the making over of much of China in the early
millennia .162 In India, the Vedic scriptures were called forest books
(Aranyakas) and celebrated the diversity of life in the forest and hence in
human society as well. In Europe, especially, hierarchies of esteem devel-
oped, with heaven and its inhabitants at the top, humans a good second, and
then the various attractive animals and so on down, with the non-human
world being desacralised. In parallel comes a widespread human tendency to
make dualisms and so the notion of the environment being part of ‘the
other’ allows it to be changed whenever a human demand is discerned. This
requires that any religious sanctions on the alteration of the non-human
world be lifted, a process fraught with consequences for the whole world
once industrialisation drew all places the more together. Sanctions of
another kind were always needed in cities in order to control redistributive
functions, and stratification was the usual result. One cultural effect of wide-
spread control was that Asian pre-industrial cities were cleaner than their
European equivalents because human excrement was normally sold for
manure in Asia but regarded as a discardable waste in much of Europe. At
one more level, this era saw the emergence of the nation state, which became
a powerful agent of environmental change, when, for example, it initiated
large-scale projects like land drainage as in the fenland of eastern England
in the seventeenth century. The state might also allocate ‘marginal’ lands to
individuals or companies to raise profits for the crown and thus hasten
the conversion of wilder ecosystems into more immediately productive
terrains.163
 P-  97
Agriculture was by and large a success. A few groups went back into hunting
and gathering because of conquest or expulsion but mostly its adoption was
an irreversible process in which one Malthusian trap was avoided even if
another eventually took its place. Looking back, it has an air of inevitability
even though failures are well chronicled.164 Some of the development of agri-
culture took place in what has been labelled the ‘Medieval Warm Epoch’
(c.1000–1200) with temperatures of 0.5–1.0 C above 1970 means, but the
phase may not have been global. In places like the western United States,
drought was widespread. More pervasive was the downturn between 1550 and
1850 (that is, the Little Ice Age) which straddles the agricultural era and the
early industrial eras,165 and in which there were consequences for agriculture
and settlement for a particular year or sequence of years even if not over those
centuries as a whole. Yet, although populations were sometimes devastated by
disease and famine, a global total of perhaps 50 million in 1000  had grown
to 800 million by  1750. The energetic underpinning was the ability of
hunter-gatherers to maintain densities of 0.01–1.0 persons per square kilo-
metre whereas, with shifting cultivation 10–80 people per square kilometre
was possible and sedentary farming garnered solar power to underpin
100–1000 people.166 The outcomes of the agricultural era are therefore both
physical (and were emphasised by the many millennia that it has occupied)
and mental, disseminated above all by the spread of writing in its various
forms. Both these themes must be taken forward and explored again in their
industrially powered transformations when many stomachs were filled by
agriculture but many more were born to growl.

N
1. Part of a Yoruba poem called ‘Hunger’ in R. Finnegan (ed.) The Penguin Book of
Oral Poetry, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1982, p. 166:
There is no god like one’s stomach:
We must sacrifice to it every day.
2. The treatment of energy in agriculture and pre-industrial resource use is out-
standing in V. Smil, Energy in World History, Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1994,
chs 3 and 4.
3. A. M. T. Moore, G. C. Hillman and A. J. Legge, Village on the Euphrates, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001.
4. T. Watkins, ‘From foragers to complex societies in Southwest Asia’, in C. Scarre
(ed.) The Human Past, London: Thames & Hudson, 2005, 200–33 is clear, up to
date and very well illustrated, as are the subsequent chapters on the equivalent
process in East Asia (ch. 7) and the Americas (ch. 9).
5. See especially D. R. Harris, ‘The origins and spread of agriculture and pastoral-
ism in Eurasia: an overview’, in D. R. Harris (ed.) The Origins and Spread of
Agriculture and Pastoralism in Eurasia, London: UCL Press, 1996, 552–73; idem,
‘Domesticatory relationships of people, plants and animals’, in R. F. Ellen and
K. Fukuyi (eds) Redefining Nature. Ecology, Culture and Domestication, Oxford
and Washington DC: Berg, 1996, 437–63. An explanatory account of the earliest
98 G E H
stages of domestication is in D. R. Harris, Settling Down and Breaking Ground:
Rethinking the Neolithic Revolution, Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Museum
voor Anthropologie en Praehistorie, 1990.
6. See for example M. Jones, The Molecule Hunt, London: Penguin Books, 2001;
L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, Genes, Peoples and Languages, London: Allen Lane, 2000; for
linguistics the innovative tome is C. Renfrew, Archaeology and Language: the
Puzzle of Indo-European origins, London: Cape, 1987 and Pimlico, 1998; also
P. Bellwood and C. Renfrew (eds) Examining the Farming/Language Dispersal
Hypothesis, Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2002.
7. M. P. Richards, R. J. Schulting and R. E. M. Hayes, ‘Sharp shift in diet at onset of
Neolithic’, Nature 425, 2003, 366; A. Whittle, ‘Very like a whale: menhirs, motifs
and myths in the Mesolithic–Neolithic transition of Northwestern Europe’,
Cambridge Archaeological Journal 10, 2000, 243–59.
8. In Table 1 of A. B. Gebauer and T. D. Price, ‘Foragers to farmers: an introduc-
tion’, in A. B. Gebauer and T. D. Price (eds) Last Hunters, First Farmers: New
Perspectives on the Transition to Agriculture, Santa Fe NM: School of American
Research Press, 1992, p. 2. The authors list thirty-eight ‘suggested causes’ from
the literature on the transition to agriculture.
9. V. G. Childe, The Most Ancient East: the Oriental Prelude to European Prehistory,
London: Kegan Paul, 1928; idem, Man Makes Himself, London: Watts, 1951.
10. P. J. Richerson, R. Boyd and R. L. Bettinger, ‘Was agriculture impossible during
the Pleistocene but mandatory during the Holocene? A climate change hypoth-
esis’, American Antiquity 66, 2001, 387–411. It is interesting that climate has
come round again, since after Childe it was often pushed into the background;
it is connected in part, of course, with the renewed curiosity about climatic
history brought about by ‘greenhouse’ anxieties.
11. W. J. Burroughs, Climate Change in Prehistory, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005, p. 263.
12. This paragraph derives from a large number of sources. They include, E. Isaac,
Geography of Domestication, Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970; J. Cauvin,
The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000, trans. T. Watkins (first published in French 1994, 2nd edn
1996); M. A. Blumler, ‘Ecology, evolutionary theory and agricultural origins’, in
D. R. Harris (ed.) op. cit. 1996, 25–50; D. Rindos, The Origins of Agriculture: an
Evolutionary Perspective, Orlando FL, Academic Press, 1984; L. Groube, ‘The
impact of diseases upon the emergence of agriculture’in D. R. Harris op. cit. 1996,
101–29; M. N. Cohen, The Food Crisis in Prehistory, New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1978. Most authors refer to Carol O. Sauer even if only to point out
that there is now a great deal more empirical evidence, but they usually acknowl-
edge his seminal work in, for example, Seeds, Spades, Hearths and Herds: The
Domestication of Animals and Foodstuffs, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1969,
2nd edn.
13. New finds and new dates invalidate any account as soon as it written. But both
regions have domesticates in the early Holocene.
14. They are often central to transhumance, where there is a once-yearly movement
from a permanent base to summer pastures. Pastoralism usually involves more
movements so as not to overgraze the forage in areas of slow plant growth.
15. J. Clutton-Brock, A Natural History of Domesticated Animals, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press/London: British Museum (Natural History), 1987.
16. Idem, ‘The unnatural world: behavioural aspects of humans and animals in the
process of domestication’, in A. Manning and J. Serpell (eds) Animals and
Human Society, London and New York: Routledge, 1994, 23–35.
 P-  99
17. A detailed budget is given for highland Scottish examples in R. A. Dodgshon and
E. G. Olsson, ‘Productivity and nutrient use in eighteenth-century Scottish
Highland townships’, Geografiska Annaler ser B 70, 1988, 39–51.
18. Care is needed in extrapolating erosion rates from present-day measurements to
historic times. See S. W. Trimble and P. Crosson, ‘U.S. soil erosion rates – myth
and reality’, Science 289, 2000, 248–50.
19. R. C. Sidle et al., ‘Interaction of natural hazards and society in Austral-Asia:
evidence in past and recent records’, Quaternary International 118–19, 2004,
181–203.
20. J. Goodman, P. E. Lovejoy and A. Sherratt (eds) Consuming Habits: Drugs in
History and Anthropology, London and New York: Routledge, 1995.
21. T. Ingold, ‘Growing plants and raising animals: an anthropological perspective
on domestication’, in D. R. Harris (ed.) The Origins and Spread of Agriculture
and Pastoralism in Eurasia, London: UCL Press, 1996, 12–24.
22. J. Thomas, Understanding the Neolithic, London and New York: Routledge, 1999.
This book is a revised second edition of Rethinking the Neolithic, 1991. It takes
its evidence from southern Britain only.
23. M. Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness, New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1991, ch. 2; K. Anderson, ‘A walk on the wild side: a critical geography of
domestication’, Progress in Human Geography 21, 1997, 463–85.
24. The idea is derived from M. Harris, Good to Eat: Riddles of Food and Culture, New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1985, and developed by J. Goudsblom, ‘Ecological
regimes and the rise of organized religions’, in J. Goudsblom, E. Jones and
S. Mennell, The Course of Human History, Armonk NY and London: M. E.
Sharpe, 1996, 31–47.
25. J. R. Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1977; idem, The Power of the Written Tradition, Washington DC
and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000.
26. Something might be said about philosophy and sliced bread, but perhaps better
not. See the extended discussion of writing in D. Abram, The Spell of the
Sensuous, New York: Vintage Books, 1996.
27. M. Oelschlager op. cit. pp. 65–72.
28. An easily accessed source of chronology for ENSO events is in the tables pro-
vided on http://sharpgary.org
29. D. F. Ferretti et al., ‘Unexpected changes to the global methane budget over the
past 2000 years’, Science 309, 2005,1714–17.
30. L. V. Trabaud, N. L. Christensen and A. M. Gill, ‘Historical biogeography of fire
in temperate and Mediterranean ecosystems’, in P. J. Crutzen and J. G.
Goldammer (eds) The Ecological, Atmospheric, and Climatic Importance of
Vegetation Fires, Chichester: Wiley, 1993, 277–95.
31. J. L. Byock, Medieval Iceland. Society, Sagas and Power, Enfield Lock (UK):
Hisarlik Press, 1993, p. 55, first published by the University of California Press,
1988.
32. S. J. Pyne, Burning Bush. A Fire History of Australia, New York: Henry Holt, 1991,
ch. 12.
33. J. Goudsblom, Fire and Civilization, London: Penguin Books, 1994; J. A.
Galloway, D. Keene and M. Murphy, ‘Fuelling the city: production and distrib-
ution of firewood and fuel in London’s region, 1290–1400’, Economic History
Review 49, 1996, 447–72; D. H. Fischer, The Great Wave. Price Revolutions and
the Rhythm of History, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
34. A. Robock and H-F. Graf, ‘Effects of pre-industrial human activities on climate’,
Chemosphere 29, 1994, 1087–97.
100 G E H
35. Wine-making was dependent on the development of sound containers of wood
or pottery. Once developed, though, there was probably little technological
change in wine-making between 1500  and the 1950s; H. Hobhouse, Seeds of
Wealth, London: Macmillan 2003.
36. Most books on world agriculture contain historical material which relates to
the subject of this paragraph. Useful concentrations are in G. A. Klee (ed.)
World Systems of Traditional Management, London: Edward Arnold, 1980;
W. Denevan, Cultivated Landscapes of Native Amazonia and the Andes, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001; C. L. Crumley (ed.) Historical Ecology, Santa Fe:
School of American Research Press, 1994; J. D. Hughes, Ecology in Ancient
Civilizations, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1975. Terracing has
spawned a couple of classic writings: J. E. Spencer and G. A. Hale, ‘The origin,
nature and distribution of agricultural terracing’, Pacific Viewpoint 2, 1961, 1–40
and R. A. Donkin, Agricultural Terracing in the Aboriginal New World,
Tucson: University of Arizona Press Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology
no. 56.
37. O. Rackham, ‘Ecology and pseudo-ecology: the example of ancient Greece’, in
G. Shipley and J. Salmon (eds) Human Landscapes in Classical Antiquity.
Environment and Culture, London and New York: Routledge, 1996, 16–43.
38. A. Sluyter, ‘From archive to map to pastoral landscape. A spatial perspective on
the livestock ecology of sixteenth-century New Spain’, Environmental History 3,
1998, 508–28. E. Melville, A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the
Conquest of Mexico, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
39. There is a worldwide overview with many detailed examples by A. M. Mannion,
Agriculture and Environmental Change, Chichester: Wiley, 1995.
40. See the complexities explored in D. Herlihy, ‘Ecological conditions and demo-
graphic change’, in R. L. DeMolen (ed.) One Thousand Years. Western Europe in
the Middle Ages, Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1974, 3–43.
41. R. Halperin and J. Dow (eds) Peasant Livelihood, New York: St Martin’s Press,
1977.
42. P. Sillitoe, An Introduction to the Anthropology of Melanesia, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998.
43. B. Fürst Bjelis̆, ‘Triplex confinium – an ecohistorical draft’, in D. Roksandić (ed.)
Microhistory of the Triplex Confinium, Budapest: Central European University
Institute on Southeastern Europe, 1998, 147–55; there is a much wider context
in J. R. McNeill, ‘Woods and warfare in world history’, Environmental History 9,
2004, 388–410.
44. N. Christie, ‘Barren fields? landscape and settlement in late Roman and post-
Roman Italy’, in G. Shipley and J. Salmon op. cit. 1996, 254–83.
45. F. J. Simoons, ‘The determinants of dairying and milk use in the Old World: eco-
logical, physiological and cultural’, in J. R. K. Robinson (ed.) Food, Ecology and
Culture, New York, London and Paris: Gordon and Breach, 1980, 83–91;
P. Wheatley, ‘A note on the extension of milking practices into Southeast Asia
during the first millennium A.D.’, Anthropos 60, 1965, 577–90.
46. M. Gadgil and R. Guha, This Fissured Land. An Ecological History of India, Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1993.
47. J. E. Shermondy, ‘Water and power: the role of irrigation districts in the transition
from Inca to Spanish Cuzco’, in W. P. Mitchell and D. Guillet (eds) Irrigation at
High Altitudes: the Social Control of Water Control Systems in the Andes, American
Anthropological Association, 1994. (Copy gives no place of publication.)
48. K. Hastrup, Nature and Policy in Iceland 1400–1800, Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1990; I. A. Simson, A. J. Dugmore, A. Thomson and O. Vésteinsson, ‘Crossing
 P-  101
the thresholds: human ecology and historical patterns of landscape degrada-
tion’, Catena 42, 2001, 175–92.
49. O. F. Linares, Power, Prayer and Production. The Jola of Casamance, Senegal,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. The introduction of Islam came
under French colonial influence but in a largely pre-industrial economic context.
50. For Italy, see E. Sereni, History of the Italian Agricultural Landscape, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1997, trans. R. B. Lichfield, originally published in
1961 as Storia del paesaggio agrario italiano.
51. G. Condominas, ‘Ritual technology in Mnong Gap swidden agriculture’, in
I. Nørlund, S. Cederroth and I. Gerdin (eds) Rice Societies, London: Curzon
Press, 1986, 28–41. The study was in the late 1940s but the group (Montagnard
in French) seemed little affected by colonial influences.
52. A. Pluskowski, Wolves and the Wilderness in the Middle Ages, Woodbridge:
Boydell Press, 2006.
53. J.-P. Poirier, ‘The 1755 Lisbon disaster, the earthquake that shook Europe’,
European Review 14, 2006, 169–80.
54. K. W. Butzer, Early Hydraulic Civilizations in Egypt, Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1976; K. W. Butzer, J. P. Mateu, E. K. Butzer and
P. Kraus, ‘Irrigation agrosystems in Eastern Spain: Roman or Islamic origins?’
Annals of the Association of American Geographers 75, 1985, 479–509.
55. W. M. Denevan, Cultural Landscapes of Native Amazonia and the Andes, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001; T. M. Whitmore and B. L. Turner, Cultural
Landscapes of Middle America on the Eve of Conquest, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001.
56. J. V. Kirch, The Wet and the Dry. Irrigation and Agricultural Intensification in
Polynesia, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
57. C. Geertz, Agricultural Involution: the Process of Ecological Change in Indonesia,
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963.
58. B. J. Murton, ‘South Asia’, in G. A. Klee op. cit. 1980, 67–99.
59. M. Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past, London: Eyre Methuen, 1973.
60. T. F. Glick, Irrigation and Society in Medieval Valencia, Cambridge MA: Belknap
Press of Harvard University, 1970.
61. S. J. Borsch, ‘Environment and populations: the collapse of large irrigation
systems considered’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 46, 2004,
451–68.
62. K. A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1957.
63. There are several papers on these themes in B. Menu (ed.) Les problèmes institu-
tionels de l’eau en Egypte anciennne et dans l’Antiquité mediterranéene, Cairo:
Institut Français d’Archaeologie Orientale, 1994.
64. J. V. Kirch op. cit. 1994, ch. 13.
65. J. Shaw, ‘Sanchi and its archaeological landscape: Buddhist monasteries, settle-
ment and irrigation works in central India’, Antiquity 74, 2000, 775–6. (The sug-
gestion about Sri Lanka occurs in the discussion section of the paper.)
66. J. S. Lansing, Priests and Programmers. Technologies of Power in the Engineered
Landscape of Bali, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991; J. S. Lansing,
and J. N. Kremer, ‘Emergent properties of Balinese water temple networks:
coadaptation on a rugged fitness landscape’, American Anthropologist 95, 1993,
97–114.
67. C. S. Beekman, P. C. Weigand and J. J. Pint, ‘Old World irrigation technology in
a New World context: qanats in Spanish colonial western Mexico’, Antiquity 73,
1999, 440–6.
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68. K. W. Butzer, ‘Irrigation, raised fields and state management: Wittfogel redux?
Antiquity 70, 1996, 200–4; K. Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants: an
Environmental History of China, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.
69. J. Clutton-Brock (ed.) The Walking Larder. Patterns of Domestication, Pastoralism,
and Predation, London: Allen & Unwin, 1989; J. Galaty and D. Johnson (eds) The
World of Pastoralism: Herding Systems in Comparative Perspective, New York:
Guilford Press/London: Belhaven, 1990; A. B. Smith, Pastoralism in Africa.
Origins and Development Ecology, London: Hurst, 1992.
70. O. Hanotte, D. G. Bradley, J. W. Ochieng, Y. Verjee, E. W. Hill and J. E. O. Rege,
‘African pastoralism: genetic imprints of origins and migrations’, Science 296,
2002, 336–9.
71. M. F. Molinillo, ‘Is traditional pastoralism the cause of erosive processes in
mountain environments? The case of the Cumbres Calchaquies in Argentina’,
Mountain Research and Development 13, 1993, 189–202.
72. K. Abdi, ‘The early development of pastoralism in the central Zagros moun-
tains’, Journal of World Prehistory 17, 2003, 395–448.
73. C. W. Schwabe, ‘Animals in the ancient world’, in A. Manning and J. Serpell,
Animals and Human Society. Changing Perspectives, London and New York:
Routledge, 1994, 36–58 at p. 37.
74. P. Bonte, ‘ “To increase cows, God created the king”: the function of cattle in
intralacustrine societies’, in J. Galaty and P. Bonte (eds) Herders, Warriors
and Traders. Pastoralism in Africa. Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1991, 62–86;
D. L. Hodgson, ‘Gender, Culture and the myth of the patriarchal pastoralist’,
in D. L. Hodgson (ed.) Rethinking Pastoralism in Africa, Oxford: James Currey,
2000, 1–28; J. C. Galaty, ‘Cattle and cognition: aspects of Maasi practical
reasoning’, in J. Clutton-Brock (ed.) The Walking Larder. Patterns of
Domestication, Pastoralism, and Predation, London: Allen & Unwin, 1989,
215–230.
75. G. Brotherston, ‘Andean pastoralism and Inca ideology’, in J. Clutton-Brock
op. cit. 1989, 240–55. The drawing of the king and llama singing together in the
epigraph to this chapter forms the frontispiece to Clutton-Brock’s volume.
76. M. Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England. The Transformation of the
Agrarian Economy 1500–1850, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
77. The story is much more complex than this. Orientation towards urban markets
was often found in medieval times but massive changes preceded much indus-
trialisation. In parallel with improving lowland agriculture, there was massive
enclosure and transformation of heath, moor and fen but there is no space to
discuss that here.
78. J. Chapman and S. Seeliger, Enclosure, Environment and Landscape in Southern
England, Stroud: Tempus, 2001.
79. The quotation is from near London in 1515 and given in J. R. Siemon, ‘Landlord
not King: Agrarian Change and Interarticulation’, in R. Burt and J. M. Archer
(eds) Enclosure Acts. Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England,
Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994, 17–33 at p. 30.
80. H. Hobhouse, Seeds of Change. Six Plants that Transformed Mankind. London:
Sidgwick and Jackson, 1985, revised edition Macmillan 1999.
81. D. Watts, The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture and Environmental
Change since 1492, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987; J. R. McNeill,
‘Agriculture, forests and ecological history: Brazil, 1550–1984’, Environmental
Review 10, 1986, 122–33; J. H. Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry: An Historical
Geography from its Origins to 1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989.
 P-  103
82. An eighteenth-century observer wrote, ‘. . . these two vegetables [coffee and
sugar] have brought wretchedness and misery upon America and Africa. The
former has been depopulated, that the Europeans may have land to plant them
in; and the latter is stripped of its inhabitants, for hands to cultivate them.’
Quoted by M. Williams, Deforesting the Earth, Chicago and London: University
of Chicago Press, 2003, p. 159.
83. This is of course a Eurocentric view. The Chinese may have circumnavigated
the globe (with vessels that would have dwarfed the caravel) and explored the
southern oceans in the fifteenth century, although they left relatively little
trace of their journeys compared with Europeans’ metamorphoses. See
G. Menzies, 1421. The Year China Discovered the World, London: Bantam
Press, 2003.
84. L. Jardine, Worldly Goods. A New History of the Renaissance, London: Macmillan,
1996. John Clare (1793–1864) is the great poet of nineteenth-century enclosure
and its deprivation of livings for the poor and space for nature.
85. R. P. Multhauf, Neptune’s Gift. A History of Common Salt, Baltimore and
London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.
86. S. Rippon, The Transformation of Coastal Wetlands: Exploitation and Management
of Wetland Landscapes in North West Europe during the Roman and Medieval
Periods, Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2001.
87. M. Elvin and Su Ninghu, ‘The influence of the Yellow River on Hangzhou Bay
since  1000’, in M. Elvin and Liu Ts’ui-jung (eds) Sediments of Time.
Environment and Society in Chinese History, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998, 344–407; J. Needham, with Wang Ling and Lu Gwei-Djen, Science
and Civilisation in China, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, vol. 4, Part
III, 335–9.
88. J. Van Veen, Dredge, Drain, Reclaim. The Art of a Nation. The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1962, 5th edn.
89. See, for example, L. Östland, O. Zackrisson and G. Hörnberg, ‘Trees on the
border between nature and culture. Culturally modified trees in Boreal Sweden’,
Environmental History 7, 2002, 48–68.
90. M. G. Wolman and F. G. A. Fournier, ‘Introduction to land transformation in
space and time’, in M. G. Wolman and F. G. A. Fournier (eds) Land
Transformation in Agriculture, Chichester: Wiley, 1987, for ICSU: SCOPE 32,
3–43. Their ‘primary forest’ would no doubt include such areas as Amazonia, the
ecology of which is now coming under revision, and many areas of forest where
fire history was also its human history. Their estimates, however, give some kind
of baseline.
91. C. Delano-Smith, ‘Where was the wilderness in Roman times?’, in G. Shipley
and J. Salmon op. cit. 1996, 154–79.
92. O. Rackham, The History of the Countryside, London: Dent, 1987, p. 87.
93. These data come from M. Williams, Deforesting the Earth, Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 2003, which is an immense store of data and his-
torical knowledge. An abridged edition is available from the same publisher,
2006, in paperback.
94. C. Totman, The Green Archipelago. Forestry in Preindustrial Japan, Berkeley, Los
Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1989.
95. M. Cartmill, A View to a Death in the Morning. Hunting and Nature through
History, London and Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1993, p. 66.
96. J. Cummins, The Hound and the Hawk. The Art of Medieval Hunting, London:
Phoenix Press, 2001, first published 1988. The saker (Falco cherrug) was like the
gyr falcons of northern Europe.
104 G E H
97. There is an immense literature and most of it concentrates on the gardens of the
wealthy as distinct from the less rich: see, for example, J. S. Berrall, The Garden.
An Illustrated History, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966. More critical
material can be seen in J. D. Hunt (ed.) Garden History: Issues, Approaches,
Methods, Washington DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, 1992.
98. T. Williamson, Polite Landscapes. Gardens and Society in Eighteenth Century
England, Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1995. For estimates of the quantity of park-
land in England see, for example, H. C. Prince, ‘England circa 1800’, in H. C.
Darby (ed.) A New Historical Geography of England after 1600, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1976, 89–164; and for descriptive work that takes
the story through to recent times, S. Lasdun, The English Park. Royal, Private and
Public, London: André Deutsch, 1991.
99. T. Williamson, Polite Landscapes. Gardens and Society in Eighteenth-Century
England, Stroud: Sutton, 1995.
100. There is a paradox in the sense that, for example, Cistercian monasteries were
supposed to be set apart from the world but, in fact, exchanged materials and
ideas between each other frequently in the course of disciplinary visitations
within the order. No doubt their lay brethren also brought in new ideas when
admitted to the order.
101. J. Prest, The Garden of Eden. The Botanic Garden and the Re-Creation of Paradise,
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981 and for connections in
other arts, J. D. Hunt, The Figure in the Landscape: Poetry, Painting and
Gardening during the Eighteenth Century, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University,
1976, pb edn 1989; it is almost exclusively about England.
102. Quoted in M. Willams op. cit. 2003, p. 112.
103. William Wordsworth (1770–1850), ‘The Tables Turned’. It might have been true
then but is now rather nonsensical.
104. R. Waswo, The Founding Legend of Western Civilization. From Virgil to Vietnam.
Hanover NH and London: University Press of New England, 1997. Waswo
points out that the chain-dragging bulldozer used to clear forests during the
Vietnam War was called the Rome Plow.
105. ‘Woods’ (Bucolics, 2), in Collected Shorter Poems 1927–1957, London and Boston
MA: Faber & Faber, 1966, pp. 257–8.
106. M. Cartmill, A View to a Death in the Morning. Hunting and Nature through
History, Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1993, p. 233,
quoting from India, M. M. H. Shastri (ed.) Syainka Sāstram: the Art of Hunting
in Ancient India, Delhi: Eastern Book Linkers, 1982; J. Cummins op. cit. 2001
describes some of the erotic associations of hunting.
107. M. Cartmill op. cit. 1993.
108. Holy Bible: The Book of Job, ch. 28 vv. 9–11, RSV. Probably about the fourth
century .
109. Most of this comes from various earlier works of mine, especially the two books
on environmental history and Changing the Face of the Earth, 2nd edn. See also
J. Needham (with Wang Ling) Science and Civilisation in China, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1959, vol. 3; A. Y. al-Hassan and D. R. Hill, Islamic
Technology, Paris and Cambridge: UNESCO/Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Marco Polo is quoted by J. L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: the World
System .. 1250–1350, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 349.
110. I. Douglas, The Urban Environment, London: Edward Arnold, 1983.
111. J. A. Galloway et al. op. cit. 1996, Appendix I.
112. The famous occasion on which J. S. Bach improvised a three-part fugue
for Frederick the Great upon the composer’s arrival in Potsdam in 1747
 P-  105
immediately followed the normal presentation to the King of a list of arrivals that
day at the town gate. ‘Gentlemen’, Frederick is supposed to have said, ‘Old Bach
is here’. (J. Gaines, Evening in the Palace of Reason, London: Fourth Estate, 2005.)
113. Water is an unusual molecule found naturally in solid, liquid and gaseous forms.
‘Liquid’ may be incorporated in, for example, plant tissues.
114. There have been attempts at affecting the weather before industrial-era tech-
niques such as cloud-seeding from aircraft. Cannons were fired into thunder-
storms in France to try to pre-empt hail falling on the grapes just before harvest.
As with cloud-seeding, nobody really knows whether or not it has worked.
115. R. J. Magnusson, Water Technology in the Middle Ages, Baltimore and London:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. More hygienic disposal of sewage did not
come to London until the industrial era.
116. R. C. Hoffman, ‘Economic development and aquatic ecosystems in medieval
Europe’, The American Historical Review 101, 1996, 631–9; idem, ‘Carps, cods,
connections. New fisheries in the medieval European economy and environ-
ment’, in M. J. Henninger-Voss (ed.) Animals in Human Histories, Rochester NY:
University of Rochester Press, 2002, 3–55.
117. R. A. Wild, Water in the Cultic Worship of Isis and Sarapis, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1981.
118. The leviathan of The Bible is a mythical beast but in modern Hebrew simply
means ‘whale’.
119. R. C. Hoffmann, ‘Frontier foods for late Medieval consumers. Culture, economy,
ecology’, Environment and History 7, 2001, 131–67.
120. R. C. Hoffmann, ‘A brief history of aquatic resource use in medieval Europe’,
Helgoland Marine Research 59, 2005, 22–30. The material on the beam
trawl is from the Parliamentary Rolls temp. Edward III, quoted at
http://sharpgary.org/FisheryTimeline.html, accessed on 10 July 2006.
121. It was first used by King Creon in Sophocles’ Antigone.
122. In R. Hamer (ed.) A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse, London and Boston MA: Faber
& Faber, 1970, p. 187.
123. Much ‘subsistence’ farming was, in fact, enmeshed in local and regional net-
works of trade and exchange.
124. ‘[Emerson] tells me he does not like Haynes as well as I do. I tell him he makes
better manure than most men’: Henry David Thoreau in 1852, quoted in
D. Foster, Thoreau’s Country. Journey through a Transformed Landscape,
Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 40.
125. A. Manguel and G. Guadalupi, The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, London:
Bloomsbury, 1999.
126. J. R. McNeill, ‘Europe’s place in the global history of biological exchange’,
Landscape Research 28, 2003, 33–9. The Silk Road was in fact a set of routes
rather than a single road. Central Asian mtDNA seems to be intermediate
between European and eastern Asian sequences: D. Comas et al., ‘Trading genes
along the silk road: mtDNA sequences and the origin of central Asian popula-
tions’, American Journal of Human Genetics 63, 1998, 1824–38. There is a broad
but detailed account of the silk roads which includes the complementary sea
routes in J. H. Bentley, Old World Encounters. Cross-Cultural Contacts and
Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1993.
127. J. P. Grattan and F. B. Pyatt, ‘Volcanic eruptions, dry fogs and the European
palaeoenvironmental record: localised phenomena or hemispheric impacts?’
Global and Planetary Change 21, 1999, 173–9; R. B. Stothers, ‘Climatic and
demographic consequences of the massive volcanic eruption of 1258’, Climatic
Change 48, 2000, 361–74.
106 G E H
128. The Portuguese saying, ‘E se mais mundo nouvera, là chegara’ (‘if it had been
bigger, we would still have gone round it’) sounds a little like boasting. This para-
graph derives mostly from chapters in A. G. Hopkins (ed.) Globalization in
World History, London: Pimlico 2002; and R. Robertson, The Three Waves of
Globalization, London: Zed Books, 2003. An holistic account of Europe per se is
in D. Levine, At the Dawn of Modernity. Biology, Culture and Material Life in
Europe after the Year 1000, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of
California Press, 2001, and the Old World is the focus of J. H. Bentley op. cit.
1993. See also J. L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: the World System
.. 1250–1350, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989; A. Gundar Frank and
B. K. Gills (eds) The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand?,
London and New York: Routledge, 1993; see also G. Menzies, 1421. The Year
China discovered the World, London: Bantam Books, 2002.
129. C. Chase-Dunn and P. Grimes, ‘World system analysis’, Annual Review of
Sociology 21, 1995, 387–417, especially Figure 1; C. Chase-Dunn and T. D. Hall,
‘The historical evolution of world systems’, Sociological Inquiry 64, 1994,
257–80.
130. J. H. Bentley op. cit. 1993.
131. J. R. McNeill op. cit. 2003. The classic text is A. W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism.
The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986/Canto Books, 1993. Note that other areas were recipients
as well: the Japanese word for bread is pan, presumably from the Portuguese mis-
sionaries of the sixteenth century; the ‘traditional’ Japanese lantern is said by
some to have been copied from the stern lanterns of European galleons.
132. D. Hahn, The Tower Menagerie: Being the Amazing True Story of the Royal
Collection of Wild Beasts, London: Simon & Schuster, 2003.
133. The ‘Franciscan tradition’ is sometimes quoted but in actual practice seems not
to have had much effect until much later, as Keith Thomas (Man and the Natural
World. Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800, London: Allen Lane, 1983)
points out for England. The legend of St Francis preaching to the birds seems
summative: he preached to them rather than listened. But see Stanley Spencer’s
reversed-boots version of it: St Francis and the Birds, 1935 (London: Tate Britain:
can be seen online).
134. L. Whyte, ‘The historical roots of our ecologic crisis’, Science 155, 1967, 1203–7.
135. C. Chant and D. Goodman, Pre-Industrial Cities and Technology, London and
New York: Routledge, 1998.
136. R. H. Grove, Green Imperialism. Colonial Expansion, Tropical island Edens and
the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995.
137. A. W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality. Quantification and Western Society,
1250–1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. In the case of time,
there is the unification caused by the adoption of uniform times but also the
division of time into periods of specific activities.
138. N. Crane, Mercator. The Man who Mapped the Planet, London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 2002.
139. Greek ideas are put alongside those of the Romans, Jews and early Christians in
R. French, Ancient Natural History, London and New York: Routledge, 1994.
140. J. Chapman, Fragmentation in Archaeology. People, Places and Broken Objects in
the Prehistory of South-eastern Europe, London and New York: Routledge, 2000.
141. P. Spierenburg, The Broken Spell. A Cultural and Anthropological History of
Preindustrial Europe, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991, first pub-
lished in Dutch; D. Levine, At the Dawn of Modernity. Biology, Culture and
 P-  107
Material Life in Europe after the Year 1000. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London:
University of California Press, 2000.
142. M. Williams op. cit. 2003, p. 247.
143. idem, ‘Dark ages and dark areas’, Journal of Historical Geography 26, 2000, 28–46,
at p. 42.
144. M. Williams (ed.) Wetlands: a Threatened Landscape, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.
145. P. J. E. M. Van Dam, ‘Sinking peat bogs: environmental change in Holland,
1350–1550’, Environmental History 6, 2001, 31–45.
146. M.Balter , ‘The seeds of civilization’, Smithsonian Magazine, May 2005, npg; see
also M. Cauvin op. cit. 2000. Further detail of this interesting debate can be
found in I. Hodder (ed.) On the Surface: Çatalhöyük 1993–95, Cambridge:
McDonald Institute, 1996; D. Lewis-Williams, ‘Constructing a cosmos.
Architecture, power and domestication at Çatalhöyük, Journal of Social
Archaeology 4, 2004, 28–59; M. Verhoeven, ‘Beyond boundaries: nature, culture
and a holistic approach to domestication in the Levant’, Journal of World
Prehistory 18, 2004, 179–282.
147. Giorgione lived from 1477 or 1478 to 1510, mostly in Venice. See B. Wittkower,
‘Georgione and Arcady’, in R. W. Wittkower (ed.) Idea and Image. Studies in the
Italian Renaissance, London: Thames & Hudson, 1978, 161–73.
148. See chapter 4 of R. H. Grove op. cit. 1995.
149. D. Abram op. cit. 1996.
150. In his restatement of this, Oelschlaeger adds theology and has them spring forth
‘with a vengeance’. Revenge for what? (M. Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness.
From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology, New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1991, p. 29.)
151. D. Reynaud, T. Blumer, Y. Ono and R. J. Delmas, ‘The Late Quaternary history
of atmospheric trace gases and aerosols: interactions between climate and bio-
geochemical cycles’, in K. D. Alverson, R. S. Bradley and T. F. Pedersen (eds)
Paleoclimate, Global Change and the Future, Berlin: Springer, 2003, 14–31.
152. E. L. Jones, ‘The environment and the economy’, in B. Purke (ed.) The New
Cambridge Modern History, vol. XIII, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1979, chapter 2. For one historic reconstruction see L. Hacquebord , ‘Three
Centuries of Whaling and Walrus Hunting in Svalbard and its Impact on the
Arctic Ecosystem’, Environment and History 7, 2001, 169–85.
153. P. H. Armstrong, ‘Human impact on the Falkland Islands’ environment’, The
Environmentalist 14, 1994, 215–31.
154. P. V. Kirch and T. L. Hunt (eds) Historical Ecology in the Pacific Islands. Prehistoric
Environmental and Landscape Change, New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1997.
155. J. Goody op. cit. 1977, p. 162.
156. O. Mayr, Authority, Liberty and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe,
Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.
157. J. Opie, ‘Renaissance origins of the environmental crisis’, Environmental Review
11, 1987, 2–17; L. Jardine, Ingenious Pursuits. Building the Scientific Revolution,
London: Little, Brown, 1999.
158. J. F. Richards, The Unending Frontier. An Environmental History of the Early
Modern World, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California
Press, 2005.
159. There is a symposium on the earthquake’s effects on European thought in
European Review 14 (3) 313–67.
160. W. Behringer, ‘Climatic change and witch-hunting: the impact of the Little Ice
Age on mentalities’, Climatic Change 43, 1999, 335–51.
108 G E H
161. J. Freidman, ‘Ecological consciousness and the decline of “civilisations”:
the ontology, cosmology and ideology of non-equilibrium living systems’,
Worldviews 2, 1998, 303–15.
162. The subject of a classic paper by Yi Fu Tuan, ‘Discrepancies between environ-
mental attitude and behavior: examples from Europe and China’, The Canadian
Geographer 12, 1968, 176–91.
163. R. A. Butlin, ‘The role of the state in the initiation and development of land
drainage schemes in England in the seventeenth century’, in P. Cereno and M. L.
Sturani (eds) Rural Landscape between State and Local Communities in Europe
Past and Present, Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 1998, 121–9.
164. Diamond gives eight examples of ‘collapse’ from agricultural societies (ten if
recent times in Haiti and Rwanda are included) and only two from modern
industrial economies. The latter two are Australia and China where judgement
is perhaps suspended for the moment. (J. Diamond, Collapse. How Societies
Choose to Fail or Succeed, London: Allen Lane, 2005.)
165. R. S. Bradley, K. R. Briffa, J. Cole, M. K. Hughes and T. J. Osborn, ‘The climate
of the last millennium’, in K. D. Alverson, R. S. Bradley and T. F. Pedersen (eds)
Paleoclimate, Global Change and the Future, Berlin: Springer, 2003, 105–41; J. M.
Grove, Little Ice Ages. Ancient and Modern, London and New York: Routledge,
2004, 2 vols, 2nd edn.
166. V. Smil, General Energetics. Energy in the Biosphere and Civilization. New York:
Wiley Interscience, 1991.
 CHAPTER FOUR

An industrious world

F 4.1 Derwentcotes Steel Mill.

Photograph by I. G. Simmons.

A little-known but crucial place in the development of the industrial-

isation of the world. The remants, now preserved by English Heritage,
of the Derwentcotes Steel Mill near Gateshead in north-east England.
Built in the 1720s, this mill’s coal-fired furnaces turned iron into steel,
in this case especially for cutting tools. Although iron was critical in the
development of industrialisation, the much harder steel was in many
industries an essential breakthrough. The mill packed iron bars into a
furnace with coal, to allow the carbon to be absorbed into the iron and
so harden it.
This 2006 photograph might fancifully be thought to depict the
workers having their midday break in the sun but in fact shows the site
as a lunch-time stopping point for a ramblers’ club. There is a connec-
tivity in this because it has been the development of industrial methods
of production that has released workers into a life-pattern with much
more leisure time. Also, it has permitted a revolution in attitudes: in the

109
110 G E H
eighteenth century, not many working people would have spend pre-
cious leisure time on a Sunday going for a 10-mile ‘ramble’ unless it had
some powerful attraction such as courtship. The coming together of
people who live apart but have common interests has been contrasted
with those who have to live and work together: Ferdinand Tonnies’s
(1855–1936) German terms Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft were for a
long time the accepted descriptions of the new (company or goal-
oriented society) and the old (community) styles of living and hence of
environmental relationships, especially in terms of travel patterns and
what would now be called ecological footprint. Both terms are perhaps
less useful in post-industrial conditions: indeed, why are these people not
shopping?
The photograph was taken in April 2006. The building is supposed to
be open on Sunday afternoons in the summer but not on this one.

A  I A

The treatment of industrialisation must give prominence to the development
of fossil fuels as an energy source. But energy for human use has always to be
channelled, whether via plant and animal tissue, inside a vast concrete and
steel sphere or, putatively, inside a magnetic field that is independent of tem-
perature.1 In the case of the application of coal, oil and natural gas the critical
material which formed the conduit down which the energy was applied
depended upon iron, increasingly in the form of steel. Not for nothing did the
chief driver of Soviet industrialisation take the name ‘Stalin.’2
This chapter is mostly about the period 1750 to 1950 when the possibilities
of exploiting fossil hydrocarbons expanded first into the western world and
thereafter taken to almost everywhere else.3 Some use for coal and natural gas
had been found in the previous era, and peat was a vital fuel in the Netherlands
from the seventeenth century onwards, but the scale and the technology for
railways, steamships and high-volume chemical production belong to the
years from the eighteenth century onwards. The inhabitants of the first centres
of industrialisation lived in a society where the per capita use of energy was
much higher than in the previous era. In Britain in 1870, 100 million tons of
coal were used, which produced the same quantity of calories needed to feed
850 million adult males for a year, Britain having about 10 million of them in
that year. Energy carries value socially and environmentally when it is embed-
ded in materials; in terms of this new iron age, we can contrast Britain’s pig-
iron production of 17,350 tons in 1740 with 2,701,000 in 1852.4 The key stage
in the transformation of an energy source such as coal to a metamorphosed
environment such as a mine and its wastes was the knowledge of how to
control steam under pressure, which was a central piece of technology for the
whole planet. The phrase ‘steam power’ has many resonances beyond the
(admittedly evocative) locomotive whistle.5
 A   111

T    

The underlying essential of the industrial era is the human ability to supple-
ment the flows of solar energy with that of fossil fuels which are essentially
mineral in form. Like living tissue, which they once were, coal and oil (and the
derivative natural gas) are carbon compounds; reflecting their geological her-
itage, they are distributed worldwide though not uniformly so.6 But their
adoption meant that industrial energy (and, indeed, most other materials)
was no longer dependent upon the use of surface area together with imports.
Yet we often overlook the fact that the energy subsidy was also applied to agri-
culture. Producing more wheat per hectare may be ecologically as significant
as producing millions of cheap tin trays but the latter has a higher profile since
the development of manufacturing is the new element. It implies the produc-
tion of a high volume of goods and their fabrication in factories on a concen-
trated site rather than piecemeal in workers’ houses dispersed through a rural
area. It comes to an apogee in this era in mass production on production lines
of the type associated with Henry Ford in Detroit from about 1900. One
outcome was the suburban family in the 1920s western country which now
had access to about 100 times as much energy (mostly from fossil fuels) as
their agrarian predecessors gained from child labour, a hired hand and an ox
team. Other relationships were transformed as well: until coal replaced wood
for firing bricks, more trees were consumed in building a house in brick than
in timber.7 The social context was important, too. Industry created develop-
ments which could often be accommodated in land hitherto held in common
and used for sport or grazing. If it was enclosed then landlords could develop
mines, houses, water reservoirs and transport links in a more or less unhin-
dered fashion.8
Since neither the raw materials nor the social context were favourable
everywhere, there were core areas of development of the new ecology and an
uneven spread in time and space via, mostly, trade and empire. Moreover,
none of the previous energy supplies was lost and new technology gave added
utility to such sources as falling water once electricity became known and con-
trollable. The cultural basis of the new economy cannot be overlooked, the
more so because the changes wrought were truly Promethean in scale and in
diversity of mode (‘all the arts’), admitting to no sense of limits in any form
or direction. James Watt (1736–1819), a Scottish improver of steam engine
technology, wanted to ‘find out the weak side of nature and to vanquish her’.9
The complexity of the idea (and also the mythology) of ‘industrial revolution’
is beyond the present volume’s scope but its historical centrality and its eco-
logical reality are beyond question.10

Evolution and dispersal

Even though steam power was critical, the application of water power was a
key precursor. New machine technology, especially in the English textile
112 G E H
industry of the eighteenth century, made factory-based production more eco-
nomical provided that the machines could be powered. The harnessing of
rivers was the solution, so that places like Cromford in Derbyshire tapped the
power of the River Derwent as it came off the uplands of the English Peak
District. From about 1750 canals were important in transporting bulky mate-
rials, such as coal, and commanded environmental changes such as the diver-
sion and tapping of tributary water supplies. Water engineering for mills was
not a new skill but it was applied at new scales and densities so that flights of
water-control mechanisms were commonplace: a knowledge that came in
especially useful when furnaces had to be supplied with blasts of air. Many
early industrial developments in Britain, Europe and eastern North America
could tap the skills and materials of the earlier era in water management and
in fuel supply where charcoal was the all-important material. To that extent
the ‘industrial revolution’ had many evolutionary traits and apparent quirks:
British iron-making was about the only industry not to change from wood to
coal by the end of the seventeenth century; it was complete only by 1790. The
new machine of star status was the steam pump, developed by pragmatic engi-
neers from the seventeenth century onwards, with Thomas Newcomen’s
‘atmospheric engine’ of 1705, notably developed by James Watt in the 1770s.11
These engines were especially valuable in allowing coal to be raised from
deeper mines than hitherto and, unlike horses and people, they did not tire;
one colliery in Warwickshire had employed five hundred horses to lift out
water bucket by bucket. Mills on rivers hitherto dependent on climate could
now rely on steam power if there was a good coal supply. The stationary steam
engine was converted into portable form as the railway locomotive and the
steamship, and its efficiency improved many times, with a type of culmina-
tion in the liquid-fuel powered internal combustion engine of the late nine-
teenth century: industrialisation could now go anywhere, so to speak. The new
economy also called forth a large chemical industry with improved versions
of acids, alkalis and dyes in which organic materials were replaced whenever
possible with inorganic inputs and the products became available in more
concentrated forms.
The core areas of industrial growth are well known: they evolved where
there was coal, iron ore and access to other raw materials such as the lime-
stone used a flux in blast furnaces. If England was the core zone, then many
other parts of Britain, Europe as far east as the Urals, the eastern United
States and eventually Japan, followed by 1900. Industrial production was
spread outwards from these core territories through the media of trade and
imperial direction, so that everyone in the world knew about their exist-
ence even if only through new iron-edged tools or cheap guns. By 1950, even
those countries without the basic industries of chemicals, iron and steel,
wanted factory-type production and so might develop electricity supplies
from damming rivers or importing oil. Some larger nations, such as India,
regarded heavy industry as essential to their post-independence economies.
 A   113
In cultural terms, it is interesting that very few nations turned their backs on
industrialism even when they had a choice. There might be a short sharp
debate about ‘modernisation’ that resulted essentially in economic and
political revolution, as with the restoration of the emperor in Japan in
1866–9, but essentially Walt Whitman in his Leaves of Grass of 1860 summed
up the scope and penetration of the new power source that had been har-
nessed:

His daring foot is on land and sea everywhere

He colonises the Pacific, the archipelagos
With the steamship, the electric telegraph
The newspaper, the wholesale engines of war
With these and the world-spreading factories
He interlinks all geography, all lands.

To sum up the development of fossil fuel-powered industry until 1950, we

might adopt four main but overlapping phases of dominant systems:

1750–1820 Water power, turnpikes, iron castings, textiles

1800–1870 Coal, canals, iron, steam power, mechanical equipment
1850–1940 Railways, steamships, steel, coal, chemicals, telegraph
1920–1950 Electricity, oil, cars, road-building, radio. From 1930 onwards
the beginnings of mass consumption.12

The ecology of the first one hundred years of industrialism clusters

around the processes of extraction (of mineral ores, coal and oil), of pro-
cessing in factories, and in applying the goods in social and environmental
fields. Each stage may need transport and each will have secondary effects:
early coalfields not immediately near iron ore evoked canals to transport the
coal, for example; the wastes from alkali plants poisoned fish in rivers many
kilometres downstream; coal mines had a strong impact on forestry prac-
tices because of the demand for timber underground; every trend combined
to foster the growth of towns and cities. The environmental consequences
were inevitably strongest near the centres of industrial activity; nevertheless
long-distance transport by water or railway meant that frontier industries
sprang up well isolated from the burgeoning cities the inhabitants of which
staffed the new factories: the best example is probably logging of primary
forests in lightly populated areas of North America during the nineteenth
century. So it is impossible to underestimate the outreach of the industrial
economy: where we do not detect it then it is probably because the traces
have been overlain by later changes. But look in the river sediments or in
the layers of the peat bogs or in the health records of the populations and in
the diaries that record the disappearance of familiar species of wild
animals.13
114 G E H

Environmental relationships
The closer we come to the present, the more material we have and so the nar-
ratives become more complex. In the case of 1750–1950, we are dealing with
an era in which there was widespread literacy aided by printing, a greater
curiosity about the world, and the desire to record the results of that wonder
in writing, graphics and in collections of specimens. So our main problem is
about how to treat so much information.
One major driver of environmental relationships is also one where esti-
mates have to be accepted: the growth of the human population. Even today,
censuses are not always reliable and the first systematic counts in the more
organised nations were not until the late eighteenth to early nineteenth cen-
turies: for example, in Scandinavia and Prussia, then the United States in 1790
and Britain in 1801. The data that emerge from demographic research suggest
that, in 1750, the world population was 720 million, rising to 900 million in
1800, then to 1625 million in 1900, and 2500 million in 1950. Before 1750 the
annual percentage increase was about 0.01 but between 1750 and 1950 it rose
from 0.5 per cent per annum. to 1.5 per cent per annum. Making some bravura
assumptions about populations since 50,000 years ago then perhaps 12.5 per
cent of all the people who have ever lived were present between 1750 and
1950.14 Their impact can be imagined by taking the level of industrialisation
of Britain in at 1900 to equal 100. Then the whole world in 1750 was at 127
but at 1360 in the 1920s, with 950 the level of the industrial core of ‘western’
countries.15 The summative indicator in terms of historical data is the fall of
the death rates in the world. This happened first in the industrialised coun-
tries but then elsewhere, longevity increased and birth rates took off as infant
mortality declined. Behind these trends we see not simply the effects of
the political and scientific exports but also of the worldwide distribution of
effective crops such as maize and the potato and the build-up of resistance to
infectious diseases as these spread following trade and exploration and
allowed people to build up resistances once the initial epidemics had been sur-
vived. So an Asian population of 480 million in 1750 became 1386 million in
1950; Africa grew from 95 million to 206 million in the same period and Latin
America from 11 million to 162 million.16
The onset and development of industrialisation are akin to a tsunami wave:
they tend to blot out everything. In this case the technological changes can
let us forget that the natural world was not necessarily in a state of equilib-
rium. Post-glacial changes in sea-level, for example, were not complete since
the relative effects of isostatic recovery and ice-melt were still in contention.
Some plant and animal species were still migrating under the impetus of their
own behaviour and not that of humans, and human populations themselves
were acquiring resistance to diseases. The largest-scale disequilibrium in the
natural world, however, was a global downturn in climate that is usually
labelled the ‘Little Ice Age’ (LIA). This had been in effect since about 1550 but
 A   115
its worst phase was the first half of the nineteenth century, with harshest
winters recorded in the northern hemisphere. The onset was not sudden and
there were anomalies (positive and negative) in both time and space but it was
probably the coldest interval in the Holocene. Its end was, however, relatively
abrupt for, soon after 1900, temperatures started the rise into today’s values.17
We must not infer that the LIA caused industrialisation but no doubt the easy
availability of coal was a cushion in some places, specially where centuries of
lower temperatures had retarded tree growth.
There were other climatic impacts as well. The ENSO cycle’s ability to affect
many countries with, variously, floods and droughts seemed to concentrate
upon China, India, South Africa, and Brazil, with lesser impacts upon the
Sahel, Sudan, Egypt, Ethiopia and Indonesia. Thus, very strong El Niño
phenomena were observed in 1790–3, 1828, 1876–8, 1891, 1899–1900 and
1925–6. The years 1876–8 saw a once-in-two-hundred-years drought which
was virtually worldwide. In many instances, there was drastic famine followed
by epidemics of cholera, malaria and tuberculosis. Colonial governments
helped little if at all and independent areas were left to manage as best they
could. In the Horn of Africa in 1888–1902 scorched fields were followed by
rinderpest, caterpillars, locusts and rats, then social and agrarian collapse
because, if there were no cattle, then there was no cultivation even when the
rains came.18 Volcanic eruptions do not have a cyclic pattern but climatic
cooling was certainly a result of the eruption of Tambora, Indonesia, in 1815,
followed by ‘the year without a summer’ in 1816.
The world was cool in the early nineteenth century but the reception of
technological change was warm. The advent of controlled and efficient steam
power stimulated the invention of thousands of machines for almost every
conceivable purpose. Queen Victoria’s journal gives her reaction to the Great
Exhibition of 1851,

Went to the machinery part . . . which was excessively interesting and

instructive . . . What used to be done by hand and take months doing is
now accomplished in a few instants by the most beautiful machinery . . .
We saw hydraulic machines, pumps, filtering machines of all kinds,
machines for purifying sugar – in fact every conceivable invention . . .

Those machines were powered by aeons of stored photosynthesis: a year’s

fossil fuel use in the twentieth century consumed perhaps 400 times the global
net primary productivity (NPP) of one year in that century19. Above all, coal
was the fuel of the nineteenth century, though being overtaken in usefulness
by oil in the twentieth. Hence, the steam locomotive is a cardinal invention
and emblematic of the nineteenth century, yet one which, by 1950, was
waning in favour of diesel traction. The all-important machine of the twenti-
eth century is the internal combustion engine, made possible by the extrac-
tion and refining of oil after successful drilling was achieved in 1859, in
116 G E H
Pennsylvania, its presence having been noted on a map of the 1750s.
This engine underlay not only cars, trucks and, perhaps emblematic of its
environment-altering power, the bulldozer but also powered flight. To add to
these two directly environmentally altering technologies there is a third
crucial, but indirect, piece of applied science in the form of the electric tele-
graph and its successors, such as the telephone, radio and television. All of
these speeded up both the transmission of ideas and the pace of action, adding
to the sense of mobility characteristic of this industrial era.
As we saw in the discussion of agriculture, there has to be a receptive cul-
tural climate for the adoption of technology. One of the outcomes of that era
was the formation of the nation state with an ability to provide wide-ranging
cultural contexts. In the epoch of industrialism, there was a state-backed urge
towards imperialism which had many environmental consequences. Not the
least of these was the export of the new technology to areas previously low in
its presence and the resultant impact on agriculture, forestry, wildlife and
urban growth. Most of this was devoted to the welfare and profits of the
imperial power and in many cases expanded its ‘ghost acreage’, freeing land
from the production of food and fibre at home since it could be produced
cheaply in the empire and transported cheaply in large ships. Then, after
World War II, the Zeitgeist went into reverse and colonies largely became inde-
pendent, albeit at varying rates. One carry-over from imperial days was the
taste for large-scale projects so that having a large dam became a symbol of
national status as did the possession of with an army, expensive military air-
craft, a national airline and Mercedes saloons for the governing class. The
urge to profitable (for some) export of minerals and crops was kept as well,
often aided by international development institutions such as the Food and
Agriculture Organization (FAO). Before 1950, however, it is unrealistic to say
that any nation state had an environmental policy, though outstanding indi-
vidual ills might be tackled in the richer places or in those with an environ-
mentalist legacy from their colonial years.
The industrial era can be seen as being one in which the human population
came to demand three ‘products’ from its environments. The first is utility in
the form of resources: energy as the binding resource that determines the
availability of many others, including food, water and minerals. The second is
sanitary, in the sense that the environment is expected to receive and prefer-
ably process the wastes produced by industrial and urban conglomerations.
Thirdly, there is outdoor pleasure, once confined to few social strata but
increasingly becoming available to many in the industrial nations if less so
beyond them. To provide these social benefits, new genotypes and new ecosys-
tems have been created. The new genotypes have mostly been deliberate cre-
ations, as in the case of plant and animal breeding once these had been put on
a scientific basis by an increasing knowledge of genetics. But incidental cre-
ations include species of plant adapted, for example, to grow on industrial
wastes of high toxicity. New ecosystems fall into two types. The deliberately
 A   117
created systems include the extension of agriculture at the expense of forest
and the reclamation of wetlands and the conversion of all kinds of terrain to
urban and industrial use. As with genotypes, there are creations that were not
foreseen, such as the extension of desert vegetation in steppe areas subject to
heavy grazing, the diminution of many kinds of marine life as a consequence
of heavy fishing, and the death of corals reefs if silted up by run-off from ter-
restrial land manipulation. The social appraisal involves the acceptability of
such changes. Although they are in general regarded as a price worth paying
for enhanced access to resources, reactions set in through the nineteenth
century which formed the basis for today’s conservation and environmental
movements. One generalisation which emerges gradually in the period to
1950 is that some human-driven effects can be truly global: that material
injected into the upper atmosphere (be it then acceptable like carbon com-
pounds or less so like radioactive particles from bomb testing) can affect
almost every part of the global environment.
So the extension and intensification of the ecological footprint of human-
ity are major features of the industrial age. The relationship is not so much
driven by population growth alone but by a ‘population  technology’ equa-
tion. This also needs a factor for the rate of population growth as this was often
accompanied by rapid environmental change.

Management and impact

Nothing can diminish the importance of fossil hydrocarbons for the world’s
ecology after about 1800. The getting of this concentrated supply of energy
from under the earth, its harnessing in many ways and its embedding into so
many materials, and the consequent creation of waste products were revolu-
tionary. It is no exaggeration, therefore, to called it a ‘binding resource’ in the
sense that access to coal, oil and then natural gas defined so many things:
economy, political power, health status and birth rate included. The ability to
get at energy supplies has also defined environmental relationships in terms
of the ability to manipulate the natural world, to transfuse it with wastes and
to encompass it symbolically as never before. If Newton’s equations con-
structed a knowable theory of the universe then modern communications
technology has made another virtual world but one with emotional appeal
as well.

Resources: energy and environment until 1950

If J. S. Bach’s ‘Well-tempered Clavier’ took a step away from the natural
world’s harmonies, then it is appropriate that the first item in his will com-
prises his shares in a mine.20 Coal had been known as a source of heat for
many centuries in the agricultural era but it was the knowledge of how to
generate steam under pressure that brought into being a huge industry
which was highly energy-positive, that is, every joule invested was repaid by
access to many thousands more.21 The concentration of the energy in coal
118 G E H
(and much more so in oil) made portability possible and so the power of
steam-driven (and then the internal combustion engine and electricity)
could be taken to hitherto remote places. The tiny railways up to hill sta-
tions of the British Raj in India say ‘steam and conquest’ in each blast of the
cylinders.
The ecology of the coal-mine and the oilfield are well known. The coal-
mine affects land, air and water in its immediate vicinity, but the oilfield is
more readily contained provided there no large accidents. Both oil and coal
needed cheap forms of transport if they were to be used away from their geo-
logical bases: the railway in the one case and pipelines-plus-tankers in the
other. Each took up land for installations and each produced emissions to air
and water; oil refineries, in particular, have in the past given off cocktails of
organic compounds to the air and water as well as using large quantities of
water for cooling processes. Coal has been produced by open excavations as
well as from deep shaft mines, and large quantities of unusable spoil are
created as well as disturbed drainage and, if the surface is not restored, great
scars across the landscape. Almost every shaft mine before the middle of the
twentieth century had a smoking waste tip; if possible, railways or a conveyor
system were used to take this material to be tipped away from the settlement,
perhaps to an open and uncultivated hillside or even offshore. Management
in the period to 1950 was, except in a few progressive places, driven by prof-
itability, and the effect on the human population and the environment was
generally regarded as part of the package that was crammed with cheap
energy. But this management was successful in delivering energy: a solar-
powered agriculturalist averages a throughput of 10 to 20,000 kilocalories per
capitum per day (kcal/cap/day), whereas members of early industrial societies
manage 70,000 kcal/cap/day and then, in full industrialisation, 120,000
kcal/cap/day. The access to resources made possible by the harnessing of fossil
fuels was immense and although not on the scale of the post-1950 years, nev-
ertheless worldwide in its reach and global in its effects. Few, if any, ecosys-
tems failed to receive some transformation even if it was only in the form of
aerosol fallout of, for example, lead (from its use as an additive in vehicle fuel)
on to polar ice caps and radioactive particles (from testing of nuclear
weapons) on to the high tundras of the north circumpolar zone. Many of the
failed attempts to climb Mount Everest in the Himalayas left rubbish as well
as the occasional undecayed body of a climber.
The export of industrial technologies to areas outside the core zones of
Europe, North America and East Asia followed two main channels of impetus:
that of trade and that of imperial conquest, one of which might follow the
other. By 1750, many agricultural and remnant hunter-gatherers’ societies had
links with European or Chinese consumers and, in every continent, hierar-
chies had developed in which the richer nations imported from the poorer
(slaves as well as environmentally derived materials) and, in turn, provided the
poorer zones with products such as iron tools, guns and alcohol. Colonialism
 A   119
in the form of protection was an obvious follow-up in such places, and was
often accompanied by the benefits of western technology, such as the railways,
land drainage and irrigation on a large scale, and nineteenth-century medi-
cine that at last knew about the role of bacteria in cholera and of mosquitoes
in malaria. Cheap labour could produce cotton, tobacco, timber and sugar for
industrial markets and, under colonial control, ‘unused’ lands could be con-
verted to cattle ranching for beef export or to plantations for tea, coffee and
cocoa. That the ‘empty’ lands had been the habitats of nomadic pastoralists or
hunter-gatherers was usually ignored. An emerging theme is a continual
increase in movement: of materials as, for example, rubber, bauxite and
copper entered world trade in the second half of the nineteenth century; of
people as they migrated from agricultural poverty to new sources of employ-
ment; and in support of which major canals such as that at Suez (1869) and
Panama (finally finished in its recent form in 1914) were constructed.
There was, therefore, an unprecedented and major technological change,
leading to revolutions in economies and in political structures, with immense
social ramifications. Did environmental considerations play any part in these
huge developments? This is apt to lead into a discourse on the ‘why’ of indus-
trialisation which is too complex a task for this book once we abandon simple
explanations such as charcoal shortages in the English Midlands in the
seventeenth to eighteenth centuries.22 Moral geographers, like Ellsworth
Huntington (1889–1975), were sure that temperate climates with seasonal
contrasts led to vigorous, hard-working individuals who were good at indus-
trial production and leaders of trade and empire overseas. Images of the back-
ward and lazy natives of the tropics were part of the fantasy world of
environmental determinists of that time, now discredited. Any consideration
of the complexities of both social and natural factors involved in early indus-
trialisation is likely to conclude that there was a considerable degree of chance
involved. What is not at issue are the changes in ideas and in material condi-
tions that the new energy sources brought about. In the field of ideas, steam
allowed people to entertain large-scale notions about the control of nature. It
gave, as it were, a material form to the great collections of knowledge being
gathered into extensive cathedral-like museums and into large volumes of
print and pictures. Not least among these was the formulation of grand theo-
ries of the world such as Charles Darwin’s (1809–82) crystallisation of ideas
about organic evolution. Since the practically minded drivers of environmen-
tal change in the homelands and in the colonies were mostly western men of
Christian traditions, Darwin’s desacralisation of nature was a fertile bed that
could be tilled by steam technology.23 Crudely, it was morally acceptable to
change the world of rocks, water and life and there were the means with which
to do it. William Huskisson24 wrote in 1824: ‘If the steam engine be the most
powerful instrument in the hand of man to alter the face of the physical world,
it operates at the same time as a powerful lever in forwarding the great cause
of civilization.’
120 G E H

Resources: feeding the industrious

Of all the organic products of human endeavour, food for our species is cer-
tainly the most important, although plant and animal materials contribute to
many other flows of matter, as in animal fodder, clothing, tobacco and timber,
for instance. As in the agricultural era, the main systems were rain-fed agri-
culture, irrigated lands, and pastoralism, with the latter undergoing an inten-
sification to the form usually labelled ranching. Industrial output grew at
about 3.5 per cent a year. from 1750 and per capitum by 2.3 per cent so that
in the two hundred years currently under consideration, the total increased
one hundred-fold. This has not been regionally uniform: if we take the British
output at 1900 = 100, then the core industrial areas went from 2 in 1750 to 950
in the 1920s but the less developed countries having started at 127 finished in
the 1920s at 220.25
All these systems underwent change because of the new technologies sub-
sidised by fossil fuels, in particular, their mobile applications made possible
by oil-based fuels. The nearer to industrial heartlands the systems were, the
greater the changes but it is probably true to say that no food-and-fibre pro-
ducers in the whole world have remained unaffected in some way, even if only
by knowledge, the storage and transmission of which owed its existence to
fossil fuels.26 The theme of movement is exemplified by the mass carriage of
materials during the nineteenth century by rail and sea in response to the
demands of urban centres: meat from the High Plains to railheads in the
American west, or by refrigerated ship from Argentina to Europe; cotton from
India to England; wheat from Australia and Canada to the colonial metropo-
lis: the list could be endless.27 The production of food and fibre was, therefore,
no longer purely a way of tapping the outcome of photosynthesis. The growth
of scientific knowledge meant that plant and animal breeders could eliminate
many of the chance elements in genetic recombination and tailor organisms
to particular conditions: to produce cereals with a short straw as a defence
against lodging, for example, or cattle better suited to tropical conditions than
the indigenous varieties. Gradually, heavy machinery began to replace human
and animal labour. The tractors which replaced horses (surprisingly late in the
twentieth century even in western countries) freed land from producing food
only for horses. Other machines allowed better tillage because they could
plough deeper or break up soils into a finer tilth. Behind these direct applica-
tions was a massive secondary deployment of energy in, for example, chem-
ical fertiliser manufacture. There was also the development of biocides, in
which there was a great surge after World War II. All these metamorphoses
were tied together with oil- and coal-using transport and all underlain by the
accumulation of scientific knowledge which was, in turn, feasible only where
energy was abundant.28 The situation in which crops were confined to a par-
ticular continent or region, already breaking down in the agricultural era, was
replaced by the dominance of New World species in the entire temperate zone.
 A   121
Among those crops, the potato stands out as the food which sustained the
rapidly growing industrial populations, but maize in southern Europe was
important, as it also was in parts of Africa, albeit in less industrialised
economies.29 Environmental management at farm level thus became directly
focused on each year’s production, with rotations where necessary to avoid the
build-up of diseases such as potato root eelworm, Globodera rostochiensis. No
management, however, was successful enough to avoid outbreaks of a devas-
tating fungus like potato blight (Phytophthera infestans, in a strain derived
from South America, like its host) which caused the great famines in Ireland
in 1845–49.30 By 1950, however, potatoes produced in Ireland were, like most
places, partly constituted of diesel oil.31 A farm unsubsidised by fossil fuels
could produce perhaps 1.0 kilocalorie per square metre per day (kcal/m2/day)
of organic matter whereas by the 1950s, 5 to 10 kcal/m2/day were possible in
the heavy energy-user countries such as the United States. If, as in the nine-
teenth century, even a fraction of an improved yield goes to urban workers as
plant food rather than meat, then the feeding of population growth becomes
possible. If meat and cereal supplies are secure then alternative crops become
attractive. In the period 1879–1939 in Britain, these included pastures for
fresh milk supplies to the cities (replacing unhygienic town dairies), industrial
crops such as tobacco (uneconomical), hops, and sugar beet. The latter was
popular because it took only 3.5 person-days per acre per year compared with
wheat at 6.5 person-days/acre/year and produced both income and animal
green fodder. Game crops appeal at times of affluence so partridges, pheasants
and rabbits might be encouraged in odd patches of scrub and covert; if poor
soils were present then a combination of horse manure and night soil could
create an artificial soil 3 or 4 feet deep yielding profuse crops of mushrooms.
The railways allowed the rapid marketing of fruit and flowers.32
The management and impact of irrigation farming are difficult to separate.
The practices involve intervention in the hydrological cycle: water is stored
and then released into a channel system. Some of it evaporates or is taken up
into the crop (‘consumptive use’) but another fraction continues into the run-
off, the ‘return flow’. Added together for 1650, the water diversion for the
world was 95 cubic kilometres per year, a total which rose to 226 in 1800, 550
in 1900 and 850 in 1950, with recent totals at about 3,000. Irrigation has for
long been sufficiently important that, until 1950, it comprised about 90 per
cent of the world’s water withdrawals even in the face of industry and cities.33
Though small-scale schemes have always been widespread, the larger projects
have attracted much attention since colonial governments and their immedi-
ate successors were attracted by their ability to bring about massive transfor-
mations. In British India in the 1880s, 1 million acres (over 400,000 hectares)
of ‘scrub’ were converted to wheat production in the lower Chenab and by
1939 British India held 116,000 square kilometres of canals watering 11.6
million hectares of land. Productivity increases tie the practice into industrial
energy systems, so that water-lifting by bullocks is replaced by electric and
122 G E H
diesel motors; intensive farming depletes nutrients and requires pesticides, so
that there may be a need for 900–6,500 megajoules per hectare of energy
input. There are changes in the physics and chemistry of the water and the
soils, some of which are in the direction of improved fertility of the soils and
less silty water. If evaporation exceeds precipitation, however, then a sec-
ondary salination occurs as minerals move up the soil profile. These compact
the soil and cause waterlogging as well as increasing the pH to the 9.0–11.0
level. The impoundments are likely to get silted up quite quickly unless their
watersheds are carefully managed and are also likely to acquire an anaerobic
decomposition layer yielding hydrogen sulphide(H2S). Downstream the
clearer water may encourage aquatic photosynthesis that includes algal
blooms. Obviously, management has to be skilful and, in larger schemes, has
to encompass the whole project. Individual farmers lose control over the very
basis of their livelihood and may also have suffered dislocation as the
impoundment’s water level rose. So many failures of large-scale projects have
been due to their social context as much as to the influence of external envir-
onmental conditions. These factors have not prevented a huge growth of irri-
gation projects in the post-1950 period.
An analogous question about management runs through the history of pas-
toralism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Those areas of the world
(overwhelmingly semi-arid areas such as savannas and grasslands but also
some mountain and high plateau areas) utilised by animal flocks that were
moved on a daily or seasonal basis were usually regarded by traders and
colonists as inefficient. This evaluation was compounded when scientific
surveys detected soil erosion and overgrazing and, eventually, ‘desertification’.
Thus, from the nineteenth century onwards, European and North American
influences were brought to bear upon animal herders in order to ‘improve’
their stock and change the life-ways of the pastoralist people or to replace
them altogether with ranching. Both systems focus on a dominant species but,
whereas pastoralism kills only a few animals and prefers sustained-yield prod-
ucts like milk, ranching focuses on slaughter products for a money market.
Both take in large areas of land over which to spread the grazing pressure but
ranching needs more labour. The ecological key for both is the conversion of
primary production into animal tissue, in which not only the forage plants but
the provision of water may be critical. In the case of cattle, 5–23 litres of water
a day are required and lactating beasts need about 40 per cent more. Though
the environments of pastoralists had seasonal regularities, usually including a
pronounced dry season, they also have pulsed events such as prolonged
drought or flash rainfall, much of which may escape short-term scientific
survey just as measurements of soil erosion may be misleading when scaled
upwards to whole landscapes. Concepts of stability and equilibrium are often
misapplied in such environments.34
The development of European-style pastoralism was much enhanced by the
transport of cattle to the Americas, starting with Hispaniola in 1493 and
 A   123
thence to the mainland at Vera Cruz (Mexico) some twenty-eight years later.
Thus started the trend for colonists to run large herds of a single species and
often a single breed, with cattle and sheep far outnumbering other species.
Sheep, for example, were introduced into Australia in the early 1880s but there
were 80 million of them by 1888. This history, however, disguises the fact that,
in many places, cattle were introduced and then allowed to go feral, so that the
beginnings of ranching in Texas, northern Brazil and Argentina, for instance,
lay in the hunting of ‘wild’ cattle. These animals and many other more con-
trolled herds were run on open ranges in the early to mid-nineteenth century.
The takeover of apparently empty land was helped by the fact that some of it
was occupied by hunter-gatherers with no concept of ‘ownership’ and other
parts by indigenous pastoralists undergoing a downturn due to pulses of
drought, disease or war as was the case on the East Africa savannas about
1900.35 The transformation of pastoralism into ranching was given enormous
impetus by the development in the 1880s of refrigerated steamships in which
large quantities of chilled carcasses could be conveyed around the world36.
The combination of demand for meat from urban-industrial populations,
colonial power and scientific insights combined to push forward the idea of
improvements in grazing in semi-arid environments. This was applied to both
white-owned ranches and to the ‘native areas’. The impacts of the former
could be severe, as in Australia, where soil erosion, xerification of range,
explosive populations of introduced species, such as the rabbit and the prickly
pear, and the elimination of wildlife were part of the price of a ‘golden age’ of
wool production in 1880–1900. Elsewhere, indigenous stock-raisers were
often forced into smaller and often more marginal areas by colonists’ land
appropriation. Then their chances of avoiding higher rates of soil erosion,
pasture degeneration and animal disease (and their human consequences)
were poor. As a result, ideas of improvement of animal rearing were dominant
in many colonial regimes. In Rhodesia (now Zambia and Zimbabwe) the plans
(from about 1903 onwards) included the movement of selected bulls into
native areas, fertilising pastures, reseeding, and rotational grazing but success
on the experimental farm was rarely repeated in the reserves not least because
Africans had no history of, and hence no cultural orientation towards, beef
production.
One unusual example of pastoralism under change is that of reindeer in
northern Scandinavia, in the area inhabited by the Saami people. Their pas-
toralism evolved from hunting in the seventeenth century to a form in which
the animals ran wild for most of the year although they were owned and
rounded up two or three times a year by settled forest agriculturalists and
forest workers. After the depredations of World War II, the demand from the
south for reindeer products coupled with the advent of the snowmobile
allowed a few herders to accumulate the majority of the animals and displace
many others into cities; keeping the reindeer from overgrazing the lichens of
the forest and tunturi has been difficult due to interruption of their grazing
124 G E H
patterns by developments such as reservoirs and tourist complexes.37 There is
a parallel with the Bedu of, for example, Syria and Saudi Arabia where the
camel has been replaced by the Toyota truck, the 44 and even the light aero-
plane, all providing for the better-off.
The cultural context of animal herding has changed as well as its tech-
nology. Perhaps the greatest change has been in the political impact of the
state, whether colonial or post-colonial. Colonial regimes were notorious for
making artificial boundaries that cut across pre-existing migration routes of
seasonally migratory pastoralists and forcing them into overgrazing pastures
or overusing water sources within the new political jurisdictions. (This may
have meant that a cultural group who had been powerful were now rendered
nugatory, a change not lost on colonial administrators.) Even post-colonial
land reform imposed the sort of control that made it possible to alienate pas-
toralists’ land in favour of agriculturalists, sometimes under the guise of
sealing off areas where animal disease had broken out. Examples include Iran
under the Shah, Israel, and British East Africa. As the semi-arid areas were
drawn into worldwide systems of trade, further changes came about, com-
bining economics and technology. In the United States, for instance, the pen-
etration of railways into the High Plains imported both eastern capital and a
demand for meat that brought the open range to full capacity. The range was
then closed to facilitate more rational management, aided by the development
of effective barbed wire, patented in Illinois in 1874. Even within the new units
overgrazing was rife so that a move to high-quality stock was brought about
by selective breeding, in which the new land-grant universities played a key
role. Above all, there was territorial compartmentalisation which led to a
mosaic of ground-cover types according to local stocking rates and manage-
ment competence. The future of burrowing rodents, for instance, might
depend on the attitude of a stock manager towards cattle numbers and
coyotes. Ranching overall, however, seems to be culturally marked by cruelty
towards animals.38 At the heart of many environmental transformations lay
demands for meat, aided by the spread of motor transport.

Translocation and transformation

A major difference between this era and the preceding millennia is the trans-
port of food over large distances and its processing. Trade has always shipped
food between people, and food has always been processed to preserve it.
Industrialisation increased immeasurably the scale of both processes, with
steamships and railways allowing the perishable products of New Zealand
(like butter) to end up in Europe or Argentinian beef in canned and com-
pressed form in North America. Refrigeration was first used for meat but
proved to be useful for fruit as well. Canning drew upon metal ores and a great
deal of energy in terms of heating, sealing and labelling. Cheaper energy
meant that refining of comestibles could be more effective and so sugars with
a higher sucrose level were cheaply made. Coal fires may have allowed more
 A   125
boiled water for tea and coffee and hence improved the general levels of health.
On the other hand, food processing may remove minerals and vitamins and
so energy has to be expended in producing, refining, packing, labelling and
distributing food supplements. Even before 1950, cut flowers were sent by air
from California to New York in winter. One lesson of the era is the way in
which ecological transformations could be so thorough. In 1850s New
England Henry David Thoreau describes an extensive swamp ‘. . .which first
had been cut, then ditched broadly, then burnt over; then the surface paved
over, stumps and all, in great slices; then these piled up every six feet . . . then
fire put to them; and so the soil was tamed.’ This was achieved by William
Brown the farmer who was clearly following in the steps of the English rector
of the eighteenth century who had, in a flush of innovatory enthusiasm in
agriculture, planted the churchyard to turnips. His archdeacon chided him,
saying, ‘This must not happen again’. ‘No sir, next year will be barley.’39

Whole environments: forests, recreation and warfare

The period from 1750 to 1950 was one of sustained impact upon the world’s
forest cover, though not as strong as that after 1950. Temperate zones and the
tropics were affected: between 1700 and 1920, some 315 million hectares of
forest and woodland in the temperate zone and 222 million hectares in the
tropics disappeared. In the tropics, 56 million hectares of that total were trans-
formed into grassland simply by felling and neglect. They became either crop-
land or grassland; at the same time 146 million hectares of temperate
grassland became cropland. The trend was of acceleration: in the tropics once
again, the change from 1700 to 1850 was a loss of 70 million hectares and from
1850 to 1920, 152 million hectares.40
Within these startling totals there are regional differences. In Germany, for
example, forest loss led to strong governmental interest in the management of
the resource. This was present in many of the smaller princedoms of the eigh-
teenth century after the end of the Seven Years War in 1763. Following the
publication of the influential Principles of Forest-Economy by Wilhelm
Gottfried von Moser in 1757,41 timber production became a principal aim of
forests. Standard species of trees, orderly rows of monocultures and continual
yields became the watchwords, and German foresters spread the techniques
through many nations, including the tropics. By coincidence, 1757 was the
start of the official British Raj in India, where a combination of fiscal policy
and technology removed great areas of forest and other woodlands. In the first
case, the removal of forest increased the amount of cropped land available for
revenue. Thus, land was readily sold to (mostly white) landlords for conver-
sion to plantations for tea, coffee and rubber. It was also cleared to feed
expanding indigenous populations and to export timber, especially tropical
specialities such as teak (Tectonia grandis). After about 1853, technology in the
form of railways started to be a major influence. Fuel was an initial concern
until coal became available from Raniganj after 1880, but construction was
126 G E H
even more consumptive. In British India, there were 1,350 kilometres of
railway in 1860 and 51,658 kilometres in 1910. In the Madras Presidency
alone, that meant a yearly demand of 250,000 sleepers, meaning 35,000 trees.42
The fading of the forests led eventually to a Forest Act of 1878 which fudged
the question of common rights (hoping they would disappear), banned shift-
ing cultivation and grazing, and moved the direction of management towards
commercial production: the first Chief Forester was, in fact, German.43 The
same policies survived Independence in 1947. One other consequence of both
forest loss and commercial orientation was lower populations of animals such
as the tiger and the elephant, though imperial-style hunting added to both
concerns.44 In Africa, the savanna lands had islands of woodland, often
wrongly interpreted as relics of former high forest in another example of
regarding many tropical forests as pristine ecosystems.45 More sophisticated
twentieth-century science has teased out some of the detail of, for example,
soil erosion, showing that short-term measurements are not necessarily a
guide to long-term processes and that soil loss from one place may be soil gain
lower down the watershed.46 Nevertheless the rates of soil loss after deforesta-
tion in the nineteenth century increased by at least four times, often by ten and
even by as much as seventy, if combined with (European style) settlement as
in Michigan in the 1860s47. The new owners of large country parks often had
an ingrained eye for profit and so faster-growing conifers were, in Europe at
least, part of the planting schemes. The European larch and also the evergreen
Japanese larch, and then the imports from North America: Douglas fir, Sitka
spruce and lodgepole pine were set to be grown privately and then to become
the staples of state forestry. Where a real exotic was wanted then the Sierra
Redwood (Sequoia gigantea) was the obvious choice and given the common
name of Wellingtonia in Britain demonstrated patriotism as well.
The cultural context of forests in this era is in some ways scale dependent.
Locally, there were still few forests that did not share in the ambiguities of folk
knowledge about them. Malevolent inhabitants were part of those habitats
and so the disappearance of the trees had its virtuous side. At a national scale,
forests and their history become part of mythologies: in England the oak
stood for a whole people’s virtues for it was venerable, patriarchal, stately, a
guardian and therefore quintessentially English. Beech and elm were also well
regarded. Even before then, conservatives like William Wordsworth thought
that the larch (Larix europaea) was (in the Lake District, in 1810) a sign of
increasing industrialisation.48 The landscape designer Humphrey Repton
(1752–1818) thought that any patron of his who wanted conifers was a
parvenu. The German coniferous forests entered the German consciousness
as part of a Nordic (and militaristic) history; the French saw them in the
light of a passion for order, and in the United States they were part of a
transcendental compact with the Creator.49 In their untidy way, the British
took against ‘regimented conifers’ when reafforestation became very impor-
tant strategically after World War I.50 Governmental attitudes were rarely
 A   127
irrelevant in the colonies. The pressure in Asia was often to clear land for sub-
sistence farming and this might be aided by colonial policies which favoured
agriculture over tree growth as short-term aids to a settled population. More
rice and more rubber, as in Malaya and Indonesia, were preferable to keeping
the forest trees even if, by the twentieth century, there was enough scientific
evidence to suggest that in the longer term there might be environmental
problems.51 Wartime created pressures on forests as in Japan where post-1941
forestry emphasised cypress and Cryptomeria trees which created a ‘dark
forest’ (kuraku kanjiru) instead of the preceding mixed forests. Traditional
place names (‘beech plateau’) were lost and wild boar was no longer so tasty.52
More widely still, it has been argued that forests developed as a ‘dark other’
in contrast to ‘civilisation’.53 The origins no doubt pre-date the industrial era
but chime nicely with the perceived needs for wood products and for the
clearance of forested land. Within each of these possibilities, local views and
local construction can emerge which subvert any broad generalisations. But
in all eras, the cultural constructions of nature are nowhere more evident
(and commented upon by scholars) than in the case of trees, woods and
forests.
The emergence of more widespread public attitudes to forests heralds the
growth of outdoor recreations in which the environment is very important.
The pleasures enjoyed by upper social echelons are by no means diminished
but they are joined by the middle and working classes once those groups have
more free time and some discretionary income. The delights of rural areas
outside the city walls and of spring woodlands are celebrated in many lan-
guages.54 In the later nineteenth century the joys of days off spent in rural areas
and by the sea began to spread through the often grimy world of industrialised
regions.55 In this, the role of cheap travel, especially by rail, was central and
prefigures today’s low-cost airlines. The role of gardens was now subsumed
into a wider recreational context. Some cities made it possible for poorer
people to have a small plot of land near their houses or flats in which to grow
flowers or vegetables. Spare pieces of land near railways were often leased for
such use, and their descendants can be seen today from the train between
Schipol airport and Amsterdam’s central station. In many cities, public parks
were saved from the rapid developments caused by industrialisation. These
usually depended upon philanthropy, when a landowner gave an area to a
public corporation or an aristocrat opened his park or landscape garden to a
wider set of users. Former hunting parks as far apart as London and China
were transformed in that way. The ecology of a public city park tended to
reflect the culture of the time: in the late nineteenth century of Europe and
North America (and their imitators) this meant a fair degree of symmetry of
flower beds and shrubbery, a few captive animals in a menagerie, some large
trees and a nod in the direction of the wild in the shape of a non-circular
pond.56 In a different mood, changes in politics and warfare meant that cities
no longer needed their encircling walls for defence. In Vienna, a ring road and
128 G E H
imperial-looking buildings were the replacement, but in Lucca, for example,
a belt of parkland was the successor use.
The pleasure that alpha males get from killing did not diminish. In England
and southern Scotland, the control of the predatory fox (Vulpes vulpes) was
ritualised during the nineteenth century so that ‘the hunt’ with horn calls,
special dress, dedicated packs of dogs and negotiated access across farmland
(preferably hedged and ditched but without wire fencing) and a parallel social
life was integral to certain groups. It too was made possible by rail travel, as
Anthony Trollope makes clear in his political novels, where the English
Midlands are a favourite playground of Members of Parliament. The fox hunt
harks back to a pre-industrial world of hunting whereas grouse shooting on
the upland moors of England and Scotland was adapted to industrial-scale
slaughter. Burning of the moors created heather monocultures and high
grouse numbers; the birds were driven across a line of guns (breech loading,
introduced from the mid-nineteenth century was the key technology) and
large numbers could be killed by even short-sighted men. A day’s bag into the
thousands from one moor was the aim. Upper-class management and impact
were variable: for fox hunting it was essential to maintain small coppice and
scrub areas in which foxes can breed and sleep, and there is no strong evidence
that fox populations have ever been seriously controlled by sport hunting with
dogs. In the mid-nineteenth century, indeed, there was a shortage of foxes
in England and so they were imported from France and Belgium and sold
at Leadenhall Market in London. On the uplands, though, strict predator
control was practised on grouse moors: the falcons and hawks were ruthlessly
culled, no matter whether they fed on grouse chicks or not.57 The mountains
of Scotland needed less control, which did not prevent the near-extirpation of
many species in case they took the occasional lamb or fawn, though the out-
standing example, the golden eagle (Aquila chrysaëtos), is a preferential
carrion-eater.58 Grouse contrasts with its historical companion which was the
development of red deer (Cervus elephas) shooting in the Scottish Highlands
on estates where sheep ranching was less profitable and where the Royal
example, often seen in the paintings of Edwin Landseer (1802–73) was per-
suasive. Here the purpose was to take only a few animals: especially the best
stags. The servants might then cull the hinds, a system that broke down when
there were many fewer servants – after World War I, for example. (Hence the
current overpopulation of upland Scotland with red deer.) It is no wonder that
hunting became a major recreation for those people running empires, espe-
cially the military officer when not actually campaigning against humans. So,
in much of Africa and Asia, most of the larger species became ‘game’, and
targets for sport hunting. The more likely that the animal might fight back
then the higher its status in trophy terms: the Indian tiger perhaps above all,
so that it was shot from the safety of a small castle on the back of an elephant.
Even herbivores could be worthwhile prizes if they were known aggressors,
such as the rhinoceros and African buffalo.59 One other zone of conquest was,
 A   129
however, very much socially and financially confined: exploration. Though
imperial, scientific and spiritual reasons might be put forward for climbing in
the Himalayas, finding the sources of the great rivers or reaching the South
Pole, a common underlying theme is the imposition of western notions of
dominance over nature. In hunting and exploration, as in business, a type of
Social Darwinism favoured the dominant male.
Parallel to these high-profile recreations, there was from the 1880s onwards
a series of working-class recourses to the outdoors. The killing desires were
focused on fish which, in Europe, were often the coarse fish species and were
put back for another day. In North America, the salmonids were not reserved
for the upper classes and all were liable to be killed for trophies or food. A kind
of working-class imitation fox hunting took the form of hare coursing, pro-
vided there was the right kind of grassland to support the hares (Lepus
timidus). But the mass recreations involved the sea and the countryside. Sea
bathing and sea air as antidotes to the illnesses and oppressions of industrial
cities were in Britain an obvious follow-on from her maritime preoccupations
but became popular elsewhere quite quickly, with resorts developing in, for
example, New Jersey, central Japan, Brittany and on the Baltic. New towns
developed with good rail connections, suitable for a day out or perhaps for
longer stays. The management of the sea became important: access to it was
important so that promenades and walkways had to be built, no matter that
storm damage might increase; a sandy foreshore was desirable and so groynes
trapped the sand, no matter that areas down-drift were then starved and more
vulnerable to storms. If the intertidal zone was shallow, then a pier (normally
made of wrought iron) might be necessary and could provide municipal
profits for other schemes. Sand dunes were often manipulated: they might be
in the way of development or they might be kept in the usually forlorn hope
that trampling would not lead to blow-outs; the result was normally the loss
of a cheap and effective coastal protection habitat, foreshadowing the later loss
of mangroves in the tropics.
Inland, rural areas attracted thousands on Sundays, Bank Holidays and
feast days.60 Provided there was adequate public transport, then strolling,
picnics, serious hiking, cycling, and ‘just being there’ were popular. In
general, perhaps, wilder ecosystems were the most attractive, so that the
Japanese Alps, the Appalachians, the English Lakes and moorlands were
among the most visited. Alpine rock climbing and winter sports were for a
wealthy group, not the plebs. In much of continental Europe, forests were
favourite places even if they had been converted from beech to conifers by fol-
lowers of von Moser; the British not only never took to such environments,
they actively campaigned against them, at least until widespread car owner-
ship came about after the 1950s. For moorlands, ‘regimented blankets of
trees’ were derided but the term ‘over-grazed wet deserts’ was never heard
outside the ecologists’ laboratories.61 In crowded nations, some conflicts were
inevitable. Farmers complained of gates being left open and so stock were lost
130 G E H
or allowed to mate promiscuously; animals were attacked by loose dogs; and
some landowners simply hated not being able to keep the working classes
out.62 Walkers complained that they were excluded from vast areas of land
that were kept for grouse or which were part of the catchment areas of water-
supply impoundments. In both places (in England and Wales at least), armed
keepers enforced exclusion perfectly legally with some resolution coming
only in the year 2000.63 The environmental impact of mass recreation before
the 1950s is hard to judge because so much of the evidence in terms of
erosion, for example, has been overtaken by later pressures. Photographs cer-
tainly show that, in popular areas of western countries, boots were having an
impact, and there is evidence that in regions of coniferous forest the inci-
dence of forest fires went up.
In the western world and its colonies recreation is full of social construc-
tions that reflect a particular set of cultures at a defined time in history. There
is no shortage of interpretive work but all, perhaps, have in common the fact
of choice. The industrial worker may toil in a mill or a foundry or on an assem-
bly line and there is only the grind of repetitive tasks. For recreation, though,
other imperatives can be expressed, whether through the creation of flower
beds, the excitement of the Ferris wheel or the calm of lying in the grass lis-
tening to the wind and the bees. The imagery of a rural idyll was especially
strong in the interwar period, thus leading to much conversion of land to sub-
urbia; it also gave the illusion of participation in a now-past Golden Age of
harmonies disturbed by the machine and allowed the myth of wild areas as
sites of re-creation. So, a spiritual dimension could be added to the simpler
feelings of just being somewhere other than the workplace: the great prophet
was Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) in his New England retreat.64 At the
grandest cultural and spatial scales, the value of landscape (primarily as a
visual experience not an ecological one) led to the creation of National Parks,
starting with Yellowstone (United States) in 1872, with England and Wales just
creeping in in 1949 after many other countries. This movement, with a variety
of conservationist labels to apply to land areas and with a strong nature-
protection element in many countries, became worldwide in the post-1950 era
but its origin and cultural reference points are those of the later nineteenth
century and first thirty years of the twentieth century.
Last in this treatment of total environments is warfare. Deliberate and acc-
idental effects of conflict were present in the agricultural era and these were
characteristic of the eighteenth century and most of the nineteenth century as
well. A time-span from 1750 to 1950, however, contains some major changes:
from armies in red coats and shakos marching along the roads and tracks of
Europe, North America and South Asia to the aerial devastation and radioac-
tive legacy wrought on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Navies are involved, too:
shipbuilding had a strong impact on timber harvesting and management until
iron hulls took over after the 1850s. Shores were then converted to large
shipyards because vessels became dramatically bigger. Air power took a hand
 A   131
with the flattening and grassing of large areas and the use of coastal sands and
salt-marshes for bombing practice.
An eighteenth-century army on the march may devastate much in its path
and consume anything edible but it is relatively small and transient: few rural
places now carry scars from the Napoleonic Wars. Burning of forests was more
likely to last and was carried over from Classical times to North America; it
needs a Mediterranean vegetation or high densities of conifers, preferably
accompanied by a dry season, to succeed. The burning of forests (especially in
anti-guerilla campaigns) was helped by air power, as when the French bombed
forests in Morocco in 1921–6. The construction of large dams and dyke
systems involved vulnerability to destruction as when large parts of the western
Netherlands were flooded during 1944 or when 4,000 villages and millions of
hectares of cropland were inundated along the Yellow River in China in 1938
in an attempt to hold up the Japanese advance. Mechanised armies retreating
are apt to destroy everything to deny it to the enemy, as with the scorched-earth
policies of both the Red Army and Wehrmacht east of the Oder in World War
II.65 They fail if their fuel supplies are cut off: no oil, no war.
One of the ecologies of industrialisation is the concentration of energy and
materials and this is shown vividly on the Western Front in World War I. The
slogging across largely static battle lines meant that narrow bands of terrain
were reduced to simple ecosystems (albeit high-energy zones) of men, iron
and steel, mud, horses and lice. (The paintings of Paul Nash convey this like
no other depiction.) Similar transformations were brought about on smaller
Pacific Islands in World War II when Japanese resistance turned whole islands
like Iwo Jima into a pockmarked soil and scrub ecology. As elsewhere, the
portable successor to Greek fire, napalm, consumed plants as well as people.
Although steel remains in soils as shells and mines, most of these areas have
become farm and forest once again except where deliberate efforts to preserve
the past have been made. The threat of biological warfare allowed the author-
ities to use a small Scottish island (Gruinard) as a testing ground for anthrax
and its decontamination has only recently been accomplished.66 Nearly all
warfare had secondary effects. Tanks need steel and so need energy as coal
for smelting iron ore. More coal production consumes more timber under-
ground. Soldiers and munitions workers need calories so grassland is
ploughed (perhaps 6 million hectares in North America in World War I);
horses, too, have to be fed and they were important right through to 1945. By
contrast, fish stocks have a chance to recover if the fleets are kept out of mined
zones and factory destruction reduces emissions to air and water. The sea was,
however, a dumping ground for old shells and bombs: those thrown into the
channel between Scotland and Ulster have a distasteful habit of being washed
ashore. Old and unexpended munitions are a problem in many land areas,
too, especially shells and mines which can inhibit productive land uses.
In general, combat zones and aerial warfare before 1950 produced devasta-
tion that can be overcome. The great exception was radiation which, as we
132 G E H
shall see for the post-1950 era, makes the greatest threats because of the
longevity of radioactive particles.

Dead matter into living symbols

In his famous book, The City in History, Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) wrote
that, ‘The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into
culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction
into social creativity’.67 While the city is not the only place for which to discuss
the use of energy, minerals and water, it is a good place to start for, without
the ability cheaply to transform inorganic substances, such as rock and clay,
and to manage water, there would have been no cities of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries and these are, after all, among the great phenomena of
those centuries. The growth of cities and urban agglomerations under the
influence of industrialisation in developed countries and the subsequent
explosion of their populations in the less developed lands are testimony to a
massive change in the environment of many humans.68 By 1800, Britain led
the world by having 30 per cent of its population urbanised and, indeed,
between 1750 and 1800 some 70 per cent of European urban expansion was
in England. But 1800 to 1900 was the time of the new industrial city in Europe,
North America and Japan, with a few pockets elsewhere. So, by the 1950s, the
world became 34 per-cent urbanised, with Africa at 18 per cent and Europe at
61 per cent. A major change of the twentieth century, accelerating as time pro-
gressed, was the shedding of rural populations in the poorer countries into
their cities.69 Still, in Africa about 70 per cent of the population was engaged
in agriculture, compared with 14 per cent in North and central America
combined.
A common metaphor for the city’s metabolism, opposed to Mumford’s
upbeat summary, is to regard it as parasitic. Not even the medieval city could
supply its own energy needs though it might have produced some of its food,
and both were usually supplied from relatively near at hand. But the quanti-
ties of hydrocarbons needed for the people and factories of industrial cities
came from the mines that also supplied the railways and steamships. The pull
of the city became strong enough to draw in coal from long distances, so that
the coal yards of Chicago, for example, were a dominant feature of the urban
topography. Most big cities had gas lighting in the streets by about 1820. There
were emblems of a second kind of demand: of organic materials for food and
clothing and structural purposes such as timber for roofing. In Chicago, the
stockyards fed meat to the city and then processed it eastwards as well. The
various flows may have become long-term stock if they became structures
such as buildings or sewers, but may equally have had a short-term utility as
food and fuel before becoming wastes.70
The city’s growth may be managed by urban planners, so as to minimise
some environmental impacts but many of the latter are inevitable. (Table 4.1).
At the local level some soil may remain in parks and gardens but the dominant
 T 4.1 Environmental impact of the city
Input to city ‘Upstream’ Transformation within city ‘Downstream’ Output from city
(maintenance rather than construction)
Atmosphere Unmodified unless by Air velocity changes around buildings Air flow resumes normal
other cities upwind Air turbulence increased over roofline of city characteristics
Loadings increased of: Particulate loadings may
particulates – increase thunderstorm frequency increase precipitation
heat radiated from buildings immediately downwind
gases, esp. CO, CO2, SOx, NOx Particles fall out downwind
PAN
NOx  photochemical smog as in Photochemical smog may
California, Japan damage organisms
lead, fluorides NOx, SOx fall-out as acid
Precipitation – water is shed quickly from paved and rain
built areas
snow melts relatively quickly
Ground and River systems Evaporation of water from many sources Flood peakiness of river
surface water modified for flood Incorporation of water in organic and inorganic mass enhanced
control and water stored in city Contaminated rivers affect
storage Calefaction of waste water, esp. from power generation fauna, flora. Decreases with
– reservoirs Water as waste carrier. Affects local water quality dilution
– channelisation – in solution Contaminants may be toxic
Watershed cover – in suspension to life, affect aesthetic
modified for water Waste water to run-off. May add to flood peaks quality of river
yield and quality Flood hazard increases
Groundwater tapped engineering of river, e.g.
for urban use channel modified for
faster flow, cut-off channels
Water may be led off for
aquifer recharge
 T 4.1 continued
Input to city ‘Upstream’ Transformation within city ‘Downstream’ Output from city
(maintenance rather than construction)
Water may be purified in
sewage treatment works and
reused or put into river
for use lower down
Land and Little effect except as Construction of embankments etc. across flood Silt transported away more
surface forms consequence of other plains may cause ponding back at times of peak flow rapidly to sea
processes, e.g. water Slope stability – infiltration changes may hasten slides; Removal or alteration of
management, road buildings constructed in unsuitable sediment transport may
construction zones, e.g. Hong Kong, some affect landforms at some
Sand and gravel, Japanese cities distance, esp. increasing
brick clays extracted high hazard when coastal erosion hazard
to build city and earthquake risk also present: Solid wastes must be disposed
adjacent infrastructure. zoning for land use may mitigate of: circum-urban fill sites
(Also may affect damage. Japan, California sought, e.g. quarries, gravel
seabed.) Subsidence – extraction of groundwater or removal pits. Contaminants from
Other rocks used for of e.g. coal or other solids, e.g. Mexico tips may affect groundwater
urban–industrial City, Venice, Long Beach Necessity for sewage
construction Surface changes – removal of vegetation increases treatment unless river or sea
silt yield and causes local flooding volume sufficiently large to
Stream-course engineering make it appear unnecessary
– to manage and avoid floods, Eutrophication of
improve navigation water unless N2 and P
Coastal cities – dune-blowing, river channel dredging, removed by multi-stage
storm protection construction, piers, treatment
seawalls
 Waste dump accumulation
Coastal landfill for industrial sites, housing, airports,
e.g. San Francisco Bay
Food Urban demand may Some food stored, most consumed and transformed
exert strong influence to organic wastes
on agricultural
patterns
Transport network
reflects necessity to
move food to city
Plants and City acts as roosting/ Vegetation more or less all changed: Escaped pets may establish
animals nesting zone for managed vegetation often grass with shrubs and themselves in rural areas
rural feeders, e.g. trees (‘urban savanna’) (e.g. Australian parakeets
starlings, pigeons unmanaged vegetation dominated by weedy species, in S. England)
Fire-prone vegetation incl. quick-growing trees and shrubs
may need to be some species cannot cope with contaminated
managed to reduce atmosphere (esp. lichens, mosses)
hazard to city some species adapt to city life, e.g. songbirds,
fox, badger, escaped pets
Energy Construction of Energy resources into power at generating Gradual dilution of effects of
conduits, e.g. pipe and sites (steam, electricity). All forms into wastes energy transformation and
transmission lines, (heat; particles, gases) use
transport networks to
import energy;
generating
136 G E H
materials become asphalt, brick, glass, concrete and metals. These change
the values of heat reflectance, radiation and absorption, and the roughness
of the surface. The city provides a habitat for adapted plants and animals,
notably the rat. Regionally, the city generates large quantities of heat and emits
gaseous and solid wastes. Some of these are scavenged from the air quite close
to the city whereas others travel long distances laterally and may also migrate
into the upper atmosphere. Thus, there are truly global connections becuase
the combustion of hydrocarbons generates carbon dioxide, a major compo-
nent of the enhanced greenhouse effect (see pp. 145–6). Dust and aerosols
may also become globally distributed via the upper atmosphere: when lead
was a common additive to motor fuels then it rained out on to polar ice in
aerosol form; the cities were the main sources.
The city as a cultural phenomenon and milieu has evoked many millions of
pages of writing. The city has been the site of freedom to think and behave
differently and to foment revolution. It has also been the place where inequal-
ities have become manifest and so the idea of there being a permanent ‘other’
lower down the hierarchy of esteem may have contributed to a world view in
which the non-human is somewhere towards the base. And yet it was in towns,
argued Keith Thomas,71 that new attitudes towards cruelty to animals arose,
especially as industrialisation took hold. Cities are heterogeneous, too, so that
new ideas about the city and its environment are likely to take root in one place
and not another: they may be ‘pushed’ by bad conditions as well as ‘pulled’ by
the example of good open space, the presence of trees or the reining in of
motor vehicles. Cities developed a particular character which may have
attracted the kind of people who thought environmentally as well as com-
mercially though, in the United States, the dominant thinker of the pre-1950
period, Aldo Leopold, wrote firmly out of a rural background.72 Detroit qual-
ifies as the genesis site of the mass-production motor car after 1900: consider
the environmental impacts of that centre of innovation. Glasgow in Scotland
was a key innovation centre in developing open-sea steamboats after 1818,
with enormous consequences for colonial land use, especially when allied to
major projects such as iron ships (1839 onwards) and the Suez Canal (1869).
Environment in Peter Hall’s historical treatment of the city is confined to
necessities such as water supply and amenities like parks in nineteenth-
century Paris; not even Stockholm in its social-democratic heyday seems
to have contributed to considering the city as an integral component of
human–nature interaction.73 At one level of cultural abstraction, the sky-
scraper connects the worlds of the subsoil and the sky 74 though this might
signify conquest rather than a sense of belonging, for some city dwellers dis-
liked ‘nature’: it was less comprehensible to them than their urban homes. Part
of the attraction is the city as spectacle: after 1900 the night-time ‘bright lights’
formed part of its energy consumption. The advent of war changes a city’s
ecology: Germany and Japan after 1945 are obvious examples but even lesser
destruction and deprivation will bring about the cropping of gardens and the
 A   137
keeping of pigs, goats and rabbits. The city of Turku in Finland had four pig-
geries in 1940 and eighty-seven in 1945; wood cutting near the city created
open areas and, because bombing created waste land, then this became the
waste dumps rather than designated landfill sites.75
The city dweller has always been a high consumer of water. Everybody needs
about 2 litres per day to drink. Further, even in the urban areas of less devel-
oped countries, use can run at about 200 litres per person per day if there is a
piped supply; if not then about half that becomes available. The rich use much
more: 300 to 400 litres per person perday is common. The other great urban-
industrial use is in industry itself: to produce 1 kilolitre of motor fuel takes 7 to
34 x 103 litres of water. One tonne of steel requires 8 to 60  103 litres, a tonne
of worsted cloth 266,000 litres, and a tonne of paperboard 60 to 376  103
litres. These need not be consumptive figures, in the sense that the water can
usually be treated and reused but, in the period before 1950, such conservation-
minded attitudes were rarer than now and, although historical data on water
use are hard to find, it is safe to presume that between 1800 and 1950, the
upper figures at least represent the amount of new water demanded by each
batch in the process.76 The industrial era was host to two major developments
in water use: the start of hydropower generation (in Wisconsin in 1882) and
the explosive expansion of irrigated agriculture. The former leads eventually
to large dams. In 1900 the world held 700 dams over 15 metres high whereas
by 2000 the figure was over 50,000; at the Revolution in 1949, China had a
mere eight. Now, the reservoir volume for the world is five times that of rivers
and would cover the area of California. Impoundments also serve the devel-
opment of irrigation schemes for crops. Agriculture is responsible for about
70 per cent of the human interventions into the hydrological cycle: a proxy
measure of its growth is the amount of ‘consumptive use’ of water, that is, that
proportion that does not go back into the run-off downstream of a project. In
1800, the world total was 226 cubic kilometres, in 1900 550 cubic kilometres
and in 1950 it had doubled to 1,080 cubic kilometres, of which 850 cubic kilo-
metres were in Asia. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the area
under irrigation doubled every thirty years.77
No resource development on such a scale and with such penetrations into
all aspects of human life was without impact and equally in need of manage-
ment. Historical investigations inevitably emphasise the large scale but every-
where there has been a phase when small-scale use of wells, springs, shallow
aquifers and small dams has predominated. What is surprising is the occa-
sional loss of technology: the skills of Roman aqueduct builders seem to have
been lost until the eighteenth century and the substitution of iron pipes for
lead or bored timber affected cities only in the nineteenth century, so that
water supply in, for example, London was intermittent until the 1880s.78
Cheap energy in the form of pumps and drills enlarged the resource but the
large dam symbolises the industrialisation of water management. Its uses
could be for urban-industrial supply, irrigation, power generation or flood
138 G E H
control, and sometimes all at once. The impacts are well known and have not
in general diminished since 1950: the drowning of land under impoundments
is primary, with much social dislocation, especially in poorer countries.
Downstream from the dam, the chemical and physical qualities of the water
are usually changed so that the river regime becomes artificial and often con-
trolled by the agency in charge of the dam. Poor management of water levels
or miscalculations of water loadings have led to catastrophic dam failure in
most places at one time. Water supplied to users may follow two basic paths.
It may be returned to the hydrological cycle in liquid form quite quickly,
though possibly now carrying the traces of its use: sewage, fertilisers, silt and
other evidence of summer nights. By contrast it may be taken up into storage
in the form of materials such as food (think of the cucumber or melon) or
evaporated into the atmospheric part of the cycle. Evaporation water is gen-
erally free from contaminants but return flows contain both suspended and
dissolved materials, which change the ecology of the water into which they are
disseminated and may threaten human health as well. Much is known about
the effects of silt on the photosynthetic rates of plants, for example, as it is of
high levels of nitrogen and phosphates upon algae. Warm water and nitrates
make for ‘blooms’ of fast-reproducing algae which are then decomposed by
bacteria and take up oxygen, leading to the death of fish. Offshore, dinofla-
gellates bloom in ‘red tides’ in which their toxic exudates poison most other
organisms. Only in the twentieth century did most industrial regions start
seriously to clear up their nineteenth-century legacy of gross water contami-
nation with the wastes from chemical industries, which shed high volumes of
alkalis and acids alike into rivers and shallow estuaries. Similarly, sewage treat-
ment for many urban agglomerations was still absent or at best confined to
taking out some of the more solid objects: the River Tyne in north-east
England was said to be too thick to drink but too thin to plough. In 1867, a
Parliamentary Committee reported on the way in which small boys set the
Bradford canal on fire for amusement.79
Since water is so central to life itself, let alone to industry and agriculture,
how was it that such poor management came about, both in terms of supply
and of waste-water treatment? A partial answer has to be sought in terms of
shifts in responsibility as the concentration of populations increased. In a dis-
persed or low-density population, every family can be responsible for its own
flows, provided they do not impinge negatively upon others and that they obey
any common (but local) laws that govern water supply and disposal. This does
not work at high densities but there is always a lag between the perceived need
for public control (through a municipality or a company to which the respon-
sibility is delegated) and its acceptability. In the case of industry, capitalism
requires that costs be externalised as much as possible, and responsibility for
external flows disowned wherever possible. Water may cross political bound-
aries and therefore much co-operation between jurisdictions is needed for
management. There is a further cultural level beyond the political economy,
 A   139
however, which has seen water as a free good. There has been the feeling that
despite the technology needed to supply water and treat sewage, that to pay for
these services is not somehow necessary, in a kind of hangover from pre-indus-
trial days. Only since 1950 in ‘western’ nations has there been any convincing
shift in that cultural attitude. One result is the entry of water into the arena of
struggle for control within societies: the hydrological cycle and the flows of
money become inextricably mixed.80

Fishes and whales

Moving to salt water, we come to an inorganic medium populated with organ-
isms of all kinds. Human impact during the industrial era was mainly on fishes
and whales, though other ecologies were disturbed, especially along coasts.
The imagery from the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004 is a reminder
that industrialisation has not totally wiped out small-scale artisanal fisheries,
though virtually all of these depend on diesel engines and on modern fibres
for netting. The industrial revolution in fishing came with applications of
steam. On land, refrigeration of railway trucks allowed fresh fish to reach the
growing urban markets of inland cities. At sea, cargo ships could perform a
similar service. The leap from salted fish to fresh fish was made by the con-
version of the fishing fleets themselves from sail to steam. Initially, steam tugs
took sailing vessels to sea against the wind: the earliest record seems to be from
1860 81 but widespread steam-powered vessels followed in short order. In the
1870s menhaden (Brevoortia tyrannus) was caught off the north-eastern
United States by steam trawlers and then factory processed for its oil. In
Britain, 1,573 trawlers were built between 1881 and 1902 and so, about fifty
years after the rest of the economy, the deep-water fisheries were industri-
alised. By 1910, Japan had caught up and by 1938 was the world’s leading
fishing nation in terms of landings, having made a massive investment in
deep-sea vessels. Steam also powers on-board winches that haul up nets from
ever greater depths, and industrial processes provide the nylon nets which,
after 1945, proved to be stronger and more durable than organic fibres.82 The
horse-powered dredger could be replaced by steam and so channels into har-
bours were deeper and more stable than ever before.
The seas are great and wide but fish tend to swim in schools or lie on the
bottom and have cyclic variations in population numbers. Many spawn in
estuaries subject to reclamation for industrial or urban uses. Between these
two pincers, fishes were caught in greater numbers (aided by the sonar devel-
oped in World War II) without regard to their reproductive capacity and
growth rates.83 Thus, soon into the industrial era in fisheries, some stocks
began to decline. The North Sea, unsurprisingly, was one of the first localities,
with plaice (Pleuronectes platessa) stocks showing signs of stress in 1890. Cod,
herring, hake, haddock and ocean perch all showed declines through the
first half of the twentieth century around the Atlantic and various parts of
the Pacific, especially between Seattle and the Aleutians; the response was
140 G E H
occasionally to try conservation measures but more often to look for another
stock further afield and to accompany trawlers with factory ships that
processed the fish soon after the catch and then refrigerated them in bulk.
Conservation was inhibited everywhere by the fact that outside immediate
national waters, the seas were a common resource, open to all. But for many
years, optimism prevailed: the President of the Royal Society of London in
1883, Professor T. H. Huxley, asserted at an international fisheries exhibition
that away from the confines of the North Sea, ‘. . . the multitudes of these
fishes [cod, herring, pilchard mackerel] is so inconceiveably great that the
number we catch is relatively insignificant; and, secondly, that the destruction
effected by the fishermen cannot sensibly increase the death rate . . .’84 He
might have been right about the numbers but not about the death rate; yet, as
late as the 1950s, the world’s oceans were being touted as the obvious solution
to its nutritional shortages, especially those of animal protein.85
In 1772–5, Captain Cook toured the southern polar regions and put forward
the notion that ‘the world will derive no benefit’ from that region. Yet between
1778 and 1830, the southern fur seal of South Georgia86 was brought to the
verge of extinction, as have been many other fur seals; they are easy prey once
on land. This vignette pans into a wider frame with the history of whaling. Like
fishermen, whalers under sail ventured some distances from their home ports
since pelagic whaling came in around 1650, and, by the time of the advent of
steam, there were familiar with most of the seas between 80 °N and 55 °S. Steam
came into whaling after 1857 and factory ships from 1907. Like nylon nets in
the 1950s, there was a technological turning point. In this case it was the
patenting of the explosive harpoon by Sven Føyn in 1873. In spite of moving
to smaller species, by 1920 at least six great whale populations had collapsed;
in 1933, nearly 58,000 whales were killed. Blue whales probably numbered
about 200,000 before whaling began, but are perhaps 3,000 today.87 Humpbacks
fell from 125,000 to 20,000 in the same period, which includes a period
of attention to conservation promulgated by the International Whaling
Commission set up in 1946 that is discussed in the next chapter (p. 194). But
in 1950 both whaling and fishing were essentially regulated mainly by markets
and the attempts at the imposition of regulations which were usually regarded
as unwarranted government interference.
The cultural framework of fishing is complex and, in recent years, much
investigated since several ways of reducing the effort have been undertaken.
Basically, sea-fishing is still largely a hunter-gatherer exercise: the fish are not
genetically selected by humans and they are chased. Because the seas and
oceans are so vast, those involved were always reluctant to accept any sense of
limits and so there is a parallel with frontier resources like timber, grasslands
and some minerals. The plenitude seemed to be lasting since there were always
new places to exploit and nothing was known about the historic changes that
human groups had brought about.88 The tenacity shown by men engaged in a
dangerous occupation extended to whaling. The commercial arguments are
 A   141
so thin that there must be a deep-seated ‘need’ to engage in this form of
slaughter (as in the annual kill of pilot whales in Tórshavn harbour in the
Faroe Islands) as a way of exhibiting the kind of testosterone levels normally
taken care of by football and beer.

An age of minerals
Industrialisation was, indeed, a second Iron Age, and the refinement of iron
ores into various kinds of steel is the frame of that entire construction. Iron is
not the only metal of interest and many others have found uses in industrial
processes and manufactures: copper and aluminium are just two from a long
list. Other Earth resources were sought in large quantities as well: stone for the
impressive parts of eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century cities, for
instance; clay for bricks; sand and gravel for aggregate once concrete became
a major building material. Limestones formed essential fluxes in iron smelt-
ing and also became the foundation of many road beds and landfill projects
as well as fertiliser. From the 1930s uranium played its part, first in the making
of atomic weapons and then in the spin-offs of civilian power in the later
1950s. Some of these materials were virtually ubiquitous (iron ore, for
example, though very variable in quality) whereas others are found only in a
few places, giving them strategic value. Most are found on the sea-bed, though
only a very few in concentrations that make their recovery feasible. In the years
to 1950, only sand and gravel were dredged in any large amount.
One encapsulation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is therefore to
talk of them as the time of ‘holes and heaps’ when mines and quarries pro-
duced most of the minerals and the reject material from overburdens and
from refining was piled up in waste tips. The main aim of management was
the reduction of cost. Technical innovation played its part but cheap land on
which to set up processing plants and their associated transport networks
meant that estuarine salt-marshes and sand-flats, riverside meadows and
depastured hillsides were often converted to the new uses. Once in the rivers,
many toxics were entrained in the silt fraction and so were spread on riverside
flood plains at times of high water and then debouched into estuarine silts and
muds; many are still there, working their way downstream as, for example,
slugs of arsenic or lead. The air around deep mines was full of soot and acids
from the coal used for winding and sorting gear, and near metal smelters
(nickel and copper provide particular examples) the landscape was devoid of
plants and animals downwind for several kilometres. Regional effects were
dominated by acid precipitation, as the sulphur compounds in oil and coal
were scavenged out as a weak solution of sulphuric acid.89 Some 1,000 years
of copper mining around Falun in Sweden (until 1993) meant that the soils
had so much sulphur in them in that lakes showed no recovery from acidifi-
cation even as the open-air roasting of ore decreased.90 Bulk low-cost mater-
ial, such as coal or ores, also convert environments through their demands on
transport; large areas of flat land are needed for ore terminals and marshalling
142 G E H
yards. If ores, for example, came from colonies or in large ore carriers at low
cost (for example, from Sweden to Britain) then supplies seemed illimitable
and cheap so that notions of re-use and recycling were often confined to times
of exceptionally high use or interruptions of supply, of which wartime is the
main instance. Images of housewives giving up their aluminium saucepans to
make aircraft during World War II capture this process.
The subset of energy-containing materials is central to the industrial era.
The move from stored but recent photosynthesis (usually called biomass) to
geologically ancient materials with much higher energy concentrations pro-
duced many sets of environmental consequences. In the case of coal, for
example, it is deep mined or quarried,91 transported, burned and turned into
ash, with the emission of gases and solids. Oil is extracted on land or at sea,
transported by pipe or ship to a refinery and mostly burned with gaseous emis-
sions; some of it is turned into other industrial and pharmaceutical chemicals.
Natural gas is simpler, for it needs no refining and produces no solid wastes.
Out of all the impacts of land conversion, transport, pipeline construction and
maintenance, one perhaps stands out: the need for water in many of the bulk
processes of, for example, oil refining and electricity generation. In many
places, this was supplied by seawater or major rivers, so that their adjacent
lands and intertidal zones were favourite places for ‘reclamation’ and their
waters subject to heating (and hence to the acquisition of a different fauna) by
the outflow streams. Lastly, and crucially, all this combustion (in the getting
and transporting of energy as well as in its end uses) started to push up the con-
centration of gases such as methane and carbon dioxide in the global atmos-
phere. The whole question of wastes is central to an industrial era. Smaller
cities, smaller-scale industries, lower population densities and ‘organic’ mate-
rials create a volume and a type of waste that is relatively easily transformed by
local ecosystems. Energy-containing compounds merely carry the energy, and
the carbon is unwanted. But with higher energy intensities, the volume of dis-
carded solids and gases is bound to rise because every energy conversion is
inefficient. Wastes, therefore, constitute a significant ecological flow, the more
so if a ‘new’ substance is concerned, that is, one which is unknown in nature,
such as aniline dyes formulated in the nineteenth- century chemical industry
and for which (like later pesticides) there was no ‘natural’ breakdown cycle.
Though these all rose in that period, the main priorities after the eighteenth
century were the product of human excrement and domestic heating, neither
of which was amenable to town-based recycling systems in the nineteenth and
(most of the) twentieth centuries, even in thrifty resource-conscious societies
like that of the German Democratic Republic (‘East Germany’) between the
late 1940s and the 1970s.92
The cultural context of mineral extraction and use is very diverse, and gen-
eralisations difficult to sustain. In the case of mining, what had hitherto been
the occupation of slaves and other forms of forced labour, now became the
basis of whole communities who fiercely defended their conditions against
 A   143
change and – especially – closure. On a wider canvas, whereas mineral indus-
tries were always prepared to consider the virtues of thrift (mostly achieved by
technological innovation), energy suppliers were normally inclined to look
for more and to be optimistic about the supply holding up for ever. Before
1950, using less was not much discussed, for reserves of coal and oil seemed
to be virtually infinite, natural gas was little touched, and much of the world
was still dependent upon renewable biomass. The populations of the devel-
oped world enjoyed having slaves in the form of machines and acquiring many
more personal possessions, and there seemed no reason to suggest that there
should be limits to that kind of progress. ‘Scarcities could be relieved or almost
indefinitely postponed . . . by a rise in prices’ was the 1956 verdict of a mineral
company president whose cultural context clearly included neo-classical eco-
nomics as a way of thought.93

P’  

The consequences of those two centuries are with us all the time, and one
effect comprises the difficulty of understanding it all in both its empirical
diversity and depth of change in ideas about ‘the habitable world’. In terms of
a chronicle, three trends are outstanding: the industrialisation of crop pro-
duction, the increase in the volume of movement of goods and people, and
the use of fossil fuels.
The main worldwide environmental impact of the industrialisation of crop
production can be summarised (Table 4.2) in the conversion of forest and
grasslands into croplands, at regional and at continental scales. (The data are
often aggregated so that the 1950–2000 period of chapter 5 cannot be sepa-
rated out.) The loss of woodlands and forests was by no means all to cropland:

T 4.2 World land transformation 1700–1950

10 6 ha % change
1700 1850 1950 1700–1850 1850–1920 1920–50
Forests & 6,215 5,965 5,389 4 4.8 5.1
woodlands
Grassland & 6,860 6,837 6,780 0.3 1.3 0.5
pasture
Croplands 260 537 1,170
102.6
70
28.1

Note: The 1700 condition of many of these lands was not ‘natural’ in the sense that human
manipulation of them had been thorough, sometimes for a long period.

Source: extracted from J. F. Richards, ‘Land transformation’, in B. L. Turner et al. (eds) The Earth as
Transformed by Human Action. Global and Regional Changes in the Biosphere over the Past 300 years,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, Table 10–1, p. 164. More detail for cropland
1700–1990 can be found in Table 3b of N. Ramankutty and J. A. Foley, ‘Estimating historical changes
in global land cover: croplands from 1700 to 1992’, Global Biogeochemical Cycles 13, 1999, 997–1027.
144 G E H
some of it was eventually reforested, and other lands remained in a more
or less derelict condition. The grassland conversion was mainly to cereals,
however, with a smaller proportion being managed so as to support denser
herds of sheep or cattle. In the end, the period 1700–1850 saw an immense
growth in cropland, borne along especially by North America and Russia,
whereas in 1850–1920 it was south-east Asia, Oceania and Latin America that
expanded the most, with the first experiencing the conversion of much dry-
land farming into irrigated crop production. Worldwide, about 136 million
hectares (Mha) were made into cropland in 1700–99, 412 Mha in 1800–99
and 658 Mha in 1900–99. A broad generalisation has the nineteenth century
converting the temperate zones’ natural grasslands (and some forests) to crop-
land, and the second half of the twentieth century transforming the tropical
forests to food and fibre production. Overall, a cropland area of 265 Mha in
1700 became 1,471 in 1990 and a pasture total of 524 Mha expanded to 3,451
Mha; in 1700 less than 6 per cent of the world’s land surface was in agriculture
but by 2000, the equivalent figure was 32 per cent. All through the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, the clearance of forest for shifting cultivation was
about ten times that used for wood harvests; by 2000 it was only twice that
area. The wood harvest itself was 1.07 petagrams (Pg =1015 grams) per
capitum in 1920 but only 0.61 Pg/cap in 1961, showing the effects of popula-
tion growth.94 In Europe the conversion of land-use types was based on the
demands of cities which created zones of intensity of transformation. In the
less developed peripheries, the growing cities also created such zones but they
were set within an economy in which exports to the industrial core were
drivers of the economy. Such a country might well have frontier industries
where a moving belt of environmental transformation tore out forests, grazed
grasslands heavily or mined any mineral easily accessible to low levels of tech-
nology, such as alluvial gold. If permanent settlement followed then the
demand for food went up as well. Crops, though, might well now include lux-
uries such as tobacco and sugar as well as items so embedded in people’s lives
that they seemed essential, such as cotton clothing.
The development of cotton, tobacco and sugar for the delight of industri-
alising and resource-consuming populations started well before the nine-
teenth century but they and many other products were subsequently being
moved on a scale unimaginable before steam power: production and con-
sumption move apart in an unprecedented way.95 This characteristic of mass
movement of materials has had many environmental consequences and only
two will be mentioned here. The first is the environmental alterations needed
to facilitate large-scale movement in bulk: in particular, the construction of
canals and railways and then, in the post-World War I era, roads. The canals
are instructive in the sense that they were built on a variety of scales. The early
examples were usually local, to connect, for example, a coal-mining area with
a seaport or with an area of iron ore.96 Then, national systems were put
together to connect stretches of navigable river so that vessels might penetrate
 A   145
far into land masses: the Rhine and the St Lawrence alike were partially
canalised to allow either big barges or ocean-going ships to provide cheap
transport into continents. Then come larger canals with a strategic purpose,
such as the Kiel Canal, to allow German vessels (especially warships) to avoid
the narrow passage of the Kattegat. World-altering canals at Suez and Panama
made it cheaper to transport bulk goods such as ores, cereals and rubber from
areas of production to the manufacturing zones of the world. Thus, the
second consequence: the processing of materials. In the case of metal ores, the
changes are obvious and the role of energy supplies equally so. But consider
also food which is shipped in raw form (though very likely refrigerated in the
case of meat and fruit) and then processed elsewhere. This uses energy in the
actual physical changes in the tissues (for example, cooking, pulping, juicing)
and also in any transport between processing stages (think of wheat becom-
ing flour then going to a bakery, being sliced and wrapped and then driven to
a retail store) and then may well cause further energy consumption in the
manufacture and packaging of dietary supplements because the food pro-
cessing had eliminated useful minerals and vitamins. Both the shipping and
the processing have spin-off consequences for the environment: some are
large scale and profound, as with the penetration of biota through the major
canals with the potential for their populations to explode in new environ-
ments. Fruit and meat may bring unwanted micro-organisms or even hairy
spiders. There were many other ‘accessory’ changes in the years to 1950: the
aeroplane, for example, was beginning to absorb land and fuel, though on
nothing like its subsequent scale. Motor vehicles, likewise, are lower in signifi-
cance except in the United States and in the major road-building schemes of
the 1930s in Germany. But the leap into movement as a key accompaniment
to an industrialising world is very important and cannot be confined to
resources, because it involved people and ideas as well.
Underlying all this extra movement was the application of hydrocarbons.
Fossil fuel use totals about 0.11 calories per square metre per day globally, and
the weather accounts for about 100 calories per square metre per day so it is
quantitatively not a huge component; this does not mean, however, that it
does not have a considerable impact. This impact can be described in two
parts: the direct impact of energy use and its emissions, and the secondary
impact of those processes it makes possible. For direct impact, there are fall-
outs such as dust and carbon particles from coal combustion and nitrogen
compounds from oil distillates such as diesel fuel. Carbon monoxide is more
of a threat to human life than to the environment generally, but all hydrocar-
bon fuels produce waste carbon dioxide which finds its way into the upper
atmosphere, from where it is scavenged only slowly. The current concern over
the ‘greenhouse effect’ (perhaps better called the Enhanced Greenhouse
Effect) is therefore rooted in the accumulation of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the
planetary atmosphere which began to rise from industrial emissions, and so a
level of 280 parts per million (ppm) in 1750 became about 300 ppm in 1900
146 G E H
and 320 ppm in 1950, with early twenty-first-century levels at 350 ppm.97
Carbon dioxide is not the only trace gas whose emissions rose in the same
period: nitrous oxides and methane are the outstanding additions to the list
and, in the case of methane (CH4), the molecules are much more effective at
retaining radiation than CO2 and stay longer in the atmosphere. Overall, the
atmospheric CO2 level increased by 30 per cent between 1750 and 2000, and
the methane concentration by 150 per cent. More discussion of these phe-
nomena comes in the next chapter but here it needs to be recorded that there
were 200 years of rise during which its impact, actual and potential, was
ignored outside a few restricted scientific circles.

M,   

In 1849, Thomas Macaulay universalised his English subject matter to assert
that, ‘Every improvement of the means of locomotion benefits mankind
morally and intellectually as well as materially.’ This can be interpreted as a
slogan for the coalescing tendencies of the two centuries being examined here.
In 1800, the world was rapidly becoming Europeanised: Paris fashions may
have had a limited market but they functioned as a vanguard for many other
introductions in the period to 1950. Without question, the North American
and European technological introductions and spread dominate. To single
out one set of innovations is risky but perhaps the most important was the
‘improvement’ in communications in the sense that they became faster and
available on a much wider basis, more comfortable and affording greater
privacy to some at least.98 The steamship with a regular schedule, the railway
with its demands for standardised time, the electric telegraph, radio, powered
flight, film, television (though more widely after 1950) and especially print-
ing allowed the transmission of goods, people and ideas on scales never before
envisaged. Print, especially, became a validating medium like men in pulpits
in an earlier era. All these proliferations, backed up by firearms and quinine,
led to more imposition of the dominance of western ways of thought and
action. Primary among those was trade, which carried raw materials and fin-
ished goods as well as large amounts of food and other comestibles, such as
tea and coffee, and was in general responsible for the accumulation of capital:
in those two sentences lie the germs of thousands of environmental alter-
ations. Add to trade the often parallel penetration of colonial acquisition and
rule in which many production techniques from the metropolitan countries
were imposed on the dominated lands, and the recipe for large-scale ecologi-
cal change is determined. In the 1930s there was an African Research Survey
the basic aim of which was to apply scientific methods in the cause of co-
ordinating and, if possible, standardising the colonial policies of Britain,
France, Belgium and Portugal. It was abandoned in 1940 but had developed a
somewhat contrary stance in adopting ecological attitudes which called into
question the usual colonial rejection of traditional ecological knowledge.99
 A   147
This shows that, as so often, a hegemonic nexus calls forth opposition.
There were independence movements in the colonies which disrupted the
orderly flow of products and, in western circles, new thinking on the treat-
ment of animals, for example, began to take hold. This might have been
mostly a projection of human social concerns on to animals but it pointed up
changing attitudes. The extension of moral concerns beyond any immediate
circle was also one consequence of new flows of information and of technol-
ogy: the gradual (and incomplete) abolition of slavery was one outcome, and
the various conventions on the conduct of warfare another, both with envir-
onmental implications. Also normal in most parts of the world was slavery,
fundamentally made redundant by the advent of fossil fuels.100
One of the great themes of industrialisation is concentration in the mater-
ial sense: in and of the city, of chemicals and of wastes. This has an analogy in
the convergence of display in numerous ‘World Fairs’ in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. These claimed to show the best of every country’s arts and
sciences (both including technology) and so were dominated by western
nations. Trade was a central focus but, interestingly, several of them held
world congresses of science as well. In 1904, at the St Louis World Fair, there
were addresses by Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906, a founding father of par-
ticle theory) and Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937, likewise of radioactivity
science); the newest section of this International Congress of Arts and
Sciences was ecology. Science looked to be a unifying force in the world, now
that it had made such immense collections of knowledge as in the museums
of nature and of humankind in Paris, Berlin, London and Washington DC.
One example of its unifications was the Linnaean system of plant and animal
nomenclature, universally adopted, though subject (like European Union leg-
islation today) to nationalistic derogations from time to time. Meteorology
moved to the city and the laboratory from the 1840s onwards, away from its
individualistic and rural amateur base to worldwide networks of comparable
data.101 The first man (Svante Arrhenius, 1859–1927) to quantify the influence
of the concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere upon temperatures
at the Earth’s surface did so in the late nineteenth century, though he may well
have crystallised ideas of eighteenth-century pioneers.102 In such a world it is
not surprising that universalist claims were made for ideologies, of which the
outstanding example is the work of Karl Marx (1818–83) for whom the accu-
mulation and deployment of capital were the central facts of the world.
The closest parallel in understanding the human individual was Carl Jung
(1865–1961) for whom psychology had to reach out beyond European
systems of thought.
The environmental consequences are pervasive and follow two main trends:
the demands of western economies and their aspirants, and the growth of
population. One worldwide effect is the spread of species. Crop plants and
their pests are obvious examples: the import of sugar cane into Australia
brought with it cane beetles which provoked the introduction in 1935 from
148 G E H
Hawaii of a fast-breeding toad (Bufo marinus) which, in turn, has become a
large-scale pest. It is toxic to most other species and also ineffective because it
cannot jump as high as the fronds where the beetles live. In a piece of nostal-
gic symbolism, trout were exported to many parts of the British Empire
(for example, the Madras hills in 1863, Tasmania in 1864, and thence to main-
land Australia and New Zealand, 1898 South Africa, and 1947 the Falkland
Islands).103 The spread of commercial wine-making from its European heart-
lands and the interchange of stocks meant that diseases of the grape vine could
be transferred from one continent to another. Hence California contributed
to European production declines in the form of a fungus (Oideum spp.)
in 1851 and then to virtual wipe-out in 1860 by the aphids of the genus
Phylloxera. California also contributed a mid-century mildew Peronspera viti-
cola. The inadvertent transfer of organisms is exemplified by examples such as
the movement of species through great inter-ocean canals, as at Suez and
Panama, and of micro-organisms using humans as carriers. The greater
numbers of humans and their higher densities improved the chances of epi-
demics: Muslim pilgrims and the British army alike spread cholera in the nine-
teenth century; the pandemic of influenza two years after World War I, and
which affected a fifth of the world’s population, is cited as something likely to
happen again only on a larger scale. Land-use changes also spread diseases:
mosquitoes are encouraged by forest clearance, irrigation, standing water and
house-building so that malaria, yellow fever and dengue are spread. Irrigation
encourages schistosomiasis. Only tick-borne diseases have failed to colonise
the humanised spaces, with the exception of Lyme disease in the twentieth
century which followed wild deer into secondary vegetation.104
Deliberate transfer of species has not led to any universal distributions that
could be called worldwide in the sense that influenza decimated populations
as far apart as the Inuit and the Indonesians. The European house sparrow
(Passer domesticus) was taken to North America as a reminder of home, and
several exotics escaped from captivity in the parks of the rich to colonise their
new homelands: small species of deer, such as the Japanese sika (Cervus
nippon) and the muntjac (Muntiacus reevesi), have been favourite introduc-
tions. Timber trees from favoured environments, such as the west coast of
North America, have become widely grown but even Sitka spruce (Picea
sitchensis) and lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) have limits to their tolerances.
Even more widespread, however, was (and is) the planting of various species
of Eucalyptus, an Australian genus. Look by roadsides in Egypt, India,
Portugal and California alike and one will soon come into view. The transfer
of species meant that hybrid species, such as a cross between the European and
Japanese larches (Larix eurolepis), became possible and attractive to planta-
tion owners.105 In Australia itself, the European immigrants tended to believe
that the native fauna would be replaced by introduced species anyway and so
the Tasmanian marsupial wolf had a bounty on its head in 1912, a closed
season only in 1929, and protection in 1936 by which time it was extinct. In
 A   149
New Zealand, white clover would not grow until suitable bees had been
imported in 1839 and then sheep were able to become a major crop on ecosys-
tems converted to meadowlands.106
One way in which the findings of the physical sciences (by far the best at
prediction) suffused the world was in the preparation of chemical compounds
with precise effects upon defined targets. The general cure-all for plant
diseases of dusting with sulphur or one of its compounds was part folk knowl-
edge but also came out of German science. Likewise, a more precise formula-
tion of industrial fertilisers, in terms of their need to contain nitrogen,
emanated from German laboratories. The winner element in chemical death
until the 1960s is chlorine which was built up into a variety of organic com-
pounds of which the most famous was DDT, a member of a group known as
chlorinated hydrocarbons (CHCs); the public was unaware of their envir-
onment effects until the publication of Rachel Carson’s famous book Silent
Spring in 1962. Together with several similar products, the enzyme chemistry of
nerve transmission in insects (DDT was largely developed as an anti-malarial
in World War II) was disrupted by this substance. What was not predicted
was that the group would have very low breakdown rates outside the target
organisms and so became subject to biological amplification whereby very low
concentrations in, for example, water became lethally high further up a preda-
tor–prey food chain. One very noticeable effect was the accumulation of
CHCs in fish- and flesh-eating birds whose eggshells underwent thinning so
that they broke during incubation. Many species became almost extinct until
western governments began to prohibit the use of CHCs. This story might be
thought of as a example of fragmentation rather than coalescence except that
residues of CHCs are distributed throughout the world’s oceans (where they
are still available for uptake) and thence, via aerosol formation at the water–
air interface, can get rained out on land surfaces and on, for example, the
Antarctic ice. There is a case, therefore, for regarding this industrial residue as
having a global distribution. An even stronger claim can be made for waste
gases that, having been led off into the atmosphere, are only slowly scavenged
out and remain long enough to affect the processes of the atmosphere. Even
though present only at ‘trace’ levels, the likelihood that gases which contribute
to the effectiveness of retaining radiation within the Earth system will affect
climate, seems high. In 1750, the concentration of carbon dioxide was about
280 parts per million (ppm) and in 1950 it was 310 ppm, with a straight line
between the two estimations. Other industrial-era emissions such as nitrogen
oxides (270–285 ppm) and methane (650–1,100 ppm) followed the same
trend. Once in the atmosphere, their distribution is virtually homogeneous
spatially: no matter who emits, everybody will receive consequences though
these will be spatially variable. This globalisation is certainly material, is the
subject of much intellectual activity, and is without doubt moral in its impli-
cations. Not all of it stems from the ‘means of locomotion’ but the centrality
of motors of many kinds cannot be evaded.
150 G E H

T   

Since the use of the natural world must always reflect what humans think
about it (as well as allowing for any unconscious effects), developments such
as the Enlightenment and the amplifications of modern science have enor-
mous relevance for the non-human parts of the planet. In our context, the
Enlightenment of eighteenth-century Europe and North America is ambig-
uous. Its philosophers and practitioners swore by the idea of a universal
human nature but at the same time preached tolerance, diversity, reason, and
the encouragement of science and technology. The notion of humans as indi-
viduals who did not belong to anybody else becomes possible as the private
replaces the public and so there is less sharing of goods and thereafter the
production of more possessions from more ‘natural’ resources.107 If every-
body has their own stockpot, then there must be more iron mining; if city
workers live in houses, then more bricks mean more clay-pits and deeper
coal-mines. One intellectual stance became that of the literary critic, F. R.
Leavis, in the 1930s who envisaged a formerly organic society broken up by
industrialisation. If he had looked beyond the horizon of south-eastern
England then he would have had to admit that the ending of slavery in the
Atlantic in the nineteenth century was also the fragmentation of a type of
organic society, with implications for land use and land cover where large
plantations were broken up.
One evolution can be seen in the intellectual construct of modernism.
Applied firstly to the arts in the period between (roughly) 1890 and 1914, it
has come to express implications for the rational use of resources (as in town
and country planning) and the styles of that rationality. The grid plans of
some cities and the straight-line architecture of the classical skyscraper are
examples of modernist architecture, as are Picasso’s cubism or the geometric
lines of Mondrian’s paintings. Behind the rigid, however, there is a pervasive
current of ‘. . . fragmentation, introversion, and crisis . . .’108 which has reso-
nance across a broad spectrum of the arts, politics and science. The core of
these ideas is in the many spheres in which any element of continuity is broken
up by the realisation that the world and its representations are discontinuous.
The atom is not a new idea in the nineteenth century but its central role in
physics and then, indeed, its fragmentation into smaller particles with behav-
iour based only on probability comes from the twentieth century, as does the
delineation of movement on film by capturing sixteen individual frames per
second in 1903. The early pictures of Piet Mondrian show the representation
of, for example, trees breaking up into fragments, and the pointillism of
Georges Seurat makes every brushful of paint a series of dots. With words,
James Joyce’s Ulysses (conceived in 1907) was a series of pieces resolved only
by the magnificent and moving soliloquy of Molly Bloom which shifts tenses
as often as a restless sleeper. In the concert hall, Schoenberg and Webern’s
atonality provides little clue about the next note. Politically, the invention of
 A   151
the concentration camp sequesters whole non-combatant populations ‘for
their own good’, a nostrum often credited to the British during the second
Boer War (1899–1902) but more correctly the inspiration of Valeriano Weyler
y Nicolau, a Spanish army officer in a Cuban war of independence, who con-
structed three campos de reconcentraciòn in the province of Pinar del Rios in
1896.109 This separation of function is also behind the analytic approach to
planning which results in suburbs, industrial zones and shopping malls, each
with a single purpose.
Such separations are very obvious in the case of the sciences, where its lan-
guage became incomprehensible to the untrained (rather as medieval Latin
had been), and so a whole group now acquired a primary identification as ‘sci-
entists’, a word coined only in the later nineteenth century.110 In no time at all,
the ‘republic of science’ was cantonal, each area with its own language incom-
prehensible across the border. Science contributed to the climate of fragmen-
tation because it was endlessly analytical, seeking to break things into ever
smaller parts in attempts to model processes and predict their future behav-
iour. The success of Linnaean taxonomy can be seen in that light.111 Its success
was incalculable in terms of many of the phenomena of physics and chemistry
but less so with complex biological entities, such as ‘communities’, which were
the forerunners of ‘ecosystems’, pointing to an element of intellectual con-
struction in both.112 In environmental terms, however, the success of phar-
macology in disease control, helping to contain death rates, had considerable
consequences. Equally important, perhaps, was the ability of technology in
about 1900 to impose the fractured time of the stopwatch on human move-
ments and thus make an assembly line for all kinds of goods. Not least among
these was the motor car, the ascent of which into private ownership is one of
the most environmentally pervasive technologies of the twentieth century.
Henry Ford’s assembly line also broke up employment: in 1914, heavy indus-
try in the United States had an annual labour turnover of 115 per cent.113 That
statistic demonstrates a more general result of industrialisation: the demise of
communities based upon a shared locality and long-standing connections to
the land, and their replacement by associations based on particular interests,
whether these were of the workplace or of leisure time. The German terms
Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft are often used of these two states and it has been
argued that the former is more likely to be ‘tender’ towards nature than the
latter, which is so often urban and detached from sky, sea and soil.
The fragmentation of ecosystems follows the technology which allows social
drives to express themselves. Many natural and solar-powered, but humanised,
systems were replaced apparently totally but around the edges and in the inter-
stices, so to speak, there are usually small pieces of the precursor orders. Small
patches of woodland, a pond, some predators, quite a lot of scavenger species
and a few weeds remind us of a previous ecology. The enclosure of the common
fields in Europe as feudalism waned was the leading edge of much breakdown
of common-property resource use. Though much anathematised in later years,
152 G E H
this way of managing the nature of yield was often successful and highly demo-
cratic in terms of local control, locally agreed upon and locally enforced.114
Communities which knew that, if they depleted a resource base, then nobody
would ride to their rescue had a strong incentive to live within their limits and
to erect buffers against hard times. One of the coalescent forces of industriali-
sation was the emplacement of such groups within a wider nation-state context
which might bale them out. At the same time, the boundaries of the nation
state and its component units might well not be the best for resource manage-
ment, a situation still true of, for example, water in the Middle East and many
of the oceans. States such as Tokugawa Japan, which had deliberately cut itself
off from the world for 200 years (1603–1868), had faced the consequences of
famine, tsunami and earthquake without any outside assistance, yet faced
more difficult decisions when confronted with an industrial world in the form
of steamships with large guns.
The diminution of the public in favour of the private had many ecological
consequences. One of these was the need for the public bodies to acquire land
for wider use. Instead of common land, there was now public-access land
under the name of ‘park’ in one form or another. On the private areas the
industrial scale of some uses made other users unwelcome: the mass shooting
of grouse on moorlands in England and Scotland (p. 128) meant that walkers
were the targets in the nesting and shooting seasons; likewise in colonial plan-
tations and forests, any compromise with the previous land-management
systems was grudging at best and often denied. On the worldwide scale, the
gap opened up between the developed nations and the ‘less developed’ coun-
tries in which the former had high per capitum energy use and resource con-
sumption and low rates of population growth. The ‘developing’ countries
used less energy from commercial sources, and had higher rates of population
growth among which there were many poor people.115 It was thought that the
rich preserved more nature (unless it could be the basis of tourist income)
because they could call in resources from their economic periphery of poorer
dependants. The poor often had no choice and they either converted long-
standing systems to cash crops for exports, no matter what the environmen-
tal cost, or transformed fragile ecologies into subsistence systems at great risk
from environmental hazards such as floods, landslides, and even tsunamis.
The same industrial revolution which brought the world closer together, as
Walt Whitman’s paean extols, also estranged the human winners and losers,
to say nothing of the non-human members of ecosystems. It begot multiple
worlds, not all of which either understood, or had sympathy for, one
another.116
In all these changes, two features need final emphasis. The first is the impact
of colonialism in so many regions of the world beyond the temperate zone:
both wet and dry environments were subject to production systems and envir-
onmental management whose origins were in temperate areas and which
might be imposed (though not always) irrespective of the different conditions.
 A   153
Thus, shifting agriculture was often stigmatised as ‘primitive’ and ‘wasteful’
even though it was usually a rational response to certain soil–vegetation com-
binations. The second is the response to fragmentation of ecologies in places
with very rapid change in the nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries.
The United States is a prime example, with many public policies developed and
brought in by foresters, such as Gifford Pinchot (1865–1946) and President
Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), in the wake of rapid ecological transforma-
tion of forests and grasslands. But note the instrumental theme in all these
instances: nature for its own sake may get a national park here and there yet in
the United States, the National Parks Service in the 1950s promulgated a ‘parks
are for people’ policy.117 Any ontological continuity between humanity and its
co-existing entities had been lost.

R 
Invented in China, transformed in Europe by Johannes Gutenberg
(c.1400–68), printing is the key representation of the age, including the
dissemination of paintings by engravers. After the eighteenth century,
the numbers of books began to explode, accompanied by many printed
ephemera, such as newspapers. One function of the book was to be a com-
pendium in which all knowledge could be recorded, though this ambition
rather faded as the nineteenth century progressed. The details of the world
were recorded as science as in the great multi-volume tracts of Alexander
von Humboldt’s simply titled Kosmos (1845–62) or in works of travel such as
the radical (though backward-looking)William Cobbett’s Rural Rides in
nineteenth-century England (1830), or the slightly aloof French traveller,
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59), in both Britain and North America. The
stimulus to imagination of the new way of life inspired novels and poetry: the
Romantic poets were definitely against it (Wordsworth’s view of railways in
the Lake District is a good example), Elizabeth Gaskell set up a lasting divide
in North and South (1855), and D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) was in little
doubt about the morality of coal-mining as distinct from pheasant-rearing.
Threading through this emphasis on print is a change in consciousness
through the use of words. ‘Industry’ becomes a thing in itself rather than a
human attribute, with Adam Smith one of the first writers to use it for a
collective of institutions, in his Wealth of Nations of 1776. ‘Industrial
Revolution’ was coined in the 1820s by French writers, and art’s transition
from the work of the artisan to ‘imaginative truth’ was of the 1840s. Between
1780 and 1880 perhaps fifty words in English acquired new or much altered
meanings which indicated a shift in ways of seeing and representing the
world. The extension of literacy in the ‘western’ world and the emphasis
given to it in social and economic betterment inevitably make something
printed the symbol of the industrial era: let us light upon the US dollar bill.
At an abstract level, the neoclassical economic theory developed after Adam
154 G E H
Smith is distinguished (among other ways) by its absence of meaning taken
from other spheres of life. It becomes a closed and self-referential web of
concepts that dispelled morality from human livelihood and deprived all
local systems of any meaning.118 It thus placed no obstacles in the way of
accumulation of wealth which brings in further materials and money which
spin off into further environmental manipulation. The influence of Britain
in the nineteenth century extended to the exhaustion of soils in the
American South, the pushing of the American wheat belt towards erosion,
the conversion of native vegetation to pasture in Argentina and Australia, the
continued extraction of sugar from the West Indies, and the way in which
Swedish forests were managed. Where specialisation of rural production
prevailed, the ecologies of areas of cotton, wheat, tea and coffee were much
the same even on different continents.119

A  
The relationships of science, technology, culture and environment are com-
plicated. But nobody can deny the transformations in all of them that came
with the industrialisation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In some
ways, the new energy sources presented a flood of abundance which echoed
Charles Darwin’s contemplation in 1859 of the progress of life-forms from
‘famine and death’ to the production of the higher animals: ‘There is grandeur
in this view of life.’120 In keeping with this expansive attitude there came about
an acceleration of speed and accessibility that rippled out to very far corners
of the world. Between 1880 and 1914, there were sweeping changes in tech-
nology and culture which created new modes of thought about such fun-
damentals as the relationships of time and space, not least the theory of
relativity. At a hands-on level, there came the telephone and telegraph, X-rays,
the cinema and the bicycle, the moter car and the aeroplane.121 Yet words do
not capture well the linkages and interdependence of specialisation, atomisa-
tion, instrumental rationality, the growth of knowledge and its provisional
nature. The connections to environment are at one level obvious: ‘whatever
we want, we want it now’ might have been chanted in the streets had that been
the customary cry of demonstrators. It was more subtle as well. In 1834 the
Statistical Society of London averred that the ‘first indispensable body of
information’ was ‘physical geography’ and, of course, ‘the means of its modi-
fication’.122 This outlook was applied to many of the colonies which supplied
not only vast new territories for economic exploitation but new mental vistas
as well. In the fields of deforestation, soil erosion and species extinction, colo-
nial administrators and those whom we would now call scientists evolved new
ideas which would now be called environmentalist. The French led the way
with the British and Dutch some distance behind and extra-colonials, such
as George Perkins Marsh, having rather less influence outside the US and
perhaps Italy, where he was Ambassador.123
 A   155
The nineteenth century was when humans started to know a great deal more
about invisible things but this was greatly outbalanced by the rise of the visual
towards a status equalling that of the printed word in shaping world views.
Images can destroy certitudes, reveal ignorance and challenge the limits of
comprehension; on the other hand, they might often be retouched so that
interloping people or thoughts are shaded out.124 They also impose a frame on
what is included and what is left out. We think most often of photography but
painting, too, may have captured shifts in world view, moving from scenes that
were part of a pre-established order to those that were the creation of a single
artist’s perceptions: the difference between the landscapes of Gainsborough
and those of Constable has been used as an example.125 The idyllic qualities of
rural landscapes were matched by heroic industrial paintings of a boosterist
nature although beneath there might be another current. It is possible to see in
some of J. M. W. Turner’s sea pictures the sheer inability to do anything but
yield (even in a steamboat) to nature’s forces (Snow Storm – Steamboat off a
Harbour’s Mouth [1842] is a good example), echoed in A. E. Houseman’s lines
of 1900, that he was

I, a stranger and afraid

In a world I never made.

The mood of an industrialised world was caught brilliantly by T. S. Eliot’s

The Waste Land of 1922. The poem is a series of fragments and quotations,
allusive as well as direct, and multilingual. It reminds one interpreter126of
‘. . . landscapes, where billboards loom out of farmlands, and a jungle of
modern tenements surrounds the splendour of the Acropolis’, and by many
others the poem is held to sum up modernism in its disruptive aspects,
the intrusion of fossil-fuel-powered economies into a world formerly glued
by the sun. The world had been ‘hopscotched’ in the sense that not all of it
was landed upon (this is a historian of ideas writing and not an environ-
mental historian) but in a way that emphasised separations. These judge-
ments from other disciplines reinforce any conviction that, in 1950, there
was more fragmentation than coalescence in the world. After 1950, the sym-
metry changes as ‘globalisation’, as the is term currently used, is more
apparent.
If we look for fundamental factors in the metamorphoses of 1750–1950, a
number of generalisations 127can be brought out:

● An increasing capacity for collective action. This is most evident in the

power of the state but backed up by corporate entities that get ever larger.
These processes were dominated by states and companies in Europe and
North America.
● The extension of state and corporate power in the shape of colonial
regimes. Even frontiersmen [sic] logging forests, running cattle ranches
156 G E H
and mining alluvial gold have the mechanisms and power structures of
the state backing them up, usually from a warm office.
● Since about 1500 there has been a world market not only for precious
items, such as silver and gold, but also for cheaper commodities, such as
cotton, sugar, timber, tobacco and iron ore. After intensification of land
use in the industrialised heartlands, the search for these products brought
about similar processes in the tributary regions which were then tapped.
● Coal and oil meant that a nation was no longer dependent on its surface
area for energy sources: it had those underground to add to any it might
acquire by trade or conquest. Hypothetically, that might lead to lower
environmental impact. In fact, it proved to be a positive feedback loop.
● Population growth was a major contributor in most regions of the world
both as occupiers of the land and creators of demand for its products, as
well as those of the sea. The basic data for world population are a rise
from 610 million in 1750 to 2,500 million in 1950, a continuation of the
take-off beginning about 1650, with accelerating rates of growth in many
areas towards the end of the period.
● The accessibility of technology to so many more people. The state has bat-
tleships, the individual can have vulcanised rubber boots. In the early
decades of this period, the ingenuity of individuals was the major driver
of innovation but, with time, basic science preceded the engineering
achievements. Overall, technology removes barriers but ideologies, ideas
and demands drive the resulting modifications in land use and land cover
that are the visible reminders of environmental change.128

The underlying ecology then manifests certain redirections, One is of con-

centration and intensification: the sewage of a family farm is easily processed
by the local river but that of a city of half a million is a different prospect. As
the population rises in the monsoon zone, people must either convert more
hillside to rice terrace or produce more crops per year. Either way, more energy
per unit area has to flow through the agro-ecosystem, which is the basis
of intensification. A second shift is the introduction of new substances into
environmental flows. All natural and many low-intensity human-directed
ecosystems have mechanisms for breaking down complex molecules so that
they can be recycled. But some of the new outputs from the chemical and
pharmaceutical industries have no such pathways and, indeed, may have been
designed not to break down. Clear examples exist in the form of the CHC bio-
cides discussed above and in the residual radioactivity of isotopes such as plu-
tonium-239, the safe disposal of which requires it to be kept away from all
forms of life for at least 250,000 years. There is a chiasma of both transitions
in the intensification of content: tobacco is grown for higher nicotine levels,
sugar refined for more sweetness, and the increasing availability of meat. The
growth of vegetarianism in the west in the 1880s to 1890s seems not to have
affected the demand for the product that transformed whole regions and
 A   157
attracted people to them: in the 1870s, Anthony Trollope was in Australia and
noted that ‘the labouring man . . . eats meat three times a day in the colonies,
and very generally goes without it altogether at home’.129
This world is still here even though many people in the world have yet to
experience the abundance of goods and services and hence have access to the
levels of energy throughput that industrialisation has brought to the richer
regions. It is here in the habits of thought engendered by two hundred years
of expansion of production and consumption. There is an expectation that
there can be more of everything, that any limits are only temporary and
also that solutions to problems are most likely to be found in science and
technology.

N
1. If nuclear fusion is to be successful outside the laboratory, a method of contain-
ing the very hot plasmas has to be found. Magnetic fields and lasers are the top
candidates.
2. Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (1878–1953) was Georgian and his family name
was Djugashvili. He also invented his birthday, nationality and education as well.
S. Sebag Montefiore, Stalin. The Court of the Red Tsar, London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 2003. ‘Steel’ is a generic term for a variety of alloys of iron, carbon and
other additives, such as tungsten and wolfram.
3. The best history of energy use is V. Smil, Energy in World History, Boulder CO:
Westview Press, 1994. For the United States, see also D. E. Nye, Consuming
Power. A Social History of American Energies, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1998.
4. D. S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial
Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988. Pig iron was the initial product of the smelting of the ore
and so was the base material for other forms of iron and for steel.
5. Not so evocative, I suppose, for anybody born too late to travel during the era of
steam-hauled trains.
6. In approximate numbers, 1 kilogram of lignite (brown coal) contains
1,800–4,500 kilocalories; hard coal 550–7500; oil 9,500–10,500. Natural gas
comes by the cubic metre and each contains 8,500 kilocalories.
7. R. G. Wilkinson, ‘The English industrial revolution’, in D. Worster (ed.) The
Ends of the Earth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, 80–99.
Biomass energies are still important in nations now characterised as ‘poor’.
8. For example, see M. Osborn, ‘ “The weirdest of all undertakings”: the land and
the early industrial revolution in Oldham, England’, Environmental History 8,
2003, 246–69.
9. Quoted in the chapter on Glasgow in P. Hall, Cities in Civilization. Culture,
Innovation and Urban Order, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998.
10. The term seems to have originated in France c.1827 but its significance and
emplacement are due largely to Friedrich Engels in the 1840s. The term and its
mythological resonances are explored in detail by D. C. Coleman as chapter 1 of
his collected essays Myth, History and the Industrial Revolution, London and Rio
Grande OH: Hambledon Press, 1992, 1–42.
11. There is a huge literature and a constant debate about which engine was seminal,
the relative price and availability of coal and wood, and the social acceptability
158 G E H
of factory working. Here I shall accept a simple narrative: that of Landes op.cit.
1988.
12. This is much simplified from A. Grübler, ‘Technology’, in W. B. Meyer and B. L.
Turner (eds) Changes in Land Use and Land Cover: A Global Perspective,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 287–328, Table 1.
13. I have tried to put this together in my Changing the Face of the Earth (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1989, 2nd edn) and see also J. McNeill, Something New under the Sun.
An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century World. London and New
York: Allen Lane, 2000. The treatment in J. D. Hughes, An Environmental History
of the World, London and New York: Routledge, 2001, is unusual but remarkable
in the way it puts the industrial material in a long-time framework. The huge
book is B. L. Turner et al. (eds) The Earth as Transformed by Human Action.
Global and Regional Changes in the Biosphere over the Past 300 years, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990.
14. C. McEvedy and R. Jones, Atlas of World Population History, Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1978; M. Livi-Bacci, A Concise History of World Population,
Oxford: Blackwell, 2001 (first published in Italian 1989); C. Haub, ‘How many
people have ever lived on earth?’ Population Today 23, 1995, 4–5.
15. P. Bairoch, ‘International industrialization levels from 1750 to 1980’, Journal of
European Economic History 11, 1982, 269–333.
16. These and almost any other data on population can be obtained from the website
of the Population Reference Bureau.
17. J. M. Grove, The Little Ice Age, London: Methuen, 1988; R. S. Bradley, K. R. Briffa,
J. Cole, M. K. Hughes and T. J. Osborn, ‘The climate of the last millennium’, in
K. D. Alverson, R. S. Bradley and T. F. Pedersen (eds) Paleoclimate, Global Change
and the Future, Berlin: Springer, 2003, 105–41.
18. M. Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts. El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third
World, London and New York: Verso, 2001.
19. The data are for 1997 and suggest that the year’s combustion involved 44  1018
gigacalories, that is, about 400 times the twentieth-century global net primary
productivity (NPP). Coal from plants is less than 10 per cent efficient in terms
of solar energy conversion; oil and gas are less than 0.01per cent efficient. See J. S.
Dukes, ‘Burning buried sunshine: human consumption of ancient solar energy’,
Climatic Change 61, 2003, 31–44.
20. My paper, ‘Bach’s butterfly effect’ Environmental Values 5, 1997, 210–19,
wrongly assumed that Bach’s shares were in a coal-mine. In fact, the mine in
Saxony was a silver mine, not one for coal. But silver probably formed the
medium of exchange that allowed mines to be developed
21. Not a unit then in use: ‘horsepower’ was the benchmark but it would
read oddly in that sentence. Most machines that used the coal were highly
inefficient, with only a small proportion of the energy in the coal actually
moving machinery or providing light. There are relevant data throughout
V. Smil op. cit. 1994.
22. There is, of course, a huge literature on the reasons for the process. A summary
set of accounts with often unusual perspectives is found in J. Goudsblom,
E. Jones and S. Mennel, The Course of Human History. Economic Growth, Social
Process, and Civilization, Armonk NY and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1996.
23. Marx and Freud also contributed world-scale theorisations.
24. A former British colonial secretary and president of the Board of Trade. Most
remembered for his death in 1830 as the first ever victim of a railway accident,
at the opening of the Manchester–Liverpool railway; a somewhat ironic fate in
the light of his earlier pronouncement.
 A   159
25. A. Grübler, ‘Industrialization as a historical phenomenon’, in R. Socolow (ed.)
Industrial Ecology and Global Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994, 23–41.
26. I suppose there may be some remote groups unvisited by a development-agency
worker who was trained in a building lit by electricity and who arrived by 44
vehicle? But very few. After the tsunami of December 2004, Indian government
representatives would not for some time land on Sentinel Island in the Andaman
and Nicobar Islands for fear of the traditionally hostile reaction of what the
British press called ‘Stone Age tribes’.
27. Overviews of this material are given by A. M. Mannion, Agriculture and
Environmental Change, Chichester: Wiley, 1995, 3.4–3.5; D. Grigg, The
Transformation of Agriculture in the West, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992; D. Grigg, The
Dynamics of Agricultural Change. The Historical Experience, London: Hutchinson,
1982; a conceptually very important exploration was D. and M. Pimentel, Food,
Energy and Society, London: Edward Arnold, 1979 but there is no better account
than V. Smil, Energy, Food, Environment. Realities, Myths, Options, Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1987. Most of these books bring the story into the late twentieth
century and hence are relevant to the next chapter as well.
28. Consider how much science could have been carried on without electricity. The
symbolism of any movie of Frankenstein is highly revealing.
29. W. H. McNeill, ‘American food crops in the Old World’, in H. J. Viola and
C. Margolis (eds) Seeds of Change, Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution
Press, 1991, 43–59.
30. As always, there is a social context: the British government could have sent timely
food aid to Ireland.
31. A famous pronouncement by the American ecologist Howard Odum: ‘for indus-
trial man no longer eats potatoes made from solar energy; now he eats potatoes
partly made of oil’. In Environment, Power and Society, New York: Wiley
Interscience, 1971, p. 116. In both phrases the role of mineral nutrients is over-
looked.
32. J. Thirsk, Alternative Agriculture. A History from the Black Death to the Present
Day. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
33. M. I. L’Vovich et al., ‘Use and transformation of terrestrial water systems’, in B. L.
Turner et al. op. cit. 1990, 235–52.
34. See many of the papers in D. R. Harris (ed.) Human Ecology in Savanna
Environments, London: Academic Press, 1980. There are regional overviews
of the twentieth century in M. D. Young and O. T. Solbrig (eds) The World’s
Savannas. Economic Driving Forces, Ecological Constraints and Policy Options for
Sustainable Land Use, Paris: UNESCO/Carnforth: Parthenon Publishing, Man
and the Biosphere vol. 12, 1993.
35. For an even earlier example of these interactions see I. Pikirayi. ‘Environmental
data and historical process. Historical climatic reconstruction and the Mutapa
state 1450–1862’, in W. Beinart and J. McGregor (eds) Social History and African
Enviroments, Oxford: James Currey/Athens OH: Ohio University Press/Cape
Town: David Phillip, 2003, 60–71.
36. P. C. Salzman and J. G. Galaty, ‘Nomads in a changing world: issues and
problems’, in P. C. Salzman and J. G. Galaty (eds) Nomads in A Changing
World, Naples: Instituto Universitario Orientale, series minor no 33, 1990,
3–48.
37. T. Ingold, ‘The day of the reindeerman: a model derived from cattle ranching
and its application to the transition from pastoralism to ranching in northern
Finland’, in P. C. Salzman and J. G. Galaty (eds) op. cit. 1990, 441–70; J. L. Fox,
160 G E H
‘Finnmarksvidda: reindeer carrying capacity and exploitation in a changing
pastoral ecosystem – a range ecology perspective on the reindeer ecosytem in
Finnmark’, in S. Jentoft (ed.) Commons in a Cold Climate: Coastal Fisheries and
Reindeer Pastoralism in North Norway: the Co-Management Approach, Paris:
UNESCO/Carnforth: Parthenon Publishing, Man and the Biosphere vol. 22,
1998, 17–39. [Is there something about reindeer that makes commentators
adopt long titles for their essays?]
38. Ingold op. cit. 1990, including the observation about cruelty.
39. D. R. Foster, Thoreau’s Country. Journey through a Transformed Landscape,
Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 39 (a journal
entry by Thoreau for January 28, 1853); the churchyard story is in a paper the
substantive findings of which are shot through this chapter: E. L. Jones,
‘Environment, agriculture and industrialization in Europe’, Agricultural History
51, 1977, 491–502.
40. There is no better source of both data and interpretation than M. Williams op.
cit. 2003; these data are from Part II. An earlier and more condensed version of
the history can be found in his contribution to B. L. Turner et al. (eds) op. cit.
1990: ‘Forests’, ch. 11, 179–201. Some of the data have been updated by newer
studies: see G. C. Hurtt et al., ‘The underpinnings of land-use history: three cen-
turies of global gridded land-use transitions, wood-harvest activity, and result-
ing secondary lands’, Global Change Biology 12, 2006, 1208–29. The overall
magnitudes are much the same.
41. Its title in German is Grundsätze Forstoekonomie.
42. In the United States at least, the introduction of creosote in the 1920s (derived
from crude oil) saved many forests from being logged out for railroad ties
(sleepers).
43. B. Weil, ‘Conservation, exploitation, and cultural change in the Indian Forest
Service, 1875–1927’, Environmental History 11, 2006, 319–43.
44. M. Gadgil and R. Guha, This Fissured Land. An Ecological History of India, Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1993.
45. J. Fairhead and M. Leach, Misreading the African Landscape. Society and Ecology
in a Forest–Savanna Mosaic, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. The
rainforests further south were correctly interpreted much earlier by E. W. Jones
(‘Studies on the rain forest of southern Nigeria’, Journal of Ecology 44, 1956,
83–117) when he said that the whole of the (then) continuous forest had been
inhabited and cultivated at some time or other.
46. R. L. Heathcote, Back of Bourke. A Study of Land Appraisal and Settlement
in Semi-arid Australia, London and New York: Cambridge University
Press/Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1965; A. B. Smith, Pastoralism in
Africa. Origins and Development Ecology, London: Hurst/Athens OH: Ohio
University Press/Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1992; M.
Stocking, ‘Breaking new ground’, in M. Leach and R. Mearns (eds) The Lie of the
Land. Challenging Received Wisdom on the African Environment, Oxford: James
Currey/Portsmouth NH: Heinemann for the International African Institute,
London, 1996, 140–54.
47. J. Dearing and R. T. Jones, ‘Coupling temporal and spatial dimensions of global
sediment flux through lake and marine sediment records’, Global and Planetary
Change 39, 2003, 147–68.
48. S. Daniels, ‘The political iconography of woodland in later Georgian England’,
in D. Cosgrove and S. Daniels (eds) The Iconography of Landscape. Essays on the
Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 43–82.
 A   161
49. O. Jones and P. Cloke, Tree Cultures. The Place of Trees and Trees in their Place,
Oxford and New York: Berg, 2002, ch. 2.
50. J. Tsouvalis, A Critical Geography of Britain’s State Forests, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000.
51. Williams op. cit. 2003, ch. 12.
52. J. Knight, ‘When timber grows wild. The desocialization of Japanese mountain
forests’, in P. Descola and G. Pálsson (eds) Nature and Society. Anthropological
Perspectives, London and New York: Routledge, 1996, 221–39.
53. R. P. Harrison, Forests: the Shadow of Civilization, Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1992.
54. The inspiration for Ludwig van Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony (Opus 68, 1808)
came from land and water within the narrow limits of some 15 to 20 kilometres
either to the north of Vienna, or at Baden or Hetzendorf. At those places there
were conceived and written (or at least sketched) ten great works recording
Beethoven’s impressions face to face with nature. The path known today as the
‘Beethovengang’, which leads to the brook of the ‘Pastoral’ symphony, is in the
valley of Wildgrube.
55. There is much writing about individual places in the nineteenth century but few
general studies of any weight. The massive multi-volume federal study of
outdoor recreation in the United States (informally known as the ORRRC
Report) had only twenty-eight pages in its final volume given over to some
history: ‘Historical Development of Outdoor Recreation’, in Outdoor Recreation
Literature: a Survey, Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1962,
ORRRC Study Report vol. 27, 101–29. In Britain, the work of J. Allan Patmore
has introductory historical material but no detail: see Land and Leisure in
England and Wales, Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1970; Recreation and
Resources. Leisure Patterns and Leisure Places, Oxford: Blackwell, 1983. There is
a whole chapter in C. Harrison, Countryside Recreation in a Changing Society,
London: TMS Partnership, 1991.
56. In a bid for large-scale connections, a comparison was once made between the
physiognomy of city parks and savannas, with the implication that humans were
re-creating the environment in which they had evolved. Hm.
57. It is now illegal in Britain to kill birds such as the merlin and the hen harrier. The
merlin (Falco columbarius) is probably tolerated because it will prey on rats
(which eat grouse eggs) but the hen harrier (Circus cyaneus) is still shot and poi-
soned. Prosecutions in such areas are hard to bring and often not successful in
front of a local magistracy. There is more (much more) in I. G. Simmons, The
Moorlands of England and Wales. An Environmental History 8000  to  2000,
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003.
58. I. G. Simmons, An Environmental History of Great Britain, Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2001.
59. See, for example, J. M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature. Hunting.
Conservation and British Imperialism, Manchester and New York: Manchester
University Press, 1988; E. J. Steinhart, ‘The imperial hunt in colonial Kenya,
c.1880–1909’, in M. Henninger-Voss, Animals in Human Histories. The Mirror
of Nature and Culture, Rochester NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002,
144–81.
60. In most developed countries until the 1950s, Saturday was a half-day, not a full
holiday. I worked in Selfridges in London’s Oxford Street in the summer of 1956
and we closed on Saturdays at lunchtime; some stores in Germany still do so. The
exodus on Sundays was regularly condemned by the churches in Protestant
regions, less so in Roman Catholic subcultures.
162 G E H
61. Jones and Cloke op. cit. 2002, p 32 quote from a 1992 newspaper article: ‘We
British . . . have looked at these coniferous plantations and decided we do not
like them. We have brewed up a frantic symbolism of revulsion around them.’
62. M. Shoard, The Theft of the Countryside, London: Temple Smith, 1980.
63. The situation varied greatly from nation to nation. Sweden’s generous laws of
access to all but enclosed private land are well known (though currently under
threat in the south) and other countries vary considerably. Few are as restricted
as England, though here there is a dense network of de jure public footpaths,
zealously guarded by citizen associations. The water catchments have been grad-
ually opened up. For Britain, see M. Shoard, A Right to Roam, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999.
64. In the United States, Thoreau has been romanticised a great deal. There is a real-
istic account of his ecological and land-management context in D. R. Foster,
Thoreau’s Country. Journey through a Transformed Landscape, Cambridge MA
and London: Harvard University Press, 1999.
65. J. R. McNeill op. cit. 2000 is one of the few overview books to have a decent treat-
ment of warfare.
66. The publications of the Stockholm Institute for Peace Research (SIPRI)
are invaluable. See especially A. H. Westing, Environmental Hazards of War:
Releasing Dangerous Forces in an Industrialized World, Newbury Park CA: Sage,
1990 and his earlier Warfare in a Fragile World: Military Impact on the Human
Environment, London: Taylor and Francis, 1980. Also, S. D. Lanier-Graham, The
Ecology of War: Environmental Effects of Weaponry and Warfare, New York:
Walker & Co., 1993.
67. L. Mumford, The City in History: its Origins, its Transformations, and its
Prospects, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1961, ch. 18.
68. See the chapter by B. J. L. Berry, ‘Urbanization’, in B. L. Turner et al. (eds) op.
cit. 1990, ch. 7.
69. Given the conditions in which many of them lived, ‘shedding’ has a curious
ambivalence.
70. I. Douglas, The Urban Environment, London: Edward Arnold, 1983.
71. K. Thomas, Man and the Natural World. Changing Attitudes in England
1500–1800. London: Allen Lane, 1983.
72. The key work is A. Leopold, Sand County Almanac, New York: Oxford University
Press 1949.
73. P. Hall, Cities in Civilization, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998. Another
mega-book on cities has even less, focusing mostly on art: P. Conrad, Modern
Times, Modern Places, London: Thames & Hudson, 1998.
74. S. Pile, ‘Cities’, in S. Harrison, S. Pile and N. Thrift (eds) Patterned Ground.
Entanglements of Nature and Culture, London: Reaktion Books, 2004, 246–8.
75. R. Lahtinen and T. Vuorisalo, ‘ ‘‘It’s war and everyone can do as they please!” An
environmental history of a Finnish city in wartime’, Environmental History 9,
2004, 679–700.
76. These numbers are mostly from the 1970s and 1980s and will show some effects
of more conservation-minded attitudes. For the period before World War II, let
us guess, the upper figures are likely to be nearer the historical situation.
Generally speaking, as plant is renewed and technology is improved, unit con-
sumption drops.
77. Every book on world resource and environment processes and problems has a
chapter on water. Most draw for contemporary material on the UNEP and WRI
data. The chapter in B. L. Turner et al. (eds) op. cit. 1990 is by M. I. L’Vovich and
G. White, ‘Use and transformation of terrestrial water systems’, 235–70; a
 A   163
shorter version is in W. B. Meyer, Human Impact on the Earth, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996, ch. 5. The work of Gilbert White from the
1950s onwards on water has been an inspiration to many ever since. A very
useful general work is P. H. Gleick (ed.) Water in Crisis: a Guide to the World’s
Freshwater Resources, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Also, G. Petts (ed.) Man’s Influence on Freshwater Ecosystem and Water Use,
Wallingford: International Association of Hydrological Sciences, 1995.
78. H. Cook, The Protection and Conservation of Water Resources. A British
Perspective. Chichester: Wiley, 1998, ch. 2.
79. Quoted in B. W. Clapp, An Environmental History of Britain since the Industrial
Revolution, London and New York: Longman, 1994, p. 75.
80. E. Swyngedouw, ‘Water. Circulating waters, circulating moneys, contested
natures’, in S. Harrison, S. Pile and N. Thrift op. cit. 2004, 119–21.
81. This was the Heatherbelle, a paddle-steamer tug from Sunderland in north-east
England which towed two smacks offshore about 8 to 16 kilometres; by 1864
there were twenty-four such rigs working off that coast.
82. D. H. Cushing, The Provident Sea, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
83. See the classic R. J. H. Beverton and S. J. Holt, On the Dynamics of Exploited Fish
Populations, London: HMSO, 1957 Fishery Investigations series 2, vol. 19,
Facsimile reprint, London: Chapman & Hall, 1993. Also J. R. Beddington,
R. J. H. Beverton and D. M. Levine (eds) Marine Mammals and Fisheries,
London: Allen & Unwin, 1985.
84. Quoted in many sources and in my Environmental History. A Concise
Introduction, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 112.
85. ‘. . . here at the beginning and the end is the great matrix that man can hardly
sully and cannot appreciably despoil.’ M. Graham, ‘Harvests of the seas’, in W. L.
Thomas (ed.) Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1956, 487–503 at p. 502.
86. At 54° south, this is the same latitude as York (England) and the Queen Charlotte
Islands; scarcely polar.
87. K. Dorsey, ‘Whale’, in S. Krech et al. (eds) Encyclopedia of World Environmental
History, London and New York: Routledge, 2004, vol. 3, 1324–7. There is an
interesting list of the equipment and supplies of a sixteenth-century whaler,
pp. 1325–6; M. Klinowska, Dolphins, Porpoises and Whales of the World: the
IUCN Red Data Book, Gland, Sw., 1991; R. Gambell, ‘World whale stocks’,
Mammal Review 61, 1976, 41–53.
88. W. J. Bolster, ‘Opportunities in marine environmental history’, Environmental
History 11, 2006, 567–97.
89. The literature on emissions from industry is vast. A good guide is the work of
J. O. Nriagu, which nearly always has a historical dimension. See his ‘Global
inventory of natural and anthropogenic emissions of trace metals to the atmos-
phere’, Nature 279, 1979, 409–11; with J. M. Pacnya, ‘Quantitative assessment of
worldwide contamination of of the air, water and soil with trace metals’, Nature
333, 1988, 134–9; and a summary, ‘Industrial activity and metal emissions’, in
R. Socolow (ed.) op. cit. 1994, 277–85; idem, ‘A history of global metal
pollution’, Science 272, 1996, 223–4 and for the total effects of a smelter, J. O.
Nriagu , H. K. Wong, G. Lawson, and P. Daniel, ‘Saturation of ecosystems with
toxic metals in Sudbury basin, Ontario, Canada’, Science of the Total
Environment 223 1998, 99–117.
90. A. S. Ek, S. Lögren, J. Bergholm and U. Qvarfort, ‘Environmental effects of one
thousand years of copper production at Falun, central Sweden’, Ambio 30, 2001,
96–103.
164 G E H
91. Sometimes known in English as ‘strip-mining’ or elsewhere ‘open-cast’.
92. S. Baumgartner, ‘Thermodynamics of waste generation’, in K. Bisson and
J. Proops (eds) Waste in Ecological Economics’, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2002,
13–37; V. Winiwarter, ‘History of waste’, ibid. 38–54. For the United States, see
the work of M. V. Melosi, Effluent America: Cities, Industry, Energy and the
Environment, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001; idem, Garbage
in the Cities: Refuse, Reform and the Environment: 1880–1980, Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005, revised edition.
93. D. H. McLaughlin, ‘Man’s selective attack on ores and minerals’, in W. L.
Thomas (ed.) op. cit. 1956, 851–61. The use of ‘attack’ is interesting and unusual.
The equivalent essay on fuels is largely concerned with supplies (especially in the
USA) and disavows the possibility of forecasting (E. Ayres, ‘The age of fossil
fuels’, op. cit. 367–81).
94. Extracted from J. F. Richards, ‘Land transformation’, in B. L. Turner et al. (eds)
op. cit. 1990, 163–78 and from later and more refined work by the LUCC project
of the IGBP. See, for example, N. Ramankutty and J. A. Foley, ‘Estimating his-
torical changes in global land cover 1700–1992’, Global Biogeochemical Cycles 13,
1999, 997–1027; K. K. Goldewijk, ‘Estimating global land use change over the
past 300 years: the HYDE database’, Global Biogeochemical Cycles, 15(2),
417–34, 2001.
95. M. D. I. Chisholm, ‘The increasing separation of production and consumption’,
in B. L. Turner et al. (eds) op. cit. 1990, 87–101.
96. E. A. Wrigley, ‘The supply of raw materials in the industrial revolution’,
Economic History Review 15, 1962, 1–16.
97. D. Raynaud et al. in Alverson et al. op. cit. 2003, ch. 2.
98. R. Sennett, Flesh and Stone. The Body and the City in Western Civilization, New
York and London: W. W. Norton, 1994.
99. H. Tilley, ‘African environments and environmental sciences’, in W. Beinart and
J. McGregor (eds) Social History and African Environments, Oxford: James
Currey/Athens OH: Ohio University Press, 2003, 109–30.
100. O. Bernier, The World in 1800, New York: Wiley, 2000.
101. V. Jankovič, Reading the Skies. A Cultural History of English Weather 1650–1820,
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.
102. H. Rodhe, R. Charlson and E. Crawford, ‘Svante Arrhenius and the greenhouse
effect’, Ambio 26, 1997, 2–5. The first publication was in in Swedish in 1896, fol-
lowed by refined calculations in German in 1903 and 1906. A likely pioneer was
Arvid Högbom (fl. 1894): see E. Crawford, ‘Arrhenius’ 1896 model of the green-
house effect in context’, Ambio 26, 1997, 6–11.
103. C. Rangely-Wilson, ‘Trout of the empire’, The Field, December 1999, 128–31.
(The waiting-room fruits of a middle-class medical centre.)
104. M. N. Cohen, ‘The epidemiology of civilization’, in J. Jacobsen and J. Firor (eds)
Human Impact on the Environment: Ancient Roots, Current Challenges, Boulder
CO: Westview Press, 1992, 51–70.
105. In this case the hybridisation was accidental after the planting of specimens of
European and Japanese larches close to each other on the Duke of Atholl’s estate
at Dunkeld in Scotland in 1885.
106. T. R. Dunlap, ‘Australian nature, European culture’, in C. Miller and
H. Rothman (eds) Out of the Woods. Essays in Environmental History, Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997, 273–89; A. W. Crosby, ‘Biotic change in
nineteenth-century New Zealand’, ibid. 263–72.
107. Privacy is one result: people die in private (especially if legally executed) and
those declared insane are no longer an entertainment spectacle. Or at least were
 A   165
not until the kind of ‘reality television’ which can only be a step away from con-
triving these sights.
108. The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, London: Fontana Press, 2nd edn
1998, p. 540.
109. W. R. Everdell, The First Moderns. Profiles in the Origin of Twentieth-Century
Thought, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. He notes that the camps
were given their name ‘at the same time as cubism and quantum physics, by the
same civilized Westerners’. (p. 117). Everdell’s breadth of understanding and
felicitous writing make it a most persuasive read.
110. A. Desmond, Huxley, London: Penguin Books 1997, reports that it was used as
a term of abuse on a visit by Huxley to the United States in 1876 but that by 1888
the Royal Society used the word. Huxley, apparently, avoided it.
111. Carl von Linné (1707–78), known as Linnaeus, systematised plant and animal
scientific names in the system still largely in use today, though classification by
DNA structure is likely to replace the earlier emphasis on anatomy.
112. It is claimed that between 1947 and 1959 there was a paradigm shift in American
ecology which saw ‘real and integrated’ biological communities becoming arte-
facts of the human imagination. Connections with other aspects of culture
(existentialism would be an obvious transference) are poorly made by the sci-
entists themselves. M. G. Barbour, ‘Ecological fragmentation in the fifties’, in
W. Cronon (ed.) Uncommon Ground. Toward Reinventing Nature, New York and
London: W. W. Norton, 1995, 233–55.
113. However, Henry Ford tried to create a bird reserve on his farm and built hun-
dreds of bird houses. He then imported 600 pairs of songbirds from Europe at
one go: when released they all flew away.
114. A very influential paper decrying common usage was G. Hardin, ‘The tragedy of
the commons’, Science 162, 1968, 1243–8 and much reprinted since. Counter-
arguments which conclude that rational use can come from communally run
systems, include a vigorous denunciation in P. Dasgupta, The Control of
Resources, Oxford: Blackwell, 1982, ch. 2. There is a good discussion with exam-
ples in J. Rees, Natural Resources. Allocation, Economics and Policy, London and
New York: Routledge, 2nd edn 1990, ch. 6. Later work includes F. Berkes (ed.)
Common Property resources: ecology and community-based sustainable develop-
ment, London: Belhaven, 1989; R. A. Devlin and R. Q. Grafton, Economic Rights
and Environmental Wrongs: property rights for the common good, Cheltenham:
Edward Elgar, 1998.
115. The nomenclature shifts with fashion and notions of correctness. The use of ‘The
South’ to denote the poorer nations was not in use until well after 1950. Most
common at that time would have been DC and LDC, with the implication that
development was a kind of linear trajectory; then ‘developing’ replaced LDC and
eventually ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ were often applied, to the annoyance of those who
objected to its purely material parameters. Then we have ‘Low Income Economy’
and its variants. ‘Underdeveloped’ came into general use after President Truman’s
use of it in 1949, where it replaced ‘backward areas’ then current; by 1958 the FAO
of the UN was using ‘Less Developed Regions’. This is set out by L. Dudley Stamp,
Our Developing World, London: Faber & Faber, 1960, ch. 12, which is an updated
version of some lectures he gave in 1950 in the USA and published as Our
Undeveloped World in 1953. He talks of the USA (ch. 11) as a ‘poor little rich girl’
and noted that ‘The architects of the Dollar Empire . . . are compelled to adopt
and adapt most of the devices of their predecessors [as imperial powers].’ (p. 169).
116. D. S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, London: Little, Brown/New York:
W. W. Norton, 1998.
166 G E H
117. R. W. Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks. A History, New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1999.
118. A. Hornborg, ‘Ecology as semiotics. Outlines of a contextualist paradigm for
human ecology’, in P. Descola and G. Pálsson (eds) Nature and Society.
Anthropological Perspectives, London and New York: Routledge, 1992, 45–62.
119. E. R. Wolf, The People without History, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London:
University of California Press, 1982 and with an updated Preface 1987.
120. All from On the Origin of Species, 1859.
121. S. Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918, Cambridge MA: Harvard
University Press, 1983.
122. P. Gay, The Cultivation of Hatred. Vol. III of The Bourgeois Experience. Victoria to
Freud, New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1993.
123. R. H. Grove, Green Imperialism. Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and
the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995.
124. B. M. Stafford, ‘Presuming images and consuming words: the visualization of
knowledge from the Enlightenment to post-modernism’, in J. Brewer and
R. Porter (eds) Consumption and the World of Goods, London and New York:
Routledge, 1993, 462–77.
125. C. Klonk, Science and the Perception of Nature. British Landscape Art in the Late
Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1996.
126. R. L. Schwarz, Broken Images. A Study of ‘The Waste Land ’, London and Toronto:
Associated University Presses, 1988, p. 13.
127. Adapted and amplified from J. F. Richards, ‘Land transformation’, in B. L.
Turner et al. (eds) op. cit. 1990, 163–78.
128. Interesting contrasts can be found between writers who think that technology
drives change from the boiler up, so to speak, and those who say that social
factors, such as demand and the desire for control, bring forth the technology.
For examples see J. Mokyr, The Lever of Riches. Technological Creativity and
Economic Progress, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990 and
G. D. Snooks, The Dynamic Society. Exploring the Sources of Global Change,
London and New York: Routledge, 1996. For further discussion, see some of the
essays in M. R. Smith and L. Marx (eds) Does Technology Drive History? The
Dilemma of Technological Determinism, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1990.
129. A. W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism. The Biological Expansion of Europe
900–1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986, reprinted 1993, 2nd
edn 2004, p. 300 in 1993 edn.
 CHAPTER FIVE

A post-industrial era?

F 5.1 Joseph Beuys’s The End of the Twentieth Century, 1982–83 (detail).
Basalt, clay and felt. Bayerische Staatsgemäldegalarien. Pinakothek der Moderne.
Photograph by Caroline Tisdall. © DACS 2008

Joseph Beuys was a radical artist who was very concerned with environ-
mental matters. He often tried to use ‘natural’ materials such as felt
and animal fats and was aware of the role of energy in natural and

167
168 G E H
human-led systems. His largest ‘static’ work was 7,000 Oaks, begun in
1982 in Kassel, Germany. His plan called for the planting of seven thou-
sand trees, each paired with a columnar basalt stone approximately 4 feet
(1.2 metres) high above the ground, throughout the greater city of Kassel
in Germany; the last tree was planted in 1987. Beuys intended the Kassel
planting and sculpture to be the first stage of a worldwide project in
effecting environmental and social change.
The sculpture shown is portable enough to be exhibited around the
world, as is appropriate for an artwork with such wide ambitions. The
illustration does not quite convey its size: the area covered is perhaps five
or six times the area shown in the photograph. A common interpretation
is that the blocks of basalt represent the Earth and the ‘plugs’ are repre-
sentative of the wounding of the planet and its repair – the excised parts
are replaced.
Beuys is one of the generation of artists who has moved into a kind of
hybrid relationship with ‘natural’ materials. This oeuvre is partly studio
based (as above) but moving out into a wider frame with 7,000 Oaks,
and his work seems to be a precursor of the ‘landscape art’ of the kind
that uses a ‘soft’ approach (including temporary structures) rather than
importing technology-based artefacts: Andy Goldsworthy and Martin
Hill would be good examples. In this, they all covey a tenderness to the
natural world not characteristic of twentieth-century modernism and so
fit better with the pluralities of the post-modern movements in the arts.
To what extent they bring about changed attitudes in a wider context is
perhaps unknowable: on the one hand, ‘high culture’ can seem radically
divorced from the real life of the very poor or the really rich but, on the
other hand, the artist may often possess antennae that are more sensitive
to coming atmospheres and thinking.

See M. Gandy, ‘Contradictory modernities: conceptions of nature in the art of Joseph Beuys
and Gerhard Richter’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 87, 1997, 636–59.

I    
Television is a product of the 1920s but becomes an integrated part of most
humans’ lives after 1950. Its use emphasises that in the period from 1950 to
2000 it was possible for a very wide viewing public to learn a great deal more
about humans and their environments, especially after satellite transmission
reached remoter places. The visual content was remarkable but the price was
a loss of immediacy: the world became mediated through the screen’s every-
day presence. The two-dimensional digital world of the visual is apparently
tailored to an individual but, in fact, is pre-programmed by the providers of
the images.1 Television’s view of the past is also distorting in the sense that it
turns past fiction into present fact (notably via the docu-drama) and,
 A - ? 169
although its representation of the past may be more self-conscious than that
of our precursors, it is no less selective.2
The lineaments of the period to 2000 is still here so that the tenses of the
verbs in this chapter often convey the continuation of that fifty-year period
forward from the horizon of the year 2000 into the present. Through all this
time, the material world was often subject to exponential rises in rates of
interaction driven by human actions. Some of this was simply due to popu-
lation increases but other demands increased because of the high demands
from the wealthier people of the world. One outstanding linkage is the end-
use of energy by humans in ways which are luxuries in the sense that we lived
for millennia without them, and which are far enough from a source to be
an apparently inefficient use: the appetite for meat is one of them. To eat as
a top carnivore means that much photosynthetically fixed energy is dissi-
pated through the herbivore stage and also transformed into heat as the car-
nivores run around; at the table, meat is about 2 per cent efficient. Another
extravagance is the internal combustion engine in which only refined fuel
can be used and in which only a small proportion of the energy in crude oil
actually works the motor; the efficiency is about 10–12 per cent.3 In both
cases, a lot of heat is given off without performing any useful function and
there are gaseous emissions of many kinds of which two at least (methane
and carbon dioxide) are implicated in global changes in the composition of
the upper atmosphere. There are associated changes in land cover as animal
farming is favoured, often with heavy inputs of fossil fuel, and as roads allow
the penetration of powered vehicles into most places. The use of vehicles
(mostly privately owned and the bigger the better) then dictates land-use
pattens: about 1.3 per cent of Britain is road surface.4 So soils, plants,
animals, water and atmosphere are all subject to alteration and all on scales
greater than hitherto.

T       1950

The term ‘post-industrial’ (and the appended question mark in the chapter
title) need some exploration. It is normally used of societies in which the
actual manufacture of goods carries less monetary value than that of services.
(The acronym PIE [post-industrial economy] will be used here.) The goods
are still available but they are made in low- and middle-income places. Thus,
the question mark, because many parts of the world have nowhere near the
same mix of making and consuming as the ‘western’ nations such as those of
western and northern Europe, North America and Japan. Do not ask some-
body who was in an Ethiopian relief camp in the 1980s if they felt themselves
to be a member of a post-industrial world.5 But because the western ways are
innovative and so much copied and because the west controls the advocacy of
these ways of living, most countries aspire to them.6 Overall, the ingredients
of post-industrial life ways seem to be (a) the transition from coal to oil as the
170 G E H
main fossil fuel in use, with natural gas increasing rapidly in popularity; (b) an
economy in which services (financial, educational, medical) generate more
income and provide more employment than manufacturing; (c) movement is
ever more possible, including cheap air travel and also access to private means
of transport; and (d) more leisure time, coupled with higher disposable
incomes and better health, much of it made possible by the use of machines
as ‘slaves’. All of them lead to environmental interactions, not least for
energy demands where consumption by individuals (in the home, in vehicles
and as food) dominates public discussion more than its supply to industry.
‘Inefficient’ labour is replaced by cheap fossil fuels with both social and envir-
onmental effects.

Evolution and dispersal

The PIE has a technological foundation which undergirds its access to
resources, its disposal of them and its outlook upon the non-human com-
ponents of the globe. To some extent, this is a development from the previ-
ous era (the greater use of refined oil products to fuel motors, for instance)
but there are novel elements as well. New energy sources are discussed below
but there has been an emphasis on a shift wherever possible to electricity as a
source of power.7 The ease of getting electricity to most places has facilitated
a digital revolution with an emphasis on the computer, and its storage in
battery form has helped along the miniaturisation of many machines, espe-
cially in the field of communications. These last are now instant, cheap and
often visual in nature and are meshed together by a global network of satel-
lite relays. Two features become apparent. The first is that many changes are
driven by technology: we have the means, so let us find an application for
them. Previous eras may have seen social wishes allowed by technological
developments; now the technology is powerful enough to create its own
world. The second is a reflection on the role of war in accelerating trends: the
digital computer, targeted biocides, antibiotics and radar might all have come
to their present degrees of penetration and impact, anyway, but it seems at
least arguable that World War II provided the impetus for an accelerated evo-
lution after 1950.
There is a predictable air to maps of the world that show income, birth rates,
longevity, energy consumption and all the other conventional measures of a
society. When combined, the results show a division in the world between
those who are prosperous and those who are not and, between, regions that
have been climbing out of widespread poverty (Thailand would be an
example) and those who are regressing into it, such as Zimbabwe. In neither
of those two cases can the environment be said to be causal though, in both,
its state is interwoven with the economic changes that have occurred.
Worldwide, there are core areas and a constantly shifting periphery, as in the
nineteenth century. In the case of the post-1950 world, without doubt the
initial impetus lay with the United States. From there, the combination of
 A - ? 171
corporate capitalism, high resource use, with rapid throughput of materials,
and a raised standard of material life for many (though never for all) has
spread. Trade has been a major artery as always but the influence of film and
especially television is a difference from the preceding era. There has been
resistance to the American package in the shape of state socialism (in the
USSR and its satellites, in a diluted form in the post-war Labour governments
of Britain, in central America, North Korea and in Cuba, and above all in
China) but most of these are now firmly in the camp of ‘free trade’ and neo-
liberal thinking. This means that resources and their environmental linkages
are deemed marketable and can have a price. Much of the resistance to such
ideas, however, has also been initiated in the United States. Hence, the story
of the environment in both material and cultural terms since 1950 can often
be epitomised by examples from that nation, from whence came the idea of
this phase as a Great Disruption.8

Environmental relationships
If there has been a problem using all the information gathered in the period
1750–1950, then it is greatly increased in the years thereafter. The miniaturi-
sation of all kinds of instruments and the digital chip means that huge quan-
tities of data can be stored, albeit expensively since they seem to have to be
remounted every few years, which was less of a problem with the book.
Everybody of note is now a specialist and, in academia, generalists are called
‘Renaissance men’ [sic] with a certain air of patronage and a distinct lack of
promotion.
As throughout the entire Holocene, the number of humans has been a basic
element in environmental relations. In 1950, the annual growth rate was 1.5
per cent and between 1962 and 1972 rose to just above 2.0 per cent before
dropping back to about 1.2 per cent by 2000. This worldwide figure conceals
the kind of variation that shows some African countries to have rates of 3 per
cent, meaning a doubling time of twenty years. Two-fifths of the world’s
population, however, now live in countries with a replacement level of popu-
lation growth. Nevertheless, the 2,500 million (2.5 billion) people of 1950 hit
6 billion in 1999 and just under 80 million are being added to the total each
year. One element in this growth has been increased life expectancy: world-
wide in 1950 this was fifty-six years but this had become sixty-six years by
2000, and over sixty even in Low Income Economies. Again, this conceals sub-
stantial variations, and expectancy is falling in countries such as Botswana and
Zimbabwe: whereas it was over sixty years in Botswana in 1980 to 1990, it fell
to forty-three years in 2000. The reason here is the incidence of HIV/AIDS:
worldwide, two million people died of it in 1998, with 90 per cent of the deaths
in sub-Saharan Africa; in Botswana and Zimbabwe, about one-quarter of the
adults were infected.9 Because population growth is so clearly an element in
humanity’s environmental relationships, outspoken attitudes towards it have
often been adopted by environmental writers and campaigners. The high
172 G E H
growth rates of the 1950s and 1960s, for example, led to a great deal of neo-
Malthusian advocacy, with numerous campaigns and think tanks aimed
eventually at reducing growth rates in poorer countries but also in the rich
nations where the consumption patterns were held to be destructive.10
The main public phase of this argument was finished by the United Nations
Cairo Conference of 1994, and it is significant that in the United Nations
Environment Programme Millennium Survey of ‘environmental experts in
over 50 countries’, ‘population growth and movement’ were ranked seventh
in the problem list, named by 22 per cent of respondents (first came climatic
change at 51 per cent).11 Note, however, that mass migrations would also be
included and so, in Africa especially, there are notable environmental conse-
quences of famines and armed conflicts. It has looked as if population growth
is a social trend that loses its public high profile after a while. One attitude
would be that this was a feedback process and that, indeed, the high visibility
afforded to it has resulted in the means being provided to most people to
control their fertility. Pessimists have been heard to mutter that Malthus
might be disapproved but is not disproved.
Whatever the raised consciousness of population growth until the 1970s, it
was overtaken by concerns about climate, which have persisted to the present
day. Discussion of climate in scientific and popular media is usually bound
up with scenarios of future change; here in this chapter, only the history will
be given. Against the background of the Little Ice Age (LIA) and its end in
about 1900, the twentieth century has been a very warm period: as the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) puts it, ‘An increasing
body of observations gives a collective picture of a warming world and other
changes in the climate system.’12 A brief summary might focus on an increase
in global average surface temperature by about 0.6 ° ± 0.2 °C over the twenti-
eth century with a particular upward kick in 1995–2000. So 1990 becomes the
warmest year and the 1990s the warmest decade since 1861, that is, during the
period of reliable instrumental records. Therefore, the increase in tempera-
ture in the northern hemisphere in the twentieth century is likely to have been
the largest of any century in the last 1,000 years. One remarkable fact is that
between 1950 and 1993, night-time daily temperatures over land showed an
increase of about 0.2 °C per decade, which lengthened the frost-free season
in many mid- and high-latitude regions. Snow cover and ice extent have
decreased, with snow cover having fallen by about 10 per cent since the late
1960s, and a reduction of about two weeks has taken place in the period of ice
on rivers and lakes in the higher latitudes of the northern hemisphere.
Mountain glaciers have retreated and the sea ice of the Arctic has shrunk in
extent by about 10–15 per cent since the 1950s and by 40 per cent in thickness.
Warming and melting have led to an average worldwide sea-level rise of
0.1–0.2 metres in the twentieth century, and the heat content of the oceans
has also risen. There is only a finite amount of water on the planet and so, if
precipitation has increased in one set of regions (such as the northern-
 A - ? 173
hemisphere land regions and the tropical land areas), then it decreases over
others such as the subtropics. Extreme high precipitation and temperature
events have gone up in frequency, and droughts have been worse and come
more often in parts of Asia and Africa. El Niño phases have become more fre-
quent, persistent and intense since the mid-1970s. The IPCC is certain that
these changes could not have occurred by chance. There have also been pole-
ward and altitudinal shifts in the ranges of some plants and animals, declines
in the populations of some biota and the earlier flowering of plants, emer-
gence of insects and egg-laying in birds. All these have been documented for
aquatic, terrestrial and marine habitats, and are considered to be independent
of direct human activity.13 The role of the land surface, and especially of agri-
culture and forest cover, came somewhat later in investigations of influences
but their importance and their links to environmental history started to
grow in the late 1990s;14 after a period of apparent invisibility, the continuing
role of fire was recognised. About 200 to 400 million hectares of savanna
are burned annually, as are 5 to 15 million hectares of boreal forest, yielding
perhaps 2.0–4.0 petagrams of carbon to the atmosphere. In Canada, the
annual release of carbon from fires is comparable to the combustion of fossil
fuels.15 Some important aspects of climate appear not to have changed: some
southern-hemisphere regions seem not to have warmed, and phenomena
such as tornadoes, thunder and hail are still much the same in places where
they have been measured.
All these changes have been linked to the use of fossil fuels. The energy
use of this era is still dominated by coal, oil and natural gas but there have
been significant shifts within the repertory and additions to it. The cross-
over in the substitution of oil for coal between 1960 and 1965 is important,
denoting a world ever more dependent upon oil supplies, even though oil
may be transported over distances as great as 12,000 kilometres. In absolute
terms, nevertheless, coal is still being produced in ever-larger quantities
especially with the surge in industrialisation in China. Both oil and coal can
be easily, if not efficiently, converted to electricity. In the post-industrial
era, the demands for electricity were sometimes met by hydro-power
generation (HEP): between 1945 and 1985 nearly 120 plants with a capac-
ity in excess of 1 gigawatt were opened in over thirty countries. Although
the dominant producers are the United States, Canada and Russia, HEP is
important for many smaller countries and also in China. In Africa and
Latin America, HEP may often be the major source of electricity and so the
large HEP scheme has often been a staple of international development
agency funding in Low-Income Economies. Worldwide, HEP generates
about 20 per cent of world supplies of electricity.16 The limited scope for
ever more dams, along with periodic concerns about the size of coal and oil
reserves, have meant that yet other sources of energy have been developed.
The most important of these in the post-1950 era has been nuclear power.
This uses the fission reaction developed first for military purposes, and the
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separation of the two has often been incomplete. From the first commer-
cial reactor in 1956 to 400 plants (in operation or advanced planning) in
1973 represents a period of remarkable growth. About 17 per cent of
world electricity was generated from this source in the 1990s though, after
1973, there was a withdrawal from new plants except in dependent coun-
tries like Russia and its former republics, France (which has the highest
dependence at 78 per cent), Belgium and Japan. In 1998, there was one less
installation in the world than five years earlier so that, with an average life
of only eighteen years before closure, the capacity of the industry levelled
off in the 1980s. For reasons which are detailed under Management and
Impact (below), nuclear power has lost popularity and acceptance since
the 1970s, and so alternative methods of energy generation had a high
profile: a renewed interest in biomass, wind turbines, tidal power and solar
cells forms a category of ‘equilibrium’ or ‘renewable’ energies, though many
depend upon large fossil fuel inputs to start them up, as indeed does
nuclear power.17
The technologies of these economies are in part continuations of the pre-
vious industrial decades and in part novel. The centrality of steel has been
supplemented by the use of copper in electrical wiring, for instance. One
ubiquitous set of materials since 1950 has been plastics, themselves offshoots
of the refining of oil and, even in the worst situations (in refugee camps, and
after earthquakes), plastic sheeting is one of the first materials to appear. Trees
are still the providers of paper, a demand propelled by increasing literacy. In
most of these mass-material uses a different resource flow has arisen, namely
that of re-use and recycling. This is not especially new in poor countries,
where the picking-over of the city rubbish tip is normal but has become an
increasing practice among the rich countries as a reaction to, for example, the
over-packaging of almost all consumer items. The great technological novelty
is miniaturisation. In one literal sense this means that instrumentation in the
environment (as elsewhere on Earth) can be placed in satellites or at the
bottom of the oceans and thus accumulate measurements of a precision and
a quantity hitherto impossible and only manipulable because of the digital
computer. At the same time, biotechnological procedures have allowed
manipulation of living material at the molecular level so that engineering of
the genetic characteristics of plants, animals, fungi, bacteria and viruses has
become commonplace, albeit contested in some circumstances. The next step
along this road is nanotechnology, using individual atoms as building-blocks.
Environmental consequences of all these changes are likely to be great
but are impossible to forecast accurately. The United Nations Environment
Programme’s millennial overview recognised this in retrospect when it
remarked that ‘new issues rarely appear without warning’ but went on to list
a series of ‘environmental surprises since 1950’.18 These were classified into
unforeseen issues, unexpected events, new developments and changes in
trends. (Table 5.1).
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T 5.1 Environmental surprises since 1950
Type of surprise Examples(s) Date
UNFORESEEN ISSUES CFC-induced ozone Hypothesised 1974. Confirmed
depletion 1985
UNEXPECTED EVENTS Major oil spills Torrey Canyon 1967; Amoco
Cadiz 1978; Exxon Valdez 1989
Accidental toxic Minamata disease 1959; PCB
events poisoning 1960s; Sveso dioxin
leak 1976; Bhopal leak 1984;
Basel chemical fire 1986
Air pollution London smog 1952; Indonesia
forest fires 1997
Nuclear accidents Windscale 1957; Urals 1958;
Three Mile Island 1979;
Chernobyl 1986
Biological invasions Zebra mussel 1980s; mesquite
in Sudan 1950s
NEW DEVELOPMENTS Pollution Pesticide effects in birds 1962;
Love Canal toxics; contaminants
in Arctic ice 1970s
Acid precipitation Growing concern from 1972
Climate change
Tropical deforestation
Satellite images from 1980s
Widespread Effects of Aswan High Dam
1970s; shrinkage of Aral Sea,
consequences
1980s
CHANGES IN TRENDS Climate change: increase 1997/8 El Niño very severe;
in occurrence of severe 1988 summer very hot
weather and El Niño
events
Oil crisis from producer 1970s
worries about depletion
Fisheries collapse, e.g. 1990s
Atlantic cod

Source: UNEP, Global Environmental Outlook 2000, London: Earthscan, 1999, p. 336.
Some of these surprises result from new technology, such as the increased use of personal and
domestic aerosols; others from the intensification of already extant processes such as fossil fuel use,
others from synthesised compounds with no quick breakdown pathways. The 1970s oil crisis is the
only one which did not happen, so to speak. There is a school of thought that considers any global
warming is due entirely to ‘natural’ processes and that evidence linking it to fossil fuel emissions is
unreliable.

Because of the quantity and immediacy of information available, percep-

tions are intimately connected with material events and processes. The ‘oil
crisis’ of 1972–3 was partly driven by the producers’ perception that their
stocks were running out, which turned out not to be true. Less materially, the
1969 ‘Earthrise’ photograph from Apollo II became iconic as an image of a
fragile but unitary ecosystem.19 Ecological science urged that many social
176 G E H
investigations and concerns (population, pollution and resource depletion,
for example) could be seen as related to one another. Wider economic and
political contexts gave them shorthand labels, such as sustainable develop-
ment, climate change and biodiversity. The scale of focus also shifted because
better knowledge and more concerned people showed that many substances
had, not only local, but national, international, worldwide and sometimes
global pathways and storage pools. This kind of knowledge enhanced the real-
isation that environmental events always have cultural contexts: in the Cairo
earthquake of 1992 many illegally built high-rise concrete blocks of flats col-
lapsed, and government help was tardy and poor, whereas local Islamic groups
were very quick and helpful; the Yangtse floods of 1998 converted high but
‘normal’ rainfall into disaster because of all the reclamation and engineering
that had been enforced by a growth-minded central government, especially by
lowering storage in the river basin through the reclamation of lakes and fluvial
islands and the filling of impoundments with silt.20
In very general cultural terms, there has been a continuing belief in the
power of science and technology to solve problems: rather than use less
energy, for example, high-technology ways of sequestering carbon under the
oceans have been considered, and money is invested in the possibilities of
‘clean’ energy from nuclear fusion: still forty years off, as it has been for the last
forty years. Thus ‘growth’ is still considered a prime economic aim, though it
is increasingly interrogated with questions like, ‘what kind of growth? who
benefits? and what are the external costs?’ The gaps between rich and poor are
still very wide, and all kinds of environmental consequences are tied into those
discrepancies, not the least of which is the way some rich nations tried to
export their toxic wastes for disposal in poorer places without effective legis-
lation. Movement of thousands of kilometres is involved and this is just one
sample of a wider PIE phenomenon. Transport became cheaper after 1950 and
so baby sweetcorn can be flown from Thailand to Europe, and Europeans can
fly to Thailand for the weekend. Neither is without environmental con-
sequences. Through all this, the pervasive power of the visual media has
increased, pushing forward rising expectations of material anabasis.

Management and impact

As in previous chapters, this section considers the main resource processes in
their environmental context where that means not only the material flows but
some of the matrix of ideas which surrounds them. In this era, the quantity
and diversity of environmental attitudes are so great that there is even more
selection than usual: many advocates of particular positions will be dissatis-
fied at the treatment given to their convictions.

Resources: energy and environment after 1950

None of the energy sources discussed in the previous chapter fell out of use
after 1950 and, in fact, they all increased in use in absolute terms. Biofuels also
 A - ? 177
continued to be significant in many low-income economies, and their con-
tinuing supply a matter of controversy in semi-arid regions where the relative
importance of climatic shifts, grazing pressures and population growth has
been fiercely debated. One hallmark of the post-industrial economy was nev-
ertheless the development of new energy sources and, in particular, that of
energy from nuclear fission. It is also the environmental linkages of nuclear
fission which brought about evaluation and disagreements as never before.
The principal problem is that of the emission of ionising radiation which may
enter the environment in two main ways, assuming that the generating plant
is functioning properly. There may be deliberate release to the atmosphere, as
happened in the years before the test-ban treaty in 1962, or controlled release
to the atmosphere or water (mostly marine) systems, all in small quantities.
Then there is the nightmare event of uncontrolled releases when a plant mal-
functions, as at Windscale (now Sellafield) in 1957, Three Mile Island (United
States) in 1979 and Chernobyl (Ukraine) in 1986, along with a number of
others, of which incidents in Japan have attracted most attention. The isotopes
released have quite long half-lives (typically of twenty-five years or more)
during which they are carcinogenic to humans even if not immediately fatal
through radiation poisoning. Small wonder, therefore, that other new sources,
such as electricity from solar collectors or photoelectric devices have been
extensively tried as sources of energy. In general terms, however, older sources
reworked with new technological knowledge, such as wind power and small-
scale hydro-power, gained higher profiles. The use of hydrogen cells for
motive power kept bobbing up only to be deflated by the explosive potential
of hydrogen. In high-income economies, land can be given over to crop pro-
duction for ‘biofuels’, using rapeseed and other oils; in Brazil, surplus sugar is
also converted to a vehicle fuel.
The attitudes taken towards new energy generally avoided the obvious
course of using less. Western industrial processes have generally become much
less energy intensive in the post-1950 period, but that applies to few other
sectors. Instead, hi-tech solutions of radioisotope disposal were sought,
involving underground storage or even contemplating the proposal to fire
waste-bearing rockets into the sun. Large-scale development of wind turbines
can generate arguments on the basis of landscape change or impact on
wildlife. These are not apparently ineluctable, however: the general acceptance
in Denmark and Germany contrasts with the wrangles in Britain. Overall,
energy sources and their environmental connections have been well aired in
high-income economies, though less so in countries where a higher per caput
availability would bring clear benefits.

Resources: agriculture
All the techniques of the industrial era were still present but intensified in
bringing energy to the land: machinery, fertilisers, biocides, plant and animal
breeding (including recent developments in direct genetic modification),
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plastic ground covering, polytunnels and glasshouses, do not exhaust any list.
At one remove there is a great deal of scientific knowledge which is only pos-
sible with large inputs of electricity: think of all those lecture rooms without
any windows. Though most applied in the best soils of the high-income
economies (the fenlands of East Anglia are a case in point), many emerging
economies followed the path of moving where possible to more crop per unit
area per unit time, that is, to intensification. This usually means a cash-crop
economy, producing a uniform product for an outside market. The eventual
end-user is thousands of kilometres away, and with edible materials, air trans-
port was increasingly used. So we get crop monocultures coupled to high
energy consumption and multiple emissions to the atmosphere. The import
of the technology and the economics into less-regulated countries means that,
for example, pesticides are used without concern either for non-target species
or for field operators and, in a general sense, the whole process follows the
nineteenth-century course of uncontrolled emissions and the dispossessed
rural population, whose bodies’ energy input is no longer needed, migrate to
the towns and cities with entirely predictable environmental and social
results.21 The post-1950 components of a process which started in the nine-
teenth century have been dominated by the growing of soy beans for cheap
animal feed: its meal became three-quarters of all high-protein livestock feed
in the high-income economies, ending up as milk, eggs and meat. Animal pro-
duction in feedlots produces large quantities of slurry: it is, in fact, an indus-
trial undertaking, resulting in about 60 per cent of river-pollution incidents
in western countries as well as adding to the nitrogen enhancement of soils
with its eventual effects on freshwater systems. (Before the 1930s, animal
wastes were a resource rather than a problem.) Soy consumption in Europe
and North America produced environmental consequences in Brazil as well.22
Fast-food empires developed after the 1950s and rely on scientific animal
nutrition, genetics and disease control. The control of this type of industry
and, hence, of its environmental impact have been in a small number of com-
panies: in the United States, the yearly production of 3.7 billion chickens
comes from fifteen primary breeders. Concentration is similarly great in the
seed industry where advanced biotechnology ensures that about ten to twenty
seed- and plant-technology companies dominate the world’s seed trade:
nature is seen as a vast organic Lego kit for genetic characters.23
Cultural resistance is growing. The Food and Agricultural Organization of
the UN (FAO) plan, that every place should grow its ‘best’ crop and export it
falters when the subsidies made to agriculture in the richest nations are taken
into account. By contrast, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and a few
national governments argue in favour of more local self-sufficiency and the
revival of the primacy of local knowledge and local varieties of crops. In the
richer world, a move towards growing plants and animals without chemical
fertilisers or long-lived biocides and marketing it close to the producing site
(lowering the number of ‘food miles’) has a hold in middle-class eating
 A - ? 179
patterns, spurred on by medical attitudes to animal fat, refined sugar and salt;
the Italian ‘slow food’ movement is also part of this more ‘organic’ approach,
as is the buying of ‘Fair Trade’ products from tropical countries. The PIE pull
can be deduced from the example of a tea bag in Britain, with tea from
Sri Lanka, India and Kenya, wood products from North America and
Scandinavia, polypropylene from Belgium, and assembly at four different sites
in England. In Britain around the turn of the twenty-first century the cost of
‘food miles’ was c.£9 billion per year compared with £6.4 billion for agricul-
ture. The number of lorries carrying food doubled between 1974 and 2002.24
As farmers in well-watered areas discovered the usefulness of occasional
added water, so the distinction between irrigated agriculture and rain-fed
equivalents became less apparent. Even in the British Isles, not noted for their
aridity, sprinklers are a common sight in summer. The immense increase in
the irrigated area of Asia, has been largely responsible for the rise in the
absolute area of cultivated land on a world scale, by 1990 amounting to 17 per
cent of cultivated land. The amounts of water used, as a proportion of global
water stock, are minuscule but there may well be regional constraints. In the
Middle East, for example, a few rivers supply a high proportion of the irriga-
tion water and they are subject to much political quarrelling. A nation such as
Israel must therefore re-use all its water as much as possible and, for irriga-
tion, to drip-feed water to individual plants rather than saturate soils with no
plant roots in them. The centre-pivot distributor, which creates such remark-
able landscape patterns from the air, is normally 80 per cent efficient but, even
so, geological aquifers, such as the Ogalalla strata of the High Plains of the
United States, must eventually be drawn down to an uneconomic level and
another way of using that land be found. Indeed, some related shifts took
place.
In her novel That Old Ace in the Hole (2004), Annie Proulx takes on the hog-
raising units which are replacing open-air agriculture on the High Plains in
Oklahoma and Texas. Immense numbers of pigs are reared indoors, produc-
ing a great deal of slurry and a very characteristic smell. The rearing of domes-
ticated animals on a ‘zero-acreage’ basis has a long history (probably from the
Neolithic onwards in Europe) but ubiquitous energy supplies make it possible
on a large scale. Thus, although Danish bacon is a well-known export, a
journey through Denmark is visually pigless since the animals are all housed.
In the United States, beef cattle spend their time on concrete bases (‘feedlots’)
and not in fields: to eat grass-finished steak is an eccentricity of the rich. Dry-
lot dairies and battery chickens are analogous. So, while the animals in these
systems save energy by moving little, the wider economy invests it in feed con-
centrates, water supplies, animal transport and vetinerary pharmaceuticals.
(The meat tastes of very little.) Meat is so much in demand in the PIE world
that many of the species hitherto undomesticated have been considered either
for actual domestication (that is, altering their genetics) or for a form of
ranching using native grazing resources. Thus, the North American bison is
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now used for meat production, unthinkable fifty years ago when its numbers
were minuscule; red deer are farmed in Scotland as well as hunted; and in
Africa there have been many attempts at ‘game farming’ (usually of antelope
species) which provide employment and also food in a context which dimin-
ishes the pressure to extend the cereal farming that extirpates the wildlife
which is usually an excellent source of income.
No account of the ecology of present-day nutrition can ignore the import-
ance of food processing. In PIEs the emblem is the ready meal on the super-
market shelf. Its energy relationships, the packaging and its disposal, the trip
by car and indeed the impossibility of paying for it if there is no electricity to
power the tills are all part of a resource ecology dependent on abundant
energy. Some retail chains talk of their energy-conserving buildings and low-
consumption lighting but these are insignificant beside the throughput of
energy-intensive materials. In the course of processing, many chemicals may
be added and other constituents (for example, fibre) taken away, so that a
very largely artificial substance is created, often high in salt and sugar.
Governments may rail against these types of product, especially for children,
in the context of rising obesity in high-income economies but rarely connect
them outwards in their wider ecology.

Whole environments: forests, recreation and warfare

There are two major trends in the history of forests in the last fifty years: defor-
estation, especially in the lowland tropics, and afforestation in countries
where land was released from an intensified agriculture (to the tune of
16 million hectares in Europe and North America since 1950) or where semi-
arid land is converted to fast-growing conifers and eucalypts. The rapid defor-
estation is both legal, as in Brazil where it has been an element of government
resettlement policy, and illegal, as in Indonesia where trees are ‘mined’ for a
quick cash return to those with power.
The deforestation rates were initially estimates extrapolated from local
surveys but, after about 1980, satellite imagery has made it possible to refine
the data. The precursor context is of clearing about 11 million hectares per
year in the 1920s and 1930s, of which 70 per cent was in the tropics. After 1950
the rate of clearance accelerates and is mostly in the tropics. Net of
afforestation, about 318 million hectares of tropical forest disappeared in
1950–80 out of a total world loss of 336 million hectares.25 After 1980 the rate
rises again though more accurate data now suggest slightly more modest rises.
In 1990–7 5.8 ± 1.4 million hectares were lost every year, with 2.3 ± 0.7 million
hectares visibly degraded.26 The regional pathways to deforestation vary
considerably, depending upon the environmental history of the region, the
combination of causes bringing about the land-use change, and the feedback
structure which may bring about rapid degradation of ecosystems and
often the impoverishment of human societies as well. In Latin America, for
example, the proximate causes of deforestation concentrate upon the
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construction of roads followed by migrant settlers with an agricultural
economy together with pasture creation for cattle ranching: motors and meat
are both implicated to a high degree.27 In South-east Asia, the equivalents are
timber logging (often illegal), and conversion to plantations. In west and
central Africa, timber logging by private companies and the intensification of
shifting cultivation are dominant.28 In India in the 1960s clear-felling was fol-
lowed by the planting of exotics so that industry was the main beneficiary, at
the expense of subsistence cultivation.29
It is scarcely possible to sum up a cultural context for such diverse places.
Poverty, both local and national, greed by local and national loggers, the
demand for wood products by countries unwilling to consume their own
resources, the market for cheap beef, the building of extravagant capital cities
in the forests, and the lack of recognition of the short-term irreversibilities of
tropical ecologies have all contributed. The major changes in worldwide
opinion have related to such factors as the role of the forests in regional and
perhaps global climatic patterns of today, as well as their ability to sequester
carbon from the atmosphere.30 The value of the forests as long-term produc-
ers of income and of novel products, such as pharmaceuticals, has also become
more widely recognised. The carbon sequestration argument is one of the
reasons why the afforestation rates of tropical countries arouse interest.
Tropical afforestation could be a useful contributor to the mitigation of global
emissions of carbon, by about the same amount as slowing deforestation.31 It
is, though, more regional concern that leads afforestation in developing
economies, such as those of China (30 million hectares since 1950) and even
Brazil with 4.9 million hectares in 1990. But afforestation in low-income
economies is still only proceeding at a rate of about one-fifth that of defor-
estation. It can nevertheless be part of a development strategy though some
species are claimed to alter the local ecology detrimentally: the desiccation of
local agriculture by eucalypts in India is one such contention. Cessation of
summer cattle grazing in upland Norway has fragmented the habitats of many
plant species, especially as woodlands have come back but also as soil fertility
has diminished.32 The interaction of the natural and the human directed
can be seen in the phenomenon of die-back in central European forests
(Waldsterben) in the 1960s which was quickly attributed to air pollution. But
recoveries after 1980 seem not to be associated with better air quality and so
other and deeper historical factors may have been implicated: the simple
explanation of emissions-caused die-backs was too modest.32 Beyond these
instrumental considerations, there are still forests as paradises, as spiritual
places, as mythological landscapes and, indeed, as gendered landscapes but
most of these valuations can fall to the chainsaw: when Governor of California
(1966–74), Ronald Regan said that when you had seen one redwood, you had
seen them all.34
Large-scale writing on environmental change tends to the serious: today’s
pleasure is often overlooked even if medieval hunting parks are not.35 After
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1950, however, there was an explosion in recreation travel and activity which
cannot be ignored. For convenience, two kinds of activity will be distin-
guished: intra-national recreation and, in particular, that part of it which is
outdoors; and foreign travel.36 When it comes to their impact upon ecosys-
tems, the results may be similar though, in catering for a foreign tourist, many
places seem willing to undertake more intensive environmental manipulation
than for their own citizens. Both types may also focus on cities and produce
the same kinds of effects.37
Outdoor recreation on a day or weekend basis (with added mid-week use
by greying populations in the high-income economies) often focuses on wild
areas, frequently misconceived as ‘natural’. Longer trips are especially desired
to ‘wilderness’ areas where a perception prevails that human activity has been
absent or minimal. In such areas, some of the technology of the PIE is aban-
doned: ‘Take nothing but photographs, leave nothing but your footprints’ is
sometimes the aspiration. (Large designated areas may be too big for the
mobile phone but not out of sight of the global positioning system [GPS].)
Unless regulations are tightly conceived and enforced, much technology is
often brought into wild places, representing an influx of fossil fuel energy. This
may be embedded in simple machines, such as the mountain bike, or in more
complex arrangements such as quad bikes, trail bikes and 4x4 vehicles. For all
those users, the challenge of ‘overcoming’ adverse conditions is paramount.
The acme of such imports is in winter sports, where trees are felled for runs,
pistes are graded, lifts of all kinds are essential and large amounts of electric-
ity may be used to create artificial snow. The effects on plants, for example,
suggest that plant cover and species richness declined by about 10 per cent and
that machine-graded pistes had five times the amount of bare ground even
after re-sowing. Artificial snow lies longer than natural snow and so snowbed
plants (such as the alpine snowbell, Soldanella alpina) are favoured over early-
flowering species like gentians. These effects became more pronounced at
higher altitudes but were already obvious in areas such as Italy and Austria
where about 40 per cent of ski runs use artificial snow. This requires 4,000
cubic metres of water per hectare (in France enough to supply a city like
Grenoble) and 25,000 kilowatt-hours per hectare of electricity. Climatic
warming prognoses suggest that in thirty to fifty years’ time reliable snow will
be found only about 300–600 metres higher than it is at present.38
Recreation in artificial but outdoor conditions was and is dominated above
all by golf. No other sport occupies and manages such large rural areas.
Worldwide, there are over 25,000 golf courses, with almost 10 per cent of these
being located in Britain. Golf courses average between 50 and 60 hectares in
size; every golf course consists of highly managed areas (the greens and tees),
less intensively managed areas (the fairways) and non-playing areas (less inten-
sively managed habitat or ‘rough’). The non-playing areas generally represent
between 25 and 40 per cent of the total area of the course.39 Environmental
impacts have been cited that included habitat loss, water-resource depletion,
 A - ? 183
chemical contamination of soil and groundwater from pesticides and fertilis-
ers, and increasing urbanisation. Studies in the United States showed little
concern on those but, in low-income economies, there is no doubt of the land
and water use and high rates of biocide application. Land appropriation led to
civil conflict and death in the Philippines in the 1990s. In particular, competi-
tion for water seems a likely area of conflict for golf developments. This is espe-
cially so in the Mediterranean where a general shortage of water is the latest in
a series of environmental impacts which contributed to the ecological image of
the region as being a set of degraded landscapes.40
Foreign travel may focus on existing settlements, especially historic cities
like Venice, and there create problems of water availability for seasonal or
diurnal influxes of visitors and likewise those of air quality management. The
annual pilgrimage to Mecca is an example of adaptation by the authorities to
an immense seasonal influx; city managers are in general well placed to mini-
mise environmental impacts of these events. The response to demands for
beach and rural recreation has often been less well arrayed, with hotels and
similar built structures clustered in favoured locations without much regard
for their water supply, sewage disposal and road connections. A strip north of
Sousse in Tunisia in the 1970s, for example, was built on sand dunes which
became destabilised, which made the hotels prone to a coating of blown sand.
Water was pumped away from nearby smallholdings and so a source of fresh
food was undermined; sewage piped offshore made sea bathing unwise.
Similar examples can be found worldwide, and their vulnerability to marine
perturbations is seen in hurricane seasons (for example, in the Caribbean)
and after tsunamis, as on 26 December 2004. In savanna Africa, tourism not
only clashes with indigenous cultures, but the sheer density of safari vehicles
is said to affect the behaviour of some animal species, notably the large preda-
tors which everybody wants to photograph.
The boom in recreation is entirely underlain by fossil-fuel use. Without
cheap fuel to run motor vehicles and jet aircraft, it would exist as it did in the
pre-1950 era, only for the rich. (In 1993, 1.2 billion passengers departed on
international flights, that is, one for every five people on Earth.) The democ-
ratisation of recreational travel brings pleasure to many but its environmen-
tal costs are rarely added up. Thus, the cultural context is largely dominated
by the precepts of economics: people have the time, the disposable income and
the access to technology, and so a market arises. Like so many, it is one in
which the environmental costs were either externalised or, as it were, dis-
counted into an apparently infinite future. To which can be added the poli-
tical strength of those whose enterprise has created local and regional wealth.
Deeper questions can be asked: is recreation simply a positional good in which
going to more remote or expensive places than other people is the major sat-
isfaction?41 Or, has the need to escape a modern life-style (either with greater
hedonism or with the ‘desert island’ syndrome of total simplicity, for a while)
provoked a desire for movement and escape?42
184 G E H
Some forms of recreation have always, it seems, revolved around violence.
Killing wild animals was for long the preserve of an aristocracy but, to some
extent, was democratised in the nineteenth century. Angling for coarse fish
has more adherents than any other outdoor recreation in many countries and
the pastime can induce over-fishing even in the sea.43 Hunting for small
species of deer has been a widespread seasonal activity in France, Italy and the
United States, for example, resulting in high injury and kill rates, of the
hunters. The pleasures in killing have only partly translated themselves into
warfare though some candid memoirs confess to the pleasures of killing and
destruction of an official enemy. Post-1950 wars in, for example, Indo-China
included the usefulness of small diesel engines to the military and civilian
economies of North Vietnam.44 Post-1950, this pattern is amplified by the
addition of chemicals, especially the employment of defoliants in Indochina
by the United States during 1961–75: some 10 per cent of South Vietnam was
sprayed from the air (72 million litres on to 1.7 million hectares) with the
result that 1.25 million cubic metres out of 8.5 million cubic metres of timber
was destroyed. The defoliant was a mixture of growth-hormone herbicides
which included 2,4,5-T which was contaminated by dioxin (TCDD). This is a
teratogenic agent and many deformed children were born with effects that are
still present. Much of the high forest recovered, not least because shelling and
bombing implanted metal in the trees and made them commercially unat-
tractive. Indeed, the official view was that low and secondary forest suffered
the worst.45 Hence, mangroves were vulnerable to spraying, with one pass
killing an average of 36 per cent of the trees. Recovery has been very slow and
exposed coastlines to damage by storms or made them easy to convert to
shrimp farms which have turned out to be unsustainable.46 Residues of metals
in trees are reminders of the 10 million active mines in the soils of sixty-four
countries of the world, providing some sterilised wilder terrain in some and a
source of danger in all, led by Egypt (23 million), Iran (16 million) and Angola
(15 million).
Where oilfields were the scene of conflict, they added immensely to envir-
onmental damage. The First Gulf War, fought in Kuwait and Iraq in 1991, is
the best example. The oil wells were blown so that the oil sprayed the local
landscape and could be ignited, producing a great deal of heavy black smoke.
The oil may also find its way into rivers and the sea, causing anxiety about
fisheries, for example. The long-term worries have been about hydrocarbons
and heavy metals staying in sediments but being steadily released to form a
constant flow of contaminants. As far as can be seen, these worries have not
been fulfilled and the effects overall were less than was feared in 1991 and
shortly thereafter.47 Internal conflict in Iraq resulted in the drainage of the
marshes of the Tigris and Euphrates. Only about 7 per cent of the original
area (about, 20,720 square kilometres) was left after Saddam Hussein’s
actions. Perhaps 30 per cent could be revived but there are many obstacles,
such as the supply of water down the Euphrates which is dominated by
 A - ? 185
Turkey, and local habits recently acquired of electro-fishing entire water
bodies.48
One worry about the Gulf struggle of 1991 was that the cloud of smoke
from the oil fires would coagulate over India and prevent the onset of the
monsoon. This unrealised fear was a subset of what was the most influential
war-environment scenario of all time (it was developed in the 1980s), a sce-
nario in the sense that it has not happened but could. The hypothesis was that
a 5,000-megaton nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the United
States would produce so much fine particulate matter in the upper atmos-
phere that photosynthesis would be inhibited by a coalescent black cloud and
that this ‘nuclear winter’ would last for a period measured in years. The con-
sequences of the nuclear bursts would themselves be immense and lead to
total social and economic breakdown but this would be compounded by the
lack of sunlight for an indeterminate period but one certainly long enough to
cut out food supplies in the northern hemisphere and perhaps in much of the
south as well. It was an apocalyptic hypothesis and not unexpectedly some-
what controversial (though the scientific ideas at its root were mostly quite
robust); it is credited in some circles, however, with exerting great influence
on the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union in coming to greater
understandings and mutual reduction of forces. The scenario is now not
much discussed but the weaponry that might achieve it still exists.49
The nuclear-winter idea is, in some senses, an intensification of many other
pathways in which war and the preparation for it affect the environment.
Residual radioactivity persisted in Japan long after 1945 and it has also built
up in the bodies of circumpolar people following bioaccumulation in Arctic-
tundra vegetation and its transmission via animals such as caribou and rein-
deer. In the Pacific, weapons testing disrupted the lives of many in the
Marshall Islands and, at every site in the western world (and no doubt in
Russia and China as well) where weapons-grade material was processed, rogue
escapes and accumulations of radioisotopes have eventually come to light.
Even small conflicts now damage water supply and sewerage systems, create
dust and destroy crops; and, in times of war, nobody much worries about
resource consumption and the disposal of wastes: victory is all, as always.
What is new after 1950 is the sheer scale of delivery of high explosive using
large bomber aircraft and Cruise missiles, and the potential for nuclear con-
frontations in, for example, South Asia and the Middle East even if the United
States and Russia are at present standing back from each other. The ‘military-
industrial complex’ syndrome of which Dwight Eisenhower spoke in 1961 is
still going strong.50

Special places
It has been a continuing theme in this book that wild plants and animals have
occupied a special cultural role in human societies, one apart from (or as
well as) their usefulness. In many cases, this was an aristocratic phenomenon
186 G E H
but, since the 1950s, there has been an enormous growth of interest in wild
species. Cynics are apt to say that the level of interest increases as the quantity
decreases but there is perhaps a more complex relationship. It seems as if there
are two main strands to the recent state of affairs. The first is scientific in
origin: within the wild species of the world there is an enormous reservoir of
genetic variation and biochemical molecules. If biotechnology is to fulfil one
of its potentials, then the reservoir of genetic material will allow the insertion
of many desirable qualities into all kinds of species: lions may be bred to lie
down with lambs, for example. The second is basically that of pleasure: to see
the non-human in its self-hood brings pleasure and satisfaction to many
people. There is a third strand, namely that human life and livelihood depend
upon the integrity of the non-human world, that is, that it fluctuates within
certain foreseeable boundaries. The role of non-human species in this whole
complex is now called ‘biodiversity conservation’. No matter that the whole
endeavour receives a great deal of attention: in 1996, some 3,314 species of
vertebrates and 5,328 species of plants were in danger of extinction. By
2000, there were 3,507 and 5,611 respectively. About 15,000 species from all
taxonomic groups were considered endangered at the turn of the twenty-first
century.51
The way in which environmental management and impact work is highly
diverse in itself. The most noticeable in many instances is the attempt to put
a fence (literally or regulatory) around a ‘natural’ area in order to sequester it
from other economic activities. These undertakings are most successful when
there is a lot of money to be made from the sight of the wild species, as in the
game parks of Africa, or when there is a lot of international interest, and hence
pressure, to devote resources of time and money to the perpetuation of a
species or habitat. The giant panda’s survival in China is of this type. The
devotion of a special-interest group is also likely to succeed, no matter that
sometimes its primary interest is in killing the species concerned: the western
European migratory geese populations are much enhanced by the influence
of wildfowlers in protecting otherwise vulnerable habitats. Sheer remoteness
may also make it easier to declare a ‘reserve’ but experience suggests that such
places (parts of Alaska come to mind) can be undeclared when an important
resource (especially oil) can be exploited.
The period 1950–2000 saw the production of many impressive-looking
maps of protected areas in the world, with comparative percentages of desig-
nated areas but few measures of success through time in keeping, so to speak,
the wolf at the door. The degree of internal ecological change, the external
pressures for change and the intensity of the management effort all need rep-
resentation as well as the line of the boundary fence.52 Other parts of the cul-
tural context display no shortage of interest. The membership levels of
conservation organisations became very high, and selling outdoor clothing
and binoculars, for example, is a very big industry. Many people are content
with a bird-table within sight of a window, but others endure stormy seas in
 A - ? 187
smallish boats to see penguins or whales. There is, of course, a great deal of
lip-service since, if faced with the choice between the loss of central heating
and the presence of blue tits, most westerners would take little time to make
the decision. The interest veers towards the instrumental in the sense that a
strand of ‘you never know when they might come in useful’ is woven into
most western attitudes, and some biologists have evoked the metaphor of
the canary in the mine: wildlife as an indicator of the ‘health’ of the
planet. Basically, it seems as if the more carbon that passes through human
economies, the fewer wild plants, animals and habitats there are. This is
brought home again by attitudes to waste materials. There was pressure either
to export them or to keep them in a cycle so as not to pollute. But both have
relied on energy use so that the emission of gaseous carbon has increased; all
production used more energy when ‘planned obsolesence’ became common
in western economies.53
One more historical layer was started in the post-1950 period.
‘Restoration ecology’ aims at recreating habitats from a former time, mostly
from an agricultural and pre-fossil-fuels era. Woodlands are popular sites
because their composition in previous periods can be affirmed by pollen
analysis as well as by documentary sources; streams that had been straight-
ened and embanked are allowed to meander and flood their plains. The term
also embraces the reintroduction of regionally extinct animals, with preda-
tory birds a favourite group. In Scotland, the late twentieth century saw the
beginnings of a debate over the reintroduction of the beaver (Castor fiber).
It would need a broad riparian habitat with aspen, willow and perhaps birch,
and this would create habitat for waterfowl and otter as well.54 But other
interests, such as timber growing, aquaculture and fish migration, might be
adversely affected which was not the case with the reintroduction of the red
kite (Milvus milvus) into England and Scotland, where it had been extirpated
in the eighteenth century.
We might think, though, that ‘nature’ as a whole has value outside those
areas which have been designated as ‘natural’ or something similar. One cal-
culation places a dollar value on nature’s ‘services’ (processing wastes, supply-
ing energy, regulating climate and many more) and notes that it exceeds the
human economy. The data worked out suggest that the world’s gross national
product is about US$18 trillion (1012) per year but that the services of ecolog-
ical systems and the natural capital stocks are in the range of US$16–54 tril-
lion per year with an average of US$33 trillion per year, so the value of the
natural world is at least 1.8 times that of the human-directed economy. Nearly
all the natural services are outside the market yet are critical to the function-
ing of the Earth’s life-support system.55 Some interpret that as meaning its
value must be preserved, others that it is acceptable to trade some of it for
greater immediate comfort. What is certain is that the hunter-gatherer’s ‘felt
flow’ of nature (‘moose are good to eat and good to think’) scarcely exists in
the PIE era.
188 G E H

Resources and structures: minerals, cities and water

Few human activities come with as much attitudinal baggage as mineral
extraction. As old as tool-making itself, it was a small-scale activity until the
eighteenth century except for a few coal-producing regions. But its explosion
on a worldwide basis that has altered the face of the Earth permanently in
many places, and the often obvious concentration of production in poorer
countries, have left a legacy of distrust and abhorrence. Although many metals
can be recycled, industrial minerals, such as cement and salt cannot, and
energy minerals such, as coal and oil, clearly have a one-way passage through
the economic system. Though small-scale mining persisted (there were still
gold rushes in Amazonia, for instance), the large corporations mining on a
large scale dominated environmental considerations. In a typical PIE year,
over 1 million tonnes per year of nickel, 12 million tonnes of copper, 992
million tonnes of iron ore, 1,560 million tonnes of cement, and 4,655 million
tonnes of coal were produced. Their environmental impacts constitute a long
list, especially where open-cast mining is the adopted technology. The previ-
ous land cover is eradicated completely at the mining site and at the locale of
any waste disposal, and emissions will extend this zone. The land may also be
changed in its actual contours and become unstable, and any inadequate
groundwork or dams possess the potential for land-form change as well as the
destruction of human-made structures. The lifetime of a mine is always
limited and not all companies engaged in land rehabilitation after closure,
with abandoned pits and plant an obvious reminder of the effects of the mine.
Those effects have been carried on for many years, especially in the alterations
of the local water table and in the quantity and quality of water flowing from
the mining area. Mine drainage is usually acid and its quantity raised by being
pumped from underground workings. Tailings yield contaminants to soil
and water through leaching and may also contribute dust to an atmosphere
already loaded with emissions from mineral processing; mines may also
release methane to the local atmosphere. Mining attracts workers and so the
building of settlements and communications also brings about change, espe-
cially where the quality of housing, water supply and sewage disposal is poor.56
The attitudes taken to large-scale mining were, in very general terms, a
cascade of concern from citizen groups and non-governmental organisations
through governments to the large corporations. Only when forced to take
social and environmental audits and to internalise some of those costs have
companies take action, during most of the post-1950 years. None of them,
however, challenges the predominant paradigm that extraction of minerals on
a large scale (even in the face of recycling possibilities in the case of metals) is
a source of income to some of the poor as well as of material goods to the
richer inhabitants of the world. There are concerns that the lifetime of some
mineral reserves is distinctly limited but counter-arguments based on substi-
tution and technological progress are also deployed. In general, there is
 A - ? 189
still frontier feeling about many mineral operations even if the very large
companies (Anglo-American, Rio Tinto, and Broken Hill, for example) have
espoused more responsible policies in our period of interest.
One of the main destinations of minerals is the world’s cities. The growth
of these agglomerations has been an outstanding phenomenon of the last 100
years and has accelerated in the last fifty. The use of steel framing for build-
ings and of concrete walls and other urban surfaces took up large quantities
of iron ore and cement, and the growth of computers and their wiring has
increased the demand for copper. The electronics industry has added new
materials and forms to the waste streams of cities: electronic wastes comprise
from 2 to 5 per cent of the municipal solid waste stream. Rapid technological
advances and lower product prices for more powerful machines contributed
to shorter product life-spans and frequent replacement. Yet, consumers are
likely to store their old electronics: three-quarters of all of the computers sold
in the United States remain stockpiled in a garage, cupboard, or storage
space. In 2002, the European Union issued directives which forbid certain
chemical components of electrical and electronic machines along with a
waste-disposal regime which encourages manufacturers to recycle all the
component materials.57
Yet in many parts of the world, the metabolic problems of cities were still
those prevalent in the industrial world in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries except they were made worse by the rapidity of growth and by the
higher material expectations of many migrants to them. Cities are home to
more people than ever before. In 1900, only 160 million people, one-tenth of
the world’s population, were city dwellers. But in 2005 it was announced that
half the world’s people lived in urban areas, which was a twenty-fold increase
in numbers.58 The metabolism of cities is an emblem of their environmental
relationships. In the Baltic cities, for example, 26 per cent of the population
of the region (22 million people) need an area some 200 times the area of the
cities for wood, papers, fibre and food. In terms of land use, this requires eigh-
teen times the area of forests, fifty times for agricultural land and 133 times
for marine ecosystems. The calculation for the assimilation of wastes provides
for a wide range of values but for carbon dioxide these amount to 390 to 975
times the area. Hence the total terrestrial and marine appropriation is 565 to
1,130 times the total area of the cities or about 60,000 to 115,000 square metres
for the average citizen, amounting to 75–150 per cent of the whole Baltic
basin. If this approach is uprated to the 744 cities in the world which, in 1996,
had over 250,000 inhabitants, then they produced, for example, 2,099 million
tonnes of carbon dioxide which would need 46.45 million square kilometres
to sequester the carbon, with about 41.46 million square kilometres available.
All these processes are ‘hidden’ with no price in the economy and are seldom
perceived by policy, real though they are.59 In total, urban areas take up just 2
per cent of the world’s surface but consume the bulk of changes in six areas
(water, waste, food, energy, transport, and land use); they are therefore major
190 G E H
contributors to environmental processes. Not least, they impel the use of the
packaging of food which in the United Kingdom, contributed about 11 per
cent of the energy use in the food-supply system.60 The example of Hong Kong
provides further local insight into world-scale data. In studies carried out
from a 1971 baseline, jumps in affluence are shown by, for example, an
increase of 400 per cent in the consumption of plastics and 530 per cent more
putrescible materials. One million styrofoam lunchboxes per day add up to
120 tonnes per day of landfill. Each person (in 1997) generated 1.3 kilograms
per day of solid waste, which was an 80 per cent increase since 1971. All this
challenged the normal Hong Kong method of dealing with wastes by dilution,
and carries lessons for the future urban development of the rest of China.61 In
more general terms, landfill has created worldwide another type of environ-
ment, this time underground, though probably interactive with the atmos-
phere because methane is often produced.
Different actions are needed to make cities and the vast areas they affect
better for people and for the planet. Cities can align their consumption with
realistic needs, produce more of their own food and energy, and put much
more of their waste to use, in programmes which are usually labelled ‘sus-
tainability’. In such a setting, one of the fascinating things about cities is the
generally negative cultural image they have had for so long. They have been
the fount of problems in contrast to the ‘purity’ of rural areas in the eyes of
many commentators and professionals. Apart from the pleasure they can give
to those who like to live in them, there seems little doubt that they are often
the generators of new thinking and practices, in the environment sphere
no less than others. Cities can but express the dominant culture, however,
and, though a few urban centres have expressed ‘green’ ambitions, by the year
2000 no truly ‘environmental’ city had emerged.62 Some have little choice,
having undergone rapid growth in areas of high environmental risk, exacer-
bated by, for example, water extraction leading to land subsidence. Bangkok
sits on 4,550 square kilometres of land that has to be pumped during the
monsoon when 150 centimetres of rain falls. Yet, locally, the land is subsiding
by 10 centimetres a year, with some zones totalling 20 to 160 centimetres
below the ‘natural’ surfaces of 0.5 to 2.0 metres above sea-level. In Kingston
(Jamaica), peri-urban deforestation adds to the toll of earthquakes, landslides
and liquefaction of soils in maintaining the hazards underlain by high-inten-
sity rainfall and ‘natural’ slope failure.63
One outstanding problem of poorer cities is water supply, where the needs
of the individual and of the urban metabolism cannot be met with high-
quality supplies. In some ways this is an early indication of what is increas-
ingly seen as a problem of shortage in many parts of the world, both in cities
and in rural areas.64.The amount of technology brought to bear on water
supply has been very great, though it has not changed much since the nine-
teenth century: the dam, the pump and the pipe are still the basic ingredients.
(The number of large dams climbed from 5,000 in 1950 to more than 45,000
 A - ? 191
in recent years: an average construction rate of two large dams a day for fifty
years.) Re-use and greater water efficiency generally are minor considerations
and usually prompted by local prices rather than by broader environmental
considerations, these in turn usually being externalised costs.65 In fact, cities
are responsible for only about 10 per cent of worldwide water withdrawals but
the concentrated demand means that complex and capital-intensive infra-
structures are needed, and these are often the cause of unplanned environ-
mental impact: downstream from a large dam almost every aspect of a river’s
biology and chemistry is changed. There is exacerbation from water losses in
the urban system, sometimes as high as 40 per cent even in the Organization
for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. One major
problem with water is the accessibility of the resource which is largely con-
fined to fresh water flowing through the solar-powered hydrological cycle.66
One estimate suggests that humans have now appropriated 26 per cent of the
land-based evapo-transpiration and 54 per cent of the equivalent land-based
liquid resource: about 30 per cent, therefore, of the resource is in human
hands. The 54 per cent figure is withdrawals of all kinds and about 18 per cent
is ‘consumption’, that is, diverted to vapour. The spatial distribution and
effects of water use are highly uneven: agriculture worldwide takes about 70
per cent, with the figure being 90 per cent in some low-income economies.67
Here lie some of the widespread effects of, for example, the salinisation of soils
that affects some 20 per cent of the world’s irrigated lands and which is
increasing at about 2 million hectares a year. One unseen effect is the draw-
down of groundwater and aquifers, with the worst areas affected being the
northern plain of China, the Punjab, parts of south-east Asia, North Africa
and the Middle East, and the western United States. Many rivers now release
no water to the sea in the dry season: the Huang He (Yellow) river of China,
the Colorado river of the south-west United States and Thailand’s Chao
Phraya join the rivers of the (former) Aral Sea in this respect. If, indeed, the
food demands of some nations are to be met by a grain trade then, with one
tonne of grain needing 1,000 tonnes of water, the rain-fed grain-growing
zones of the globe assume a greater strategic importance.68 The consumption
of a meat-rich diet may require twice the water input of a vegetarian diet: rice
production needs twenty times less water for the same calorific value as that
of beef. Industry consumes about 22 per cent of water withdrawals (59 per
cent in high-income and 10 per cent in low-income economies) but can be
subjected to efficiency gains. Unilever, for example, reduced its water use to
4.3 cubic metres per tonne of product from 6.5 cubic metres between 1998
and 2004. Yet, while western industries in the 1980s used 50 tonnes of water
to make a tonne of finished paper, China used 100 to 300 tonnes.69
Work in the 1950–2000 years has removed any doubt that human activity
can change other facets of the hydrological cycle: land use and cover change can
alter local precipitation. The heterogeneity of land cover (that is, its fragmen-
tation) increases turbulence in the morning, leading to mesoscale circulation
192 G E H
and the incidence of precipitation in the afternoons.70 But nobody knows the
overall effects of the loss of 110,000 square kilometres of forest every year or of
the 700 per cent increase since 1950 in the stock of impounded water, with a
residence time now averaging forty-five days. Climate change will no doubt
affect water availability but the pace of the last fifty years, if maintained, will
ensure that economic development and population growth are more signifi-
cant influences.71 One finding of all these data is the knowledge that just as six
countries contain about half the water resource, several are in a condition of
acute or potential shortage: Egypt, Yemen, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi
Arabia all use 100 per cent of their water income.72 No better example from the
Middle East can be seen than the Yarquon-Taminin aquifer. Eighty per cent of
this is tapped by Israel from its West Bank acquisitions but would come under
Palestinian control if an independent state is created. More widely, taxonomies
of political action to secure water can be devised and all of them end in strug-
gle; some opinions have it that inter-state conflict over water resources is more
likely than over any other resource. What is likely as well is that water becomes
not a locally or regionally distributed resource but enters worldwide trade.
Towing icebergs is perhaps fanciful but a Norwegian company has a contract
to deliver seven million cubic metres per year in bags to Cyprus. Similar towing
of water bags delivers water to some Greek islands. In 1960s North America,
vast, continental-scale canal–tunnel–pipeline projects which basically take
northern Canadian water and deliver it as far south as Mexico, came up from
time to time. Most were resisted on grounds of cost, national politics or envir-
onmental impact, but they are not totally outside technological possibility.
Water is so basic to life that it is an integral part of daily patterns, of every-
day language and imagination. It carries cultural codes about community,
health and wealth.73 Thus, the way in which it is moving from control by local
communities into the portfolios of multinational companies (effectively a
form of dematerialisation)74 is at odds with the the cultural codings and, at
the same time, part of the separation of most people from a part of nature that
sustains them. This is especially so in remote places such as the James Bay area
of Quebec where an area the size of France was to be flooded for hydroelec-
tric power. This meant the displacement of 15,000 Cree and Innuit native
people, judged to be of much less importance than cheap electricity for south-
ern Canada.75 Nevertheless, the protracted land battle of the 1980s ensured
that the autonomy of the Cree and Inuit communities was enhanced by the
strengthening of the hunting economy and society, and by their legal stand-
ing in the initiation of political and administrative action.76

Marine complexities: no blue-green peace

The seas and open oceans are a route for trade and a source of a few minerals
but the period since 1950 was dominated by two processes: what organic
materials are taken out and what largely inorganic materials are put in: fish-
eries and pollution. The areas most likely to have experienced heavy impact
 A - ? 193
were those near the shorelines, and especially the estuaries and reefs which are
the most biologically productive zones of the marine world. The emblematic
event for marine contamination is that of the emissions of mercury into
Minamata Bay in Japan. The poisoning of humans was first detected in 1956
but the effects were still present at the turn of the century due in part to the
refusal of both the Chisso Chemical company and the Japanese government
to acknowledge what had happened.
Fishing (in which organisms such as squid can be included but not whales)
was still both artisanal and industrial but both groups were the beneficiaries
of World War II technology in the form of radar, sonar, and nylon for nets.
Thus, the impact of a given amount of fishing effort has been increased by
many times. Most artisanal fisheries produce human food whereas about one-
third of the industrial fishery catch is converted into fishmeal to be fed to
farmed fish or to cattle. The basic data for salt-water fishing in this era start
with a world catch of 21 million tonnes in 1950 rising to 116 million tonnes
in 1996 and then falling to 94.8 million tonnes in 2000. It is said that under-
reporting by China was significant and that, if the by-catch and the unre-
ported catches are added in, then the 2000 figure may be more like 130 million
tonnes. In the last fifty-odd years the industry has fished down the food web
to lower trophic levels and has also simplified food webs by extracting so many
fish that variability of populations is high and predictability of presence and
catch is low. Thus, human-induced impacts can be confused with environ-
mental changes. The story of the Peruvian achoveta exemplifies this: it was
scarcely fished at all in the 1950s, yielded 13 million tonnes in 1970 but only
2 million tonnes in 1974 and 0.8 million tonnes in 1984 but, by 1995, was back
to two-thirds of its 1950s level. This is usually presented as a sequence caused
by El Niño but high-impact fishing may also be implicated.77 The number of
fish stocks that are no longer commercially viable has increased greatly, espe-
cially where carnivorous fishes are the targets, as with cod, whose presence in
the Atlantic and North Sea has plummeted. Off Greenland, falling sea tem-
peratures after 1960 and in 1982–4 meant fewer cod at a time also of intensive
fishing, so that there was a total collapse and the industry shifted to shrimp
and halibut. The available technology has ensured that all of these are capable
of being over-fished quite easily.78
In the face of these data, the great growth has been in aquaculture. In 1950,
aquaculture comprised 1 per cent of fish supply but, by the end of the century,
it topped 25 per cent. It was supposed to relieve pressure on open-water fish-
eries but, if (as in the case of the popular salmon and shrimp farms) the
animals are fed fishmeal and fish oil, then it typically took 5 kilograms of wild
fish to produce 1 kilogram of farmed fish. Only if herbivorous fish were
farmed is the equation more favourable. The world leader in aquaculture is
China, with about 60 per cent of world output. The western world is much
given to salmon farming, where the top producers were Norway, Britain,
Canada, the United States and Chile. The marine-support area for salmon is
194 G E H
400–500,000 times the area of the farm, and the Nordic industry contributes
as much nitrogen as the untreated sewage of 4 million people as well as
antibiotics and pesticides. In the United States, aquaculture is a net consumer
of energy rather than a producer. Shrimp farming also relies on wild fish for
food and is heavily implicated in the loss of half the world’s mangroves,
opening coasts to greater vulnerability to storms as well as reducing the breed-
ing grounds for finfish and for the shrimp species themselves.79 Retaining
some mangrove in an area of coastal shrimp farming seems to improve the
productivity of the target species.
The long-term lesson of open-sea fishing is that there has never been a con-
servative set of practices. As one fish species is consumed, then there is a move
onwards to another. Technology, increased outreach in distance and depth,
the revaluing of spurned species and the masking effect created by aquacul-
ture have all brought about the depletion of a valuable resource. Only now are
there a few examples of carefully managed stocks in a world which seems
reluctant to follow their example. In some ways, fisheries are the last great
hunting economies. But hunting cultures never seemed to run down their
food sources in this way, for obvious reasons. The great sticking point seems
to be the livelihoods of the fishermen who claim that they cannot do anything
else, as do, interestingly, many farmers. They manage to convince govern-
ments and other bodies that the scientific advice is either wrong or need not
be implemented yet, which is an interesting comment on the normally hege-
monic role of science. That science was highly influential in whale manage-
ment, where for many years it hammered home the decline in whale numbers,
and the International Whaling Commission set in place a moratorium on
whaling. Just after 2000, this was broken by Norway and Japan with their
‘need’ to kill whales ‘for scientific purposes’ along with, as the Japanese put it,
their ‘right’ to eat whale. Though culturally interesting, this is just nationalist
nonsense. In fact, whale-watching is a fast-growing activity in Japan, one
which has grown much faster than the average world rate throughout the
1990s. Between 1994 and 1998, it grew by 16.8 per cent per year; from 1991 to
1998, the average increase was 37.6 per cent per year. In 1998, some 102,785
people went whale- and dolphin-watching in Japan. The most commonly
watched cetaceans are humpback, Bryde’s, minke, and sperm whales, as well
as bottlenose and other dolphins. Three of these, minke, Bryde’s and sperm
whales are currently being targeted by the Japanese whaling industry. Norway
has experienced growth in whale-watching at 18.8 per cent a year since 1994
at places like Andenes in northern Norway, which features sperm and other
whales, and at the Tysfjord area where, in autumn, orcas come in close to feed
on herring and are watched from the land. In some other communities there
has been a conflict between old and new attitudes to whales.80
The natural sciences also contributed the bulk of our knowledge about the
contamination of the oceans. The inputs from the land constitute a long list in
which the dominant elements are trace metals, synthetic organic compounds
 A - ? 195
[for example, PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) and pesticides], hydrocar-
bons (adding to some natural leakage from ocean floors), carbon dioxide,
radioactivity, litter, phosphorus, nitrogen and silicon. To highlight just one
flow: some 6 million tonnes of litter were deposited by commercial ships every
year. There is an overall difference in impact between the open oceans, where
dilution is still effective, and the regional seas where there enclosure makes
concentration significant. In the open oceans, however, synthetic organics
and radioactivity are detectable because they decay only very slowly. In the
regional seas there are abiotic zones caused by eutrophication (as in the Gulf
of Mexico and the Baltic), and poisons can build up in food chains: mercury
is a recurring example. But control is more possible here and restoration is
more feasible, albeit with time lags of a decade or more. Oil spills are another
offshore and coastal hazard though, unless they happen in very cold waters,
the long-term effect is less than often feared.81 Mineral extraction from the
seas concentrates on seabed minerals together with salt and magnesium from
seawater, with consequent effects on turbidity, the resuspension of pollutants
and the burial of habitat.82
The human impact on the planet’s defining characteristic is therefore far
from negligible. It is mainly on the continental shelves and enclosed regional
seas, but measurable in the open oceans as well. Sediment, other particulate
matters (especially plastics) and chemicals of a persistent nature are up in con-
centrations, whereas the quantity and diversity of fish, whales, seagrass beds
and coral reefs are down, with the last being always a topic of dispute over
causes. The volume of science is an apt tribute to the volume of water; the
quantity of care that is needed to keep the oceans as a predictable and stable
element of our environment seems lacking. This is put into an ambiguous per-
spective by the work of Hoffmann (cited in chapter 3) and by other recent
work which argues that overfishing (interpreted as over-use of any marine
taxon) is a long-standing historical process which has led especially to the col-
lapse of coastal ecosystems. It has happened in the past to kelp forests, cod,
abalone, sea otters, coral reefs, turtles, seagrass beds, oyster reefs and has pro-
duced anoxia and eutrophication in many localities worldwide. The concern
for the last fifty years is increasingly that such processes are no longer confined
to the shallow offshore zones but can affect the deeper oceans as well.
Inevitably, shifts in ocean temperatures connected to global warming form
part of the complexities involved in understanding marine populations and
their reactions to heavy levels of extraction.83

I 
The period 1950 to 2000 was characterised overall by an intensified search for,
and use of, resources. Areas hitherto ‘unexplored’ came into the fold because
of better technology. Oil from Arctic ocean floors, leaner ores for minerals,
clearing of old-growth tropical forests and evaluation of mineral recovery
196 G E H
from the beds of deep oceans are examples of a reach hitherto undreamed of.
More energy was available to contact and to change the world, not least in the
form of rockets putting observation satellites into orbit. All these processes
have impacts. Some can be ameliorated by careful management, some are just
left in the hope that they will cure themselves, and some are prone to cause
instabilities on a variety of scales. If the ocean beds are mined then nobody
expects the kind of attention to restoration that characterises the British open-
cast coal industry, for instance. When rainforests are converted to grow soya
for animal feed but the soils melt into a solid mass, then poor-quality grass-
land is left for settlers with no choices. Yet Arctic pipelines are scrutinised daily
from satellites so that any leaks are quickly known. Add in the technological
ability not only to find, but also to characterise and tag: note that each apple
at a supermarket has its little label for variety and source. How long before
each apple has its own number, as do cattle in BSE-free (more or less) coun-
tries? These actions have a context which is different from any previous era
and which can be analysed into a number of components, though this eludes
their essential character of all taking place at once.

Increased population, higher consumption

Though 80 per cent of the world’s population is in low-income economies,
there are enough of the high- and middle-income groups to build a demand
for all kinds of products, nearly all of which demand energy inputs from extra-
solar sources. The emergence since the 1990s of China as a source of demand
will, given its population (1,294 million in 2002) alter many environmental
interactions, not least in the supply of energy and the resulting emissions. Yet
there are unknown instabilities in human populations: the effect of HIV/AIDS
is one such, depending most likely on the time-lag before a vaccine becomes
available. Another is the possibility of worldwide pandemics of infectious
disease akin to the ‘Spanish flu’ of 1919. The growth of population has meant
that an average per caput allocation of arable land of 0.44 hectares in 1960 had
fallen to 0.27 hectares by 1990. One consequence is that nine countries with
little potential to expand crop land account for over 50 per cent of world pop-
ulation growth.84 Intensification to an industrial style of food production is
their only course. Though much of the world’s population is ‘poor’ in the
sense of low incomes, they have aspirations which demand high levels of
resource use: the arguments over the Kyoto Protocol contain the major theme
of the future contribution of higher per caput energy consumption by low-
income economies. Examination of the ways in which, for example, Thailand
has lifted itself out of general rural poverty reveals that road construction and
the access to motor transport are key elements. In addition, there seems no
upper asymptote to the capacity of the rich to suck up resources, whether in
the shape of immense private vehicles, long-distance air travel for people and
luxury foods, or ever-bigger portions of meat. The possession of goods and
access to services seem to fit the economists’ class of ‘positional goods’ which
 A - ? 197
are demanded so as to be richer (and be seen to be richer) than other people;
the price in the end is environmental change. The influences on ‘western’ con-
sumption patterns are so diverse (government, education, media and enter-
tainment industry do not exhaust the list) that a collective ‘leave it to the
market’ has been taken to be the only practical response to the developments
of the post-industrial era.85
Such change may also have had an explicit ideological content. In the Czech
Republic, for example, there were specific Party measures after 1948 which
resulted in the loss of agricultural land to, for example, the open-cast coal-
mines of northern Bohemia and to other state industrial enterprises. After
1990, private property was restituted, there was partial privatisation of state
holdings and access to markets was restored, leading to a decrease in arable
land, an increase in pastures and meadows and more urban expansion.86
Overall, it seems as though the impact of ‘natural’ conditions, such as soils and
climate, is more important under the free capitalism of recent times than
under state socialism, a feature seen in the ‘conquest of nature’ campaigns of
the Soviet Union and China at various times in the twentieth century.

Technology and ‘progress’

Nobody can sit writing at a computer and complain about technology. The
benefits it has brought to some humans, and is capable of delivering to most,
are immense. More broadly, a number of general trends in technologies
seemed to be emerging in the late twentieth century:

1 The rate of change was more rapid. One invention is rapidly rendered
obsolescent by the next in the a form of ‘future shock’. Although this
phenomenon can be exaggerated because it is confined mostly to the
high-income economies, some of the effects spread out to other regions
especially in the form of demands created by the ubiquity of media such
as television controlled from a high-income economy; the spread of
hamburger bars and ubiquitous soft drinks is accompanied by the con-
sumption of resources and subsequent emissions to air and water. This
accelerating rate of change was underlain by the cultural attitude that
science will find ‘magic bullets’ to overcome any problems.
2 Change was often predicated on the availability of cheap electricity. Much
of this is generated either by the inefficient combustion of fossil fuels (in
the sense that the conversion efficiencies are usually low) or from large
dams with their consequent problems, and then there are transmission
losses. Though there are still huge reserves of coal and natural gas, it may
be that the years around  2000 saw the peak of oil production (Fig. 6.1).
Hitherto, energy content in goods and services was scarcely worth men-
tioning but increasingly it became noticed, though not yet fulfilling the
prophecy of H. G. Wells’s The World Set Free of 1914 in which the value of
coins was set in terms of a number of units of energy.87
198 G E H
3 Technology became miniaturised. Many devices are now so small that
they can be owned and operated by one person: the tape-playing
Walkman, followed by the even smaller (but with a higher capacity)
MP3 player is a an obvious sequence. The laboratory and the manufac-
turing plant can go well beyond these toys and into the heart of things:
the structure of the atom, stem-cell research, nanotechnology, cell-
target pharmaceuticals, all rely on an ability to manipulate the smallest
components of the living world.
4 As many environmental issues became better understood in the period
1950–2000, they were highlighted more and more by non-local bodies.
One set of agencies were the international non-governmental organisa-
tions with an environmental focus, such as Greenpeace and Friends of
the Earth, along with groups devoted to wildlife generally, or mammals,
or mountains. The other comprises the world-level official bodies such
as the United Nations Organization, with its Environment Programme
as the spearhead but with many others (FAO, WHO, WMO, for
example) carrying a worldwide or, indeed, global concern. All of these
produce action plans and many publications but usually rely on others
(typically the agencies of the nation state) to carry out the objectives,
with varying degrees of commitment. The same is true of multination
blocs, such as the European Union. There are also international bodies,
such as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), whose
attempts since 1957 at regulation of atomic energy (with linkages to
military developments) have secondary environmental effects at the
very least.

There are always consequences for nature. More and more human activities
impinge in some fashion, with technology increasing the penetration for
knowledge as with satellite monitoring on the one hand and the voyeuristic
intrusion into the life of wild creatures presented on television, made possible
by mini-cameras and special lenses. There is also more opportunity for action,
as with contemplating recovering minerals from the beds of the deep oceans.
If the moon had a use other than as a dump for toxic wastes (politically unac-
ceptable at present) then a multinational company would be exploiting it by
now. Increasingly, there is competition for resources which may lead to con-
flict between different groups of people (this is not, of course, new) and in
which water looks as if it may be the commonest cause, followed by environ-
mental carelessness in extracting a resource at lowest cost, as with Nigerian oil.
Getting access to oil reserves in which their size is diminishing at the world
scale may well be a political priority for those nations with the greatest per
caput demands. Such scrambles are unlikely to be accompanied by an
enhanced environmental concern and more likely by inter-state conflict.
It is easy to purvey a sense of doom about the 1950–2000 period. There is
no doubt that technology was a boon to many and could well have been so to
 A - ? 199
many more. It could also have been used to protect the environment in the
sense of reducing the chances of unpredictable and damaging fluctuations,
and in keeping a diversity of life which is a source of delight and wonder as
well as of genetic variation. Yet there is a widespread feeling that it became self-
fuelling and that no amount of social control will now keep any check on
what is feasible, and that what is realisable will, in fact, be used. That is an
assent to technological determinism and a big step in the whole history of
human–nature relationships.

S:   1950

A key concept of the 1990s was ‘globalisation’. In its material effects, this
meant the human ability to transport and to communicate worldwide along
with the added capacity to ‘use’ the atmosphere and space. Thus, we are in the
realm of the truly global, beyond that delineated so far as worldwide. The
development of satellites, rocket propulsion and instant electronic communi-
cation by the post-industrial economies has produced a dominant technolog-
ically based culture in which other places share to varying degrees, with few
wanting to opt out. North Korea might be seen as one of the latter but its
inability to feed its population means an eventual shift towards the dominant
modes of society and production. A major cultural feature is commercial pen-
etration on the back of cheap transport so that the same brand names are seen
worldwide with only minor regional variations: Toyota and CNN are the
obvious examples, though the incidence of the pizza seems to be even higher.
The multinational company (MNC) is a bedrock of manufacturing and now
most outsource manufacturing so that it takes place in cheap-labour coun-
tries; the same is true of food production when baby sweetcorn is flown thou-
sands of kilometres to western supermarkets, with minimal returns to the
producers. The criss-crossing of the planet entrains all kinds of organisms and
materials, not least of which is the spread of disease. Apart from the obvious
examples, Britain imports 5 million vehicle tyre carcasses each year for recy-
cling and these may form a breeding ground for the Asian mosquito Stegomyia
albopicta which has been associated with twenty-three diseases including
dengue fever and West Nile virus, both of which might now get a hold in
Britain.
All this commerce requires energy and the superpower is the biggest con-
sumer of all though the energy needs of countries emerging into industriali-
sation (notably India and China) are immense. But the desire to maintain
levels of access to power in all senses of that word leads to far-reaching polit-
ical action: the United States’s impulses to maintain stability in the Middle
East after World War II at the expense of democracy can be interpreted as pro-
viding secure oil supplies.88 As more oil is secured, it seems as if more has to
be devoted to military purposes to secure those supplies and the next tranche
as well. There has been some rejection of this pattern of a unipolar world, and
200 G E H
some dissenters mark their protest at G8 meetings, whose cost and energy use
would support a small African country for a year. Political power goes along
with high per caput energy use, at levels which bring in the whole globe
because the levels of emissions are so high. Superpower means super impact
on the environment. There is more dust, for example, so that geomorpholo-
gists can talk of a ‘dimming world’. This term is derived from measurements
of aerosol particulates (mostly sulphates, soot and organic matter) which both
reflect away solar radiation and absorb it. There was a solar dimming of 1.3
per cent per decade over land in 1961–90 but this was outpaced by an increase
of solar radiation after 1983; so that any cooling effect was outpaced by the
emission of greenhouse gases. Sulphur emissions declined by about 22 per
cent after 1990: such trends ameliorate local pollution problems but take away
a counter-influence to global warming.89
Dimming seems less important than the great encroachment upon the
composition of the atmosphere, where various gases have enhanced the
capacity of the atmosphere to retain heat and thus produce what is known as
the ‘greenhouse effect’. The late-twentieth-century emphasis on methane and
carbon dioxide was preceded by concern about chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)
and their production of ‘ozone holes’ over the poles. The Montreal Protocol
of 1987 (amended in 1990 and 1992) was supposed to alleviate that process
though the ozone layer still shows an alarming thinning in some years. The
nature of a warmer globe is assessed in two ways. Firstly, any current trends
which seem to fit the idea are assigned to that cause. Thus the rise in global
temperature at the end of the twentieth century is seen as one result, as are
species shifts which see the retreat of the cold-tolerant and the advance of the
warmth-seekers. Second, complex models predict likely effects and their
regional variations, including the complex feedback effects of such elements
as cloudiness or the breakdown of tundra peats giving off methane. This pro-
cedure has been the subject of immense amounts of science and is constantly
reviewed and presented with appropriate caveats. Thus, it represents the best
that science can contribute to the question of the global environment. The
ways in which a wriggling government in the grip of multinationals can then
avoid action (‘we need to understand the problem better’) would invoke far-
cical laughter if the subject were (a) not so serious and (b) not an example of
a more widespread phenomenon. Fishing and whaling in the PIE era suffered
similar dissonances.
Although there is now one globe as never before, it is a globe that is pro-
duced by superpower in the sense of access to energy applied through tech-
nology and driven by the levels of consumption and the values of the United
States. That nation has provided the beef and the vehicles in the period
1950–2000. The origins of this ascendancy lie before 1950, most clearly in the
entry of the United States into two world wars and, in particular, the break-
down of isolationism after 1941 and the perceived need to contain commu-
nism during the Cold War. The impact has been out of all proportion to the 5
 A - ? 201
per cent of the world’s population who live in the United States, and can be
characterised as the outreach of massive energy consumption mediated via
technology. There is a basis of mass production and mass communication
conducted by companies who make possible the other developments. These
centre around (a) the possibility of mass destruction, since there is a capacity
to deliver immense amounts of weaponry anywhere in the world, rather
dwarfing the concept of the superpower when the word was first used in 1944;
(b) mass consumption, pioneered by the United States as in the late 1950s
when it had two-thirds of the world’s television sets, and (c) the promotion of
its culture to be consumed elsewhere, with the primacy of the English lan-
guage as a carrier.90
The environmental consequences again focus on the global reach, as dis-
cussed above, but we can note the United States as being in the vanguard of
levels of material use and acquisition, including travel and therefore in per
caput use of energy and hence of impact in the course of resource use, pro-
cessing and the emission of wastes. The United States has also exported atti-
tudes towards the environment: the idea of wilderness as an untouched nature
apart from human use except for very light-touch recreation has been
implanted in a number of other countries, though revisionist views about the
manipulation of US wildernesses by native Americans are undermining the
concept in its heartland. The type of mass destruction feared by the authors
of the ‘nuclear winter’ scenarios never came about but environmental destruc-
tion is forever part of the history of the war in Vietnam. But, of course, if
several other nations could have achieved those levels of power then they
would have done so.
There have been at least three waves of integration of the world, starting
with migration and trade in the period before about 1500 and then being cat-
apulted to a new level by access to fossil fuels and the accompanying tech-
nologies.91 All are outclassed by the post-World War II integrations led by the
United States and which in the PIE era qualify unreservedly for the first time
for the label ‘global’.

N  
This phrase comes from a modern (1965) Japanese haiku by Seishi
Yamaguchi92

Umi no ue Flight over water –

tobu setsurei no the gods of snowy mountains
kago mo naku have no power here

It conveys poetically the idea of separation of function and of powers which the
section on coalescence has tried to refute. Yet the PIE world has been one of
many fragmentations and separations. Two linked processes have dominated
202 G E H
the environmental history and its potentials at the end of the twentieth century:
miniaturisation and advanced biotechnology. The first is the latest stage in a
long process of stratification and segmentation that satisfies the wishes of indi-
viduals. When the technology is personal then the immediate demands of the
individual can be addressed. ‘My music’ on an MP3 player replaces the shared
experience of a concert and avoids anything that might be unexpected or dis-
turbing. The mobile phone replaces the community’s box; medication is for-
mulated to a particular physiology and ‘designer babies’ will make it further into
the world than the tabloid press. In such a setting, the intellectual rise of post-
modernism with its emphasis on avoiding the ubiquitous and the absolute in
favour of the local and the relative is not surprising. But there was scope for
debate over the location of power: if it was indeed becoming radically de-
centred than the influence of the multinationals seemed to constitute a new
class of vigorous controllers of lifestyle. If we all subscribe to ‘my news’, then
what information do we have in common?
Being able to manipulate the basic material of the living cell has opened new
vistas of tailoring. The main thrusts have been in matters of human health,
such as replacement parts grown from embryonic stem cells, and the so-called
GM (genetically modified) crops in which resistance to disease or to a herbi-
cide is implanted in the crop’s genetic material. Neither technique was, in
2000, well advanced and it is clear that there is much more to be developed.
In both cases, technological advances were developed in their own subcultural
worlds though there are more binding medical ethics committees than plan-
etary health committes with compulsory powers. The GM advocates concen-
trate on higher yields without worrying about the social implications of the
cost and supply structure that go with them. Beyond both, there is the fear that
uncontrollable harmful organisms will be released and that insufficient inter-
national protocols will ever be in place to ensure that the ‘Frankenstein Effect’
is simply a story.93 In the immediate future, the development of a new species
by genetic modification means that it can be patented, which is a fresh devel-
opment in the history of humans’ relationship with the non-human.
The environmental effects of these technologies were only just above the
horizon in 2000 and so seem speculative in this context. Communicability of
an individual kind might mean less need for travel (and so less consumption
of fossil fuels) though the habit of using travel as a symbol of status is proba-
bly deeply entrenched. Biotechnology at the field level might mean coales-
cence as well because many fewer crop varieties might dominate a region if a
broad-spectrum tolerance is implanted. The absence of weeds may diminish
the populations of all other species if a crop monoculture of great genetic
purity is the only life in the field. A segmented market of individual choice
militates for an analogous land-use pattern, with piecemeal conversions, for
example, to supply seafoods from shrimp farms at the expense of mangroves,
soy-bean farms instead of tropical forest and golf courses to replace agricul-
tural land or pasture. On some coasts the makeover is virtually complete with
 A - ? 203
artificial islands extending the pleasure zone, as in Dubai. Thus, ‘nature’
becomes a separate category with fences (often literally so) around ‘reserves’;
the non-human world becomes in some cases (especially so in National Parks)
something recreational, to be entered or observed largely for pleasure: a
reserve for tourism, in fact. Tiny cameras mean that no part of the life of a wild
bird need be unobserved, on a television screen.
There is a paradox in the sense that tiny cameras and other micro-
technology mean a heavier footprint. There has been little sense of decoupling
the processes of the planet’s ecology from those of human economies, still less
of the somewhat vague notions of dematerialising the economies of the PIE
world.94 At the end of the millennium, there was a growing, but still politically
ineffective, questioning of whether all these brave new developments were
part of a Promethean mythology in its widest sense.

S  

Max Frisch (1911–91, a Swiss architect and writer) famously said that
‘Technology [was] the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to
experience it.’95 His meaning was clear, though we might want now to modify
it when we think of the multitude of different ways in which information
about the world is made available. Many of these, however, are heavily medi-
ated via technological devices. Thinking about the representations of
human–environment relationships in the second half of the twentieth century
became even more difficult than for earlier times, not least because of the
diversity of it. To make a provocative generalisation: representations are
engaging in a polar fashion with the very small and with the global/long term,
whereas politics deals with immediate crises and the middle term but turns
away from the longer and wider views. The aesthetics of nature are akin to
music: they present us with an exposed mathematical order in which the
information content becomes meaning. We then transmit much of that
meaning with a vocabulary of symbolisms from our culture’s life. We might
wonder whether aleatory music has a parallel in the close-ups of birds’ nests
that use miniature cameras and so frame only a tiny piece of the entire ecosys-
tem of which they are a part; possibly more persuasive is the parallel between
human rapaciousness and the attraction of large mammalian predators,
including the fascination with sharks. Equally fascinating are films about films
where the sight of a lion eating or sleeping (or indeed copulating) is witnessed
by about a dozen safari vehicles parked in a circle around the animal. What
sort of experience are we getting?
Some thoughtful interpreters try to connect Earth and mind more
directly.96 The development of ‘land art’ can be seen in this light, with its
explicit origins in the 1970s with works such as Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty
(1970) and Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field from the 1970s;97 Michael
Heizer’s Double Negative, also from the 1970s, consists of two trenches cut into
204 G E H
the eastern edge of the Mormon Mesa, north-west of Overton, Nevada. The
trenches line up across a large gap formed by the natural shape of the mesa
edge. Including this open area across the gap, the trenches together measure
457 metres long, 15.2 metres deep, and 9.1 metres wide. Some 240,000 tons
(218,000 tonnes) of rock, mostly rhyolite and sandstone, were displaced in the
construction of the trenches: ‘there is nothing there, yet it is still a sculpture’
said the artist.98 Compared with the great scale of these examples from the
United States, the work of, for example, Andy Goldsworthy and Richard Long
in (mostly) the United Kingdom is more domestic and often intended to be
temporary. Whereas the large-scale works have been criticised as ecological
vandalism, Goldsworthy, for example, tends to construct ‘monuments’ to the
local materials, be they wood or stone or even leaves. Some metal objects,
however, might reflect what lies beneath, as in Tyneside circles of scrap steel
that allude to the de-industrialisation of their site.99 (In San Francisco, not
surprisingly, a piece for a gallery that sits near the San Andreas fault will chal-
lenge ‘the viewer’s notion of what constitutes a work of art by blurring the
distinction between the natural and the man-made, while also drawing
attention to nature’s potential to undermine or destroy the works created by
humans’.)100 More puzzling is the well-known pattern of ‘wrapping’ nature
(as well as buildings) as practised by Christo (1935– ): his Running Fence in
Marin and Sonoma Counties, California, and Valley Curtain in Colorado
(both in the 1970s) shroud and divide the landscape and its views rather like
his enclosure of the Berlin Reichstag in fabric. Perhaps we can take this as
pointing to our ability to be distanced from the land and its structures.
For more slightly more traditional art, though, there was the example of the
use of ‘materials with the energy of the world in them’ in the output of Joseph
Beuys (1921–86). A citizen of East Germany, he often used felt and fat in con-
structions because they were full of that energy. They also looked thrifty, a
necessary ingredient of life east of The Wall. One of his major projects was at
Kassel in Germany, the planting of 7,000 oaks from 1982 onwards, as an
engagement with environmental degradation. This led to The End of the
Twentieth Century of 1982–3, (part of which is reproduced at the head of this
chapter) in which basalt blocks look like the fallen tombs of a former age. The
hole creates a metaphorical wound which is soothed with clay and felt and
refilled. One commentator thought that Beuys ‘shifted the optical and semi-
otic field of art towards a new and potentially troubling theatricality’ and the
exhibition in London in 2005 certainly produced a thoughtfulness among its
viewers.101 There is also the question of ‘green’ cinema where explicitly envir-
onmentalist films usually deal with toxic emissions such as pesticides or the
threat of nuclear-plant meltdown or even futuristic scenarios of dystopias.
These are scarcely significant beside the vast output of implicit attitudes when
scenery is placed before us along with uplifting music, and we are invited to
admire it no matter what its history has been. The moorlands of the Welsh
Marches and the open grasslands of the High Plains alike are overgrazed and
 A - ? 205
have seen much rural depopulation owing to lack of thought for the natural
conditions, but nevertheless are presented as likely parts of idylls. This ten-
dency to regress is shown most vividly in Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (1990),
where the last episode (the film is a series of short stories with an emphasis on
death and destruction) shows the funeral of an old woman whose coffin is pre-
ceded by dancing children, moving alongside a river harnessed by only the
most gentle of watermills.102 There is no electricity and no tractors and the
103-year old man quizzed by the narrator character says that scientists fail to
see to the heart of things. It was nostalgia of the most appealing kind. There
has been no agreement as to how television and other media had altered per-
ceptions of the world compared with, say, the mid-nineteenth century. Nor
was class difference explored: even those who had access to ‘nature’ very likely
had parents, school expeditions and, of course, books to tell them what to
expect.
Words were still a major communication route for environmental repre-
sentation, from novels to poetry and journalism, and the production of web
pages by the million. A kind of meta-verbal layer was the development of
explicitly environmental philosophy and ethics, with the full panoply of acad-
emia deployed, as books, lecture series, jobs, journals and learned societies.
This is not the place for a review of the field but it may suffice to say that a
number of different and often irreconcilable positions evolved, including the
text-based exegeses at one extreme and the post-modern relativist at the other.
In the year 2000, it looked very much as if the dominant world view was still
that of humans who were largely outside the ecology of a planet whose systems
could be manipulated without limit provided the right knowledge and the
right social systems were in place. The unbelievers were the minorities who
had to make the running if change was to happen.

T
Despite the greater abundance of goods and services that some people enjoy,
the outcome of the interplay of coalescence and fragmentation has been one
of strain and of tension. There are more people with higher incomes and
better health than ever before (and, cynics might say, with more time to
worry) yet the future seems uncertain. The present work is one of history and
not futurology but some of the anxieties are rooted in the last fifty years, if,
indeed, not before. The trends in loss of total life on the planet, with about 5
per cent of vertebrates being threatened species and biotic functions alto-
gether eliminated from 9 million hectares and significantly diminished in a
further 300 million hectares, are plain to see.103
The domestication of the planet might seem a non-issue because it is clearly
a long-term activity of humanity. In an apparent continuation of the process
of naming, it seems as if science and technology have allowed the labelling
of almost everything, currently producing the stickers on apples and the
206 G E H
ear-tags on cows. With domestication comes the loss of the wild both in the
sense of habitats and in the diminution of the genetic variety inherent in wild
species and in localised domesticates. What started with Neolithic taming of
cattle was in 2000 at the stage of genetically modified varieties of soy beans
and a cloned sheep. What was different was the accuracy with which the
breeding was done and the rapidity with which it was accomplished. The
vehicle, as might be expected, was access to plentiful energy in the form of
well-equipped laboratories and lecture rooms, and as knowledge.
The carbon-based economy of the world was expected to go on as long as
coal and oil lasted. The promises by industry of resource recovery rates being
vastly improved added to a sense of security as did a politically stable world in
which friends and enemies could be identified and kept in their places. The
changes of the 1980s into first a multi-polar world and then into a single-
power world changed many views of the human environment. Freedom to
consume goods and services that followed the breakdown of Communism at
its strictest in Russia and China (and their satellites) plus the burgeoning
wealth of India mean that any tendencies to instability caused by resource use
and emission levels are made worse. The obvious manifestation has been
climate change, now accepted as a fact by all except the most denial-prone gov-
ernments and multinationals. In addition, pressures to produce more fish and
aquaculture products, to cater for beach tourism and simply to find some-
where to live have forced communities in low-income economies to occupy
and transform zones along coasts and on steep slopes which are vulnerable to
geophysical hazards. While no human intervention is likely to ameliorate the
magnitude of earthquakes and tsunamis, for example, more heat retained in
the atmosphere may well exacerbate the frequency and intensity of tropical
storms and thus damage to coastlines as well as inducing landslides. It looks
as if many geophysical hazards (drought and fire included) may get worse in
a warmer world.104 The outcome, therefore, is of an environmental instability
with unpredictable amplitudes of fluctuation.
Instability itself became better understood in the late twentieth century
with the development of ideas such as chaos theory. The attractive image of a
butterfly beating its wings in Tokyo and causing a storm in New York has been
much refined. Nevertheless, the basic idea that small initial differences can
lead to very large-scale consequences and, moreover, that the outcomes are
not likely to be the same twice, has had considerable resonance in climatic
studies and has been applied eagerly to discuss possible environmental out-
comes. It can be argued that much of the international action taken in the
second half of the twentieth century, which had direct or indirect environ-
mental implications, was aimed at reducing instability and unpredictability.
The realisation that everything is connected to everything else and that the
mediation was via the atmosphere was a sharp jolt to those who suddenly
realised that nobody owned it. The emissions trading at the centre of the
Kyoto process is a first step in the application of conventional economics to
 A - ? 207
what had hitherto been a common resource. Environmentalists lobbied hard
in the 1960–90 period for an equilibrium world as distinct from the growth
model fostered by neoclassical economics; both parties, however, rather
turned their backs on 10,000 years of history in which equilibrium was char-
acteristic of neither the natural nor the human-made world, let alone the
hybrids of both. The legacy of the nineteenth century has been to expect
growth for ever. Yet again, let it be emphasised, nobody has disproved that
there is not an upper carrying capacity level for the species Homo sapiens,
depending on the support level of other parts of the global ecosystem.
Hence, the existence of international bodies concerned directly with the
environment and the attention given to it by the more powerful national gov-
ernments in the 1990s have confirmed one thing. V. I. Vernadsky’s conception
of a noösphere in which the physical -spheres (atmos-, litho-, bio-) are
brought under the network of human thought and communication is more
or less accomplished, though some people are more connected than others,
not surprisingly. Vernadsky (1863–1945) and his interpreters have thought
that this implosion would lead to a new human culture: a coalescence of all
that is good about interdependence.105 This brings us to the question of
authority. In the 1950–2000 period there was a shift from the printed word (of
books and newspapers especially) to visual expressions of cultural influence.
‘I saw it on TV’ replaces ‘I read it in the papers’. The role of television and the
computer is central: many advertisements on the small screen of television
actually depict a computer screen as part of the sequence as a sign of author-
ity, with the other cultural dominant of science manifested as a white coat
whenever relevant. So environmental knowledge is probably more widespread
than ever before but it is at a safe distance and there is an ‘off’ switch. Cultural
attitudes can emerge which are detached from their ecology: fire in the home,
for example, is tamed as candles, log fires and cigarette lighters whereas the
media pictures from the wild are of war and disaster. No wonder that con-
trolled fire in sclerophyll woodlands is outlawed and fuels build up, as in
Australia and the Mediterranean.
The setting for many of these issues is that of consumerism. People formu-
late their goals through acquiring goods and services far removed from sub-
sistence needs or even those of elegant sufficiency. Shopping seems to give an
identity now available to many more individuals than the differentiated access
of earlier rich people in, say, the Bronze Age or even the nineteenth century.
Former luxuries are now commonplace and so a positional good has to be
sought which very often involves further environmental impact. The whole
history of sugar (as discussed in chapter 3) is a case in point.106 The ability of
the social sciences to understand all these interactions is in flux but has
changed markedly since 1895 when Durkheim urged sociologists to ignore
human biology and geography in their search for explanation. Globalisation
has brought the limits to nature back into the frame whereas, in much of the
twentieth century, ‘environment’ was simply a barrier between humanity and
208 G E H
the modern world. The thinking may have changed but many of the forces
associated with it (especially in terms of technology) continue to expand.107
The 1990s ended with a resurgence of a question which had seemed settled
perhaps twenty years earlier. The rising price of oil and rumblings about the
longevity of the reserves, the future attitudes of oil-producing nations that
were becoming Islamist in polity, and the refusal of the United States (espe-
cially but not solely) to join any form of ‘use-less’ movement, all fused in a
revaluation of the virtues of nuclear power. In many countries the fission
power station has been a symbol of disaster (actual or potential) and an
expensive source of electricity. But all such objections pale beside an alterna-
tive in which power supplies are subject to reductions and cuts. No juice, no
shopping: end of the western world and its consumption patterns (Table 5.2).
Even nuclear fusion (fifty years of development and perhaps never able to
produce more than it consumes) will become the site of massive international
co-operation, which is a real sign of desperation.
The PIE world then exhibits many things at once, but the tension at its
heart between rich and poor has many environmental consequences and all
lead to an increased chance of instabilities of many kinds. These are likely to
show greater amplitudes of fluctuation than has been the case in the past and
probably (in spite of the remarkable successes of modelling) predictable

T 5.2 Levels of consumption

World totals (million tonnes):
Product 1960 1997
Wood 2,000 3,250
Meat 75 220
Grain 900 2,100
Fish (excl. aquaculture) 79 82

These numbers are estimated visually from graphs and so should not be taken as precise.

Annual per caput levels, late 1990s:

Country Meat (kg) Fossil fuels (kg of oil Passenger cars per
equivalent) 1,000 people
USA 122.0 6,902 489
Japan 42.0 3,277 373
Poland 73.0 2,585 209
Indonesia 9.0 450 12
China 47.0 700 3.2
India 3.4 268 4.4
Nigeria 12.0 186 6.7
Zambia 12.0 77 17

Source: World Resources 2000–2001, Washington DC: World Resources Institute, 2000, Box 1.11,
pp. 26–7. Some of the data are the WRI’s own, some from the World Bank and some from FAO.
 A - ? 209
only imprecisely. History does not equip us all that well to deal with such a
world.

A  
If we examine the ‘fundamental factors’ in the metamorphoses of fifty years
of post-industrial development, then we find significant changes in all of
them:

1 The increasing capacity for communal action by states and corporations

has been enhanced by the arrival of the United Nations and its compo-
nent agencies. They have been able to direct action by pointing out the
international nature of problems but have probably been less responsi-
ble for changes in the field than the World Bank, whose fiscal policies
have had major environmental repercussions in developing countries.
The effects of super-powers, such as the Soviet Union and the United
States are also clear, as are the impacts due to the multinationals, espe-
cially those in the fields of energy access and of agricultural produce.
2 Colonial regimes have become politically unacceptable and many
empires have broken apart. Their legacy is in the terms of trade between
the post-industrial economies and their poorer suppliers in which sub-
sidies to, for example, developed-world agriculture affect the environ-
ments of both suppliers and consumers.
3 The world market for both cheap and precious goods has extended to
unpredictable items as well as to those which were foreseeable in indus-
trial times. The selling of wild places for tourism is an example of the
latter, but the lengths to which water is now being traded (and perhaps
will be fought for) are an emergent phenomenon.
4 Population growth had a lower profile in the 1990s than in, say, the
1960s, and there are now some localised worries about replacement
rates and ‘greying’. But, in most of the world, the numbers are still
rising and adding to the demands on resources and waste-processing
capacities. A big unknown is the long-term effect of HIV/AIDS: will its
late-twentieth-century effects be seen eventually as a ‘blip’ or as the
beginning of quasi-permanent effects?
5 The accessibility of technology has changed with the movement of some
highly visible items into private use and ownership. This has increased
expectations, especially because the items are often so small. Many
consumer electronics have a short lifespan, are heavy consumers of
resources and are not easily recycled because they do not get in the way
as an old motor car or refrigerator does.
6 The complexities and impacts of all these changes have resulted in a bur-
geoning of environmental law, led by the most highly industrialised
regions but with some attempts (not always enforced) by developing
210 G E H
economies. These last often perceive legal restrictions as inimical to
‘progress’ but it is worth noting that loud voices in the United States have
claimed that restricting carbon output to the atmosphere would wreck
the economy.

Few of these abstractions in themselves convey the dominance achieved

during 1950–2000 of two great planetary manipulators:

1 Demand for meat and fish. Animal protein has always been a sign of
status and the continuity of this trait seems to have diminished very
little. Such is its standing that low-income people in high-income
economies will eat poor-quality meat rather than better-quality fruit
and vegetables; plant- and fungus-derived foods are marketed as dis-
guised meat. Marketable animals (especially beef cattle) consume
immense amounts of plant material, which would otherwise be direct
human food, as well as large quantities of fish meal and the remains of
other animals, as was shown in the British BSE epidemic which peaked
around 1992. Thus, the consumption of meat and its effects on forests,
grasslands, the sea and energy consumption are primary environmental
manipulators.
2 There are many kinds of motors in the world but most are powered
directly or indirectly by the combustion of hydrocarbons. The getting of
the fuels and the necessary refining, the land-use changes that are
brought about by roads and vehicles, and the effects of emissions both
local and global place this addition to the somatic repertoire of humans
very high on the list of environmental management and impact sources.
While there is no denying the benefits brought to many by all kinds of
motors (with the possible exception of blinged-up vehicles with 1,000-
decibel sound systems), the external costs both directly to humans and
indirectly via the environment are very rarely added up.

The common factor in many of these changes is the speed with which they
occur and the rapid metamorphoses as a process ‘matures’: this is as true of
new agricultural chemicals as it is of computers, and it certainly seems to be
true of climatic change, if the models of positive feedback loops are correct.
The way in which a luxury item, such as meat, became commonplace in the
West after 1950 (even in Japan, for example) has amazed most observers. The
desire for speed, which produced Concorde (and its load of emissions), propels
many other processes, not all of which seem to produce much benefit except
that of being able to say that the person is living ‘in the fast lane’. In the case of
food, immense amounts of energy are spent transporting it across continents.
The Italian-inspired ‘slow food’ movement founded in 1986 constitutes one
response, though how well rooted it became is difficult to assess. In 2000 the
parent group instituted the Slow Food Award for the Defense of Biodiversity
 A - ? 211
with the goals of publicising and rewarding activities of research, production,
marketing, popularisation and documentation that benefit biodiversity in the
agricultural and gastronomic fields. Yet none of these interactions seems to
have produced any sense of security: there were instabilities in the population-
resources-environment system, a floundering over the mitigation of, or com-
pensation for, environmental problems caused by the North but inflicted on
the South. Insecure nation states and insecure people seemed unlikely to take
the social and political hazards incurred in tackling environmental risks.105
It seems a cliché to say that the world in 1950–2000 was poised to choose
one of several different paths and, indeed, the metaphor is too rigid. Within
the years after 1945, shuffle and muddle were as common as were the
ringing declarations of those who wanted to ‘end poverty’ or echoed the
Morgenthau plan for Germany in 1945 which was to make it a pastoral and
de-industrialised nation, or even contemplated a population level that could
be supported by foraging. Somewhere in that fifty years, however, the idea of
keeping a region ‘down’ disappeared.

N
1. A. P. Chester, ‘Globalisation and the new technologies of knowing’, in
M. Strathern (ed.) Shifting Contexts. Transformations in Anthropological
Knowledge, London and New York: Routledge, 1995, 117–30.
2. D. Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985.
3. V. Smil, General Energetics. Energy in the Biosphere and Civilization, New York:
Wiley Interscience, 1991, ch. 14.
4. So probably the total area devoted to motor vehicles is approaching 3 or 4 per
cent? The road area comes from a contribution to M. O’Hare (ed.) Does Anything
Eat Wasps?, London: Profile Books, 2005, p. 145.
5. Though of course they were: international aid helped them avoid total
starvation.
6. It is difficult to judge whether those few nations whose governments actively
eschew western ways (such as North Korea, Iran, Bhutan and until recently
China) reflect the wishes of their populations. When given the chance to change,
they usually take it.
7. In the United States, substitution by electricity reached its maximum penetra-
tion by about 1930, three decades after it had begun. In the low-income
economies this process is still far from complete.
8. F. Fukuyama, The Great Disruption. Human Nature and the Reconstitution of
Social Order, New York: Free Press, 1999. A disruption, of course, has another
side beyond the rupture. Environmentalists sometimes talk of the twentieth
century as ‘the great transition’.
9. There are always good summaries in the annual publication of the Worldwatch
Institute, Vital Signs. These data are from Vital Signs 1999–2000, ed. L. Starke,
London: Earthscan, 1999, p. 97 et seq.
10. The most exposed neo-Malthusian has been the biologist P. R. Ehrlich. The first
high-profile book was The Population Bomb, New York: Sierra Club/Ballantine
Books, 1968, followed by, inter alia, The Population Explosion (with A. H. Ehrlich),
212 G E H
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990; P. R. Ehrlich, A. H. Ehrlich and G. C. Daily,
The Stork and the Plow: the Equity Answer to the Human Dilemma, New York:
Putnam, 1995. I have written a short account of his work: ‘Paul Ehrlich’, in J. A.
Palmer (ed.) Fifty Key Thinkers on the Environment, London and New York:
Routledge, 2001, 252–60.
11. R. Clarke (ed.) Global Environment Outlook 2000, London: Earthscan/Nairobi:
UNEP, 1999, ch. 4.
12. The Third Assessment Report of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on
Climatic Change), 2001, p. 2. Accessed in March 2005 at www.ipcc.ch/pub/
spm22-01.pdf.
13. IPCC, Climate Change 2001: Impact, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, p. 3, accessed
in March 2005 at www.ipcc.ch/pub/wg2SPMfinal.pdf. The relevant studies are
mostly in north and north-western Europe and North America.
14. For example, A. Pitman, R. Pielke, R. Avissar, M. Clausen, J. Gash and
H. Dolman, ‘The role of the land surface in weather and climate: does the land
surface matter?’, IGBP Newsletter 39, 1999, 4–9; J. Fuhrer, ‘Agroecosystem
responses to combinations of elevated CO2, ozone and global climate change’,
Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 97, 2003, 1–20.
15. S. Lavorel, E. F. Lambin, M. Flannigan and M. Scholes, ‘Fires in the Earth System:
the need for integrated research’, Global Change Newsletter 48, 2001, 7–10.
16. V. Smil, General Energetics. Energy in the Biosphere and Civilization, New York:
Wiley Interscience, 1991, ch. 10; idem, Energies, Cambridge MA: MIT Press,
1999, ch. 5. There are no better places in which to read about energy flows of all
kinds on the planet than in Smil’s books.
17. V. Smil op. cit. 1991; L. Starke op. cit. 1999, pp. 48–55.
18. R. Clarke op. cit. 1999, p. 336.
19. D. Cosgrove, ‘Contested Global Visions: One-World, Whole-Earth, and the
Apollo space photographs’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers
84, 1994, 270–94, thought that the photo showed the Earth as an ownable com-
modity. The outcome awaits the verdict of time.
20. M. Degg, ‘The 1992 “Cairo earthquake”: causes, effects and response’, Disasters
17, 1993, 226–38; Y. Q. Zong and X. Q. Chen, ‘The 1998 flood on the Yangtse,
China’, Natural Hazards 22, 2000, 165–84.
21. For a comprehensive overview see A. M. Mannion, Agriculture and Environmental
Change. Temporal and Spatial Dimensions, Chichester: Wiley, 1995.
22. D. Goodman and M. Redclift, Refashioning Nature. Food, Ecology and Culture,
London and New York: Routledge, 1991.
23. Goodman and Redclift op. cit. 1991.
24. http://www.defra.gov.uk/news/latest/2005/food-0715.htm
25. M. Williams, Deforesting the Earth, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003, ch. 14.
26. Note that an error term is now possible. F. Achard et al., ‘Determination of defor-
estation rates of the world’s humid tropical forests’, Science 297, 2002, 999–1002.
27. See the account in M. Williams op. cit. 2003, ch. 14.
28. E. F. Lambin and H. J. Geist, ‘Regional differences in tropical deforestation’,
Environment 45, 2003, 22–36.
29. M. Gadgil and R. Guha, This Fissured Land. An Ecological History of India, Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1993, ch. 6.
30. See for example, R. Walker, ‘Theorizing land-cover and land-use change: the
case of tropical deforestation’, International Regional Science Review 27, 2004,
247–70; H. Geist and E. Lambin, ‘Is poverty the cause of tropical deforestation?’,
International Forestry Review 5, 2003, 64–6; R. Bonnie, S. Schwartzman, S. C.
Stier and S. F. Siebert, ‘Tropical reforestation and deforestation and the Kyoto
 A - ? 213
protocol’, Conservation Biology 17, 2003, 4–5; E. B. Barbier and J. C. Burgess,
‘Tropical deforestation, tenure insecurity and unsustainability’, Forest Science
47, 2001, 497–509.
31. Y. Malhi, P. Meir and S. Brown, ‘Forests, carbon and global climate’, Phil. Trans.
R. Soc. Lond. A 360, 2002, 1567–91.
32. E. G. A. Olsson, G. Austrheim and S. N. Greene, ‘Landscape change patterns in
mountains, land use and environmental diversity, Mid-Norway 1960–1993’,
Landscape Ecology 15, 2000, 155–70.
33. O. Kandler, ‘Historical declines and diebacks of central European forests and
present conditions’, Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry 11, 1992, 1077–93.
34. This was in 1966. The actual quote was probably more like ‘A tree is a tree. How
many more do you have to look at?’
35. See both the W. L. Thomas and the B. L. Turner edited volumes frequently
referred to above: neither takes recreation seriously. J. R. McNeill does not
mention it as a twentieth-century phenomenon. A. M. Mannion (op. cit. 1997,
2nd edn) certainly does.
36. See, for example, M. Clawson and J. L. Knetsch, Economics of Outdoor
Recreation, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press for Resources for the Future, 1966,
for a pioneering volume. A concise overview is in J. Pigram, Outdoor Recreation
and Resource Management, Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1983.
37. I. G. Simmons, Rural Recreation in the Industrial World, London: Edward
Arnold, 1975. Cities are, unsurprisingly, not covered.
38. A BBC News story (‘Piste pressure on alpine plants’) accessed on 18 April 2005
at http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/sci/tech/4449637.stm. Also, C. Rixen,
V. Stoeckli and W. Ammann, ‘Does artificial snow production affect soil and veg-
etation of ski pistes? A review’, Perspectives in Plant Ecology, Evolution and
Systematics 5, 2003, 219–30.
39. A. C. Gange, D. E. Lindsay and J. M. Schofield, ‘The ecology of golf courses’,
Biologist 50, 2002, 63–8.
40. A. T. Grove and O. Rackham, The Nature of Mediterranean Europe. An Ecological
History. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001.
41. In the early twenty-first century, salmon fishing in northern Scotland’s wild
areas of Caithness would cost at least £1,000 per week per person, and a day’s
pheasant shooting in Somerset some £500. Scottish deer stalking was advertised
at £250 per stag, though it was unclear if that depended upon results.
42. K. R. Jones and J. Wills, The Invention of the Park. From the Garden of Eden to
Disney’s Magic Kingdom, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005.
43. F. C. Coleman, W. F. Figuueira, J. S. Ueland and L. B. Crowder, ‘The impact of
United States recreational fisheries on marine fish populations’, Science 305,
2004, 1958–60.
44. D. Biggs, ‘Managing a rebel landscape: conservation, pioneers, and the revolu-
tionary past in the U Minh forest, Vietnam’, Environmental History 10, 2005,
448–76.
45. National Research Council [of the USA] Committee on the Effects of Herbicides
in Vietnam, The Effects of Herbicides in Vietnam. Part A. Summary and
Conclusions, Washington DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1974. (Part B con-
tains the detailed working papers.) It is interesting that the calculations on tree
growth were framed in terms of ‘merchantable timber’. Nobody should forget
the seminal work by A. H. Westing in this area, as in, for example, his edited col-
lections, Herbicides in War. The Long-term Ecological and Human Consequences,
Stockholm: SIPRI, 1984, and Environmental Hazards of War: Releasing
Dangerous Forces in an Industrialized World, London: Sage, 1990.
214 G E H
46. G. J. De Graaf and T. T. Xuan, ‘Extensive shrimp farming, mangrove clearance
and marine fisheries in the southern provinces of Vietnam’, Mangroves and Salt
Marshes 2, 1998, 159–68.
47. J. W. Readman, B. Oregioni, C. Cattini, J. P. Villeneuve, S. W. Fowler and L. D.
Mee, ‘Oil and combustion-product contamination of the Gulf marine environ-
ment following the war’, Nature 358, 1992, 662–5. There is a popular treatment
of the immediate effects on wildlife in M. McKinnon and P. Vine, Tides of War,
London: Boxtree, 1991.
48. See BBC News reports from various sources in the first half of 2005.
49. An immense literature was generated. See P. Ehrlich et al., ‘Long-term biological
consequences of nuclear war’, Science 222, 1983, 1293–1300; L. Dotto, Planet
Earth in Jeopardy. Environmental Consequences of Nuclear War, Chichester: Wiley,
1986. The leaders at the time were Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.
50. It was his farewell address to the nation before leaving the Presidency. The full
text is available on numerous websites.
51. The ‘official’ data from IUCN’s Red Books are available on www.iucnredlist.org,
and there is historical information from the Committee on Recently Extinct
Organisms on creo.amnh.org, and a splendid individual’s website www.extinct.
petermans.nl/extinct. All accessed in July 2006.
52. The literature is enormous and the general media attention being high, there are
many other sources of information from, for example, television and the Web.
There is everything from mysticism to mountainous government reports. If the
printed source is taken as more permanent, and something more than local
advocacy is required, then possible material includes: W. M. Adams, Future
Nature: a Vision for Conservation, London: Earthscan, 2003; idem, Against
Extinction: the Story of Conservation, London: Earthscan, 2004; B. Green,
Threatened Landscapes: Conserving Cultural Environments, London: Spon, 1991;
J. A. McNeely, Conservation and the Future: Trends and Options towards the year
2025, Gland: IUCN 1997; J. G. Nelson and R. Serafin (eds) National Parks and
Protected Areas: Keystones to Conservation and Sustainable Development, Berlin,
Springer 1997; P. Marren, Nature Conservation, London: Collins New Naturalist
91, 2002; J. A. Burton, The Atlas of Endangered Species, London: Apple, 2000;
R. W. Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks: a History, New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1997; M. W. Schwartz, Conservation in Highly
Fragmented Landscapes, London and New York: Chapman & Hall, 1997;
D. Ingram, Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema, Exeter:
University of Exeter Press, 2004.
53. The OED gives a first example from 1966.
54. J. van Andel and J. Aronson, Restoration Ecology, Oxford: Blackwell, 2005;
R. Ferris-Kaan (ed.) The Ecology of Woodland Creation, Chichester: Wiley, 1995;
P. Collen, ‘The reintroduction of beaver (Castor fiber L.) to Scotland: an oppor-
tunity to promote the development of suitable habitats’, Scottish Forestry 49,
1995, 206–16.
55. R. Constanza et al., ‘The value of the world’s ecosystem services and natural
capital’, Nature 387, 1997, 253–60.
56. Much of this material comes from a special issue of Industry and Environment
(Vol. 23, 2000), a UNEP publication.
57. Directives 2002/95/EC on the restriction of the use of certain hazardous sub-
stances in electrical and electronic equipment and 2002/96/EC on waste electri-
cal and electronic equipment.
58. M. O’Meara, Reinventing Cities for People and the Planet, Washington DC:
Worldwatch Paper #147, 1999.
 A - ? 215
59. C. Folke, A. Jansson, J. Larsson and R. Constanza, ‘Ecosystem appropriation by
cities’, Ambio 26, 1997, 167–72.
60. J. N. Pretty, A. S. Ball, T. Lang and J. I. L. Morison, ‘Farm costs and food miles:
an assessment of the full cost of the UK weekly food basket’, Food Policy 30, 2005,
1–19.
61. K. Warren-Rhodes and A. Koenig, ‘Escalating trends in the urban metabolism
of Hong Kong: 1971–1997’, Ambio 30, 2001, 429–38. This builds upon the pio-
neering paper of K. Newcombe, J. Kalma and A. Aston, ‘The metabolism of a
city: the case of Hong Kong’, Ambio 7, 1978, 3–15.
62. P. Hall, Cities in Civilization, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998 is a
rich source of information. The judgement about ‘environmental’ cities is mine,
not his.
63. A. Gupta and R. Ahmad, ‘Geomorphology and the urban tropics: building an
interface between research and usage’, Geomorphology 31, 1999, 133–49.
64. The world’s irrigated area grew at 2.3 per cent per year in the 1970s but dropped
back to 1.4 per cent in the 1990s. Most of the recent expansion has been in Asia,
with other continents being static or even declining a little. See L. Starke (ed.)
Vital Signs 1999–2000, London: Earthscan, 1999, 44–5.
65. P. E. O’Sullivan and C. S. Reynolds (eds) The Lakes Handbook, Oxford:
Blackwell, 2004–5, 2 vols.
66. There is also desalination, mostly confined to small islands such as Malta and to
nations with cheap energy supplies (such as Saudi Arabia); plans to tow icebergs
from Antarctica to, for example, Western Australia arise from time to time.
67. S. L. Postel, G. C. Daily and P. R. Ehrlich, ‘Human appropriation of renewable
fresh water’, Science 271, 1996, 785–8.
68. S. L. Postel, ‘Water for food production: will there be enough in 2025?’,
Bioscience 48, 1998, 629–37.
69. V. Smil, Global Ecology. Environmental Change and Social Flexibility, London and
New York: Routledge, 1993.
70. R. Avissar and Y. Liu, ‘Three-dimensional numerical study of shallow convective
clouds and precipitation induced by land surface forcing’, Journal of Geophysical
Research D 101, 1996, 7499–518.
71. C. J. Vörösmarty, P. Green, J. Salisbury and R. B. Lammers, Global water
resources: vulnerability from climate change and population growth’, Science
289, 2000, 284–88; C. J. Vörösmarty, ‘Global change, the water cycle, and our
search for Mauna Loa’, Hydrological Processes 16, 2002, 135–9.
72. Brazil, Russia, Canada, Indonesia, China and Colombia. Not all this is accessi-
ble as discussed in the preceding paragraphs.
73. V. Strang, The Meaning of Water, Oxford and New York: Berg, 2004.
74. As used in J. Blatter and H. Ingram (eds) Reflections on Water: New Approaches
to Transboundary Conflicts and Cooperation, London and Cambridge MA: MIT
Press, 2001.
75. B. Cohen, ‘Technological colonialism and the politics of water’, Cultural Studies
8, 1994, 32–55.
76. R. Niezen, Defending the Land: Sovereignty and Forest Life in James Bay Cree
Society, Boston MA: Allyn & Bacon, 1998.
77. D. Pauly et al., ‘Fisheries impact on ecosystems and biodiversity’, Nature 418,
2002, 689–95.
78. P. Lysten and O. Otterstad, ‘Social change, ecology and climate in 20th-century
Greenland’, Climate Change 47, 2000, 193–211.
79. R. L. Naylor et al., ‘Nature’s subsidies to shrimp and salmon farming’, Science
282, 1998, 883–4.
216 G E H
80. Data from International Federation for Animal Welfare accessed on 28 May 2005
at www.ifaw.org/ifaw/dfiles/file_106.pdf, a document of 2001. Iceland also
catches some whales and in 2005, South Korea wanted to join the outcasts. A
fraught meeting in 2006 reflected the buying of votes by Japan in the form of
development aid.
81. T. D. Jickells, R. Carpenter and P. S. Liss, ‘Marine environment’, in B. L. Turner
et al. (eds) The Earth as Transformed by Human Action, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990, 313–34.
82. R. H. Charlier, ‘Impact on the coastal environment of marine aggregate mining’,
International Journal of Environmental Studies 59, 2002, 297–322.
83. J. B. C. Jackson et al., ‘Historical overfishing and the recent collapse of coastal
ecosystems’, Science 293, 2001, 629–37; M. Barange, F. Werner, I. Perry and
M. Fogarty, ‘The tangled web: global fishing, global climate, and fish stock pop-
ulations’, Global Change Newsletter 56, 2003, 24–7.
84. Namely, India, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Mexico, Iran, Vietnam, Ethiopia
and Egypt. The Philippines and Costa Rica come close.
85. It is interesting (and indeed encouraging) that a ‘Commission on Sustainable
Consumption’ was chaired by a former minister in one of Britain’s more explic-
itly right-wing governments. J. Gummer (Chair) Oxford Commission on
Sustainable Consumption, November 2004. Available in 2005 on www.environ-
mentdaily.com/docs/41105b.doc
86. I. Bic̆ik, L. Jeleček and V. Štĕpánek, ‘Land use changes and their social
driving forces in Czechia in 19th and 20th centuries’, Land Use Policy 18, 2001,
65–73.
87. H. G. Wells, The World Set Free, London, Macmillan 1914; the energy value
prophecy may be as yet unfulfilled but note the following from the same book:
Certainly it seems now that nothing could have been more obvious to the
people of the earlier twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was
becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not see
it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands . . . All through the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries the amount of energy that men were able
to command was continually increasing. Applied to warfare that meant that
the power to inflict a blow, the power to destroy, was continually increasing.
There was no increase whatever in the ability to escape . . . Destruction was
becoming so facile that any little body of malcontents could use it . . . Before
the last war began it was a matter of common knowledge that a man could
carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half
a city.
88. R. Robertson, The Three Waves of Globalization, London and New York: Zed
Books, 2003.
89. G. Stanhill and S. Cohen, ‘Global dimming: a review of the evidence for a wide-
spread and significant reduction in global radiation with discussion of its
probable causes and possible agricultural effects’, Agricultural and Forest
Meteorology 107, 2001, 255–78; U. Lohmann and M. Wild, ‘Solar dimming’,
Global Change Newsletter 63, 2005, 21–2; D. I. Stern, ‘Reversal of the trend in
global anthropogenic sulfur emissions’, Global Environmental Change 16,
2006, 207–20.
90. D. Reynolds, ‘American globalism: mass, motion and the multiplier effect’, in
A. G. Hopkins (ed.) Globalization in World History, London: Pimlico, 2003,
243–60.
91. R. Robertson op. cit. 2003.
 A - ? 217
92. Seishi Yamaguchi (trans. Takashi Kodaira and A. H. Marks) The Essence of
Modern Haiku, Atlanta: Mangain Inc., 1993, 198.
93. There is an extended discussion of pros and cons in A. M. Mannion, Agriculture
and Environmental Change, Chichester: Wiley, 1995, ch. 10.
94. All this sounds suspicious to the low-income economies whose people would
like better material standards and who fear that emissions-trading, for example
(as laid out in the Kyoto process), will be like other forms of trade and disad-
vantage them. Talk of them bypassing the carbon economy in favour of some
later stage sounds to them very like us pulling up the ladder.
95. This quotation comes from a novel, Homo Faber, of 1957.
96. See J. Gold and G. F. Revill, Representing the Environment, London and New
York: Routledge, 2004.
97. Alas, too many to reproduce here. But all easily available on the Internet.
98. See http://doublenegative.tarasen.net/double_negative.html (accessed January
2006).
99. D. Matless and G. Revill, ‘A solo ecology: the erratic art of Andy Goldsworthy’,
Ecumene 2, 1995, 423–48.
100. Seen at http://www.thinker.org/fam/press/press.asp?presskey=171 in January
2006.
101. Quotation from P. Wollen, Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on Twentieth Century
Culture, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993, p. 158; see also C. Tisdall,
Joseph Beuys, London: Thames & Hudson, 1979. The End of the Twentieth
Century is in the Bayerische Staatsgemäldegalerien, Pinakothek der Moderne, in
Munich, Germany.
102. Warner Home Video SO11911, c.1993, in VHS format. (PG certificate); in DVD,
a region 1 disk ASIN B0007G1ZC, 2003.
103. D. W. Morris, ‘Earth’s peeling veneer of life’, Nature 373, 1995, 25.
104. S. Lavorel, ‘Global change, fire, society and the planet’, Global Change Newsletter
53, 2003, 2–6.
105. P. R. Samson and D. Pitt (eds) The Biosphere and Noosphere Reader: Global
Environment, Society and Change, London and New York: Routledge, 1999;
Vernadsky mostly published in Russian but a key paper, ‘The biosphere and the
noösphere’ appeared in American Scientist in 1945.
106. P. N. Stearns, Consumerism in World History. The Global Transformation of
Desire, London and New York: Routledge, 2001.
107. M. Albrow, The Global Age. State and Society beyond Modernity, Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1997.
108. R. E. Kasperson, J. X. Kasperson and K. Dow, ‘Global environmental risk and
society’, in J. X. Kasperson and R. E. Kasperson (eds) Global Environmental Risk,
Tokyo: UNU Press/London: Earthscan, 2001, 1–48.
 CHAPTER SIX

Emerging themes

F 6.1 Garden of the Ryoanji temple in Kyoto.

Photograph by I. G. Simmons.

The garden of the Ryoanji temple in Kyoto, Japan. A fire in the temple
grounds allowed the construction of this garden to begin in 1488
though, following Japanese practice, some parts have been rebuilt from
time to time within the 30 by 10 metre frame. Like most of the
medieval cathedrals of Europe, the actual designers are anonymous,
though the names of two labourers of the sensui kawaramono (‘river-
bank workers acting as gardeners’) class are found on the back of one
of the rocks.
In the Muromachi era (1338–1573) simplicity, honesty and under-
statement were prized in most types of design, including architecture.
This quality (wabi) was especially prevalent in Zen Buddhist establish-
ments where meditation was aided by concentration on the blanks as

218
 E  219
much as on any objects. Hence this strong horizontal design dominated
by raked sand. In the sand are fifteen ‘islands’ of rock, all of which except
one seem to be flowing from left to right which is, of course, against the
current of written Japanese, which is top to bottom, right to left. There
are no trees. There is a legend that no matter how often visitors count the
rocks they never find more than fourteen and that only enlightenment in
the Zen sense (satori, which is sudden, complete and non-analytical) can
produce the complete picture. As D. T. Suzuki puts it in his introduction
to Zen:

Satori is the sudden flashing into consciousness of a new truth hith-

erto undreamed of. It is a sort of mental catastrophe taking place all
at once, after much piling up of matters intellectual and demon-
strative. The piling has reached a limit of stability and the whole
edifice has come tumbling to the ground, when, behold, a new
heaven is open to full survey.

Writing a long-term environmental history is like looking for the fif-

teenth rock: no matter how many other rocks are inspected and thought
about, there is always one which has the capacity to make sense of all the
others. But for most of us satori is difficult if not impossible and in any
case neither approved of nor easily transmissible in the western post-
Enlightenment traditions of scholarship. Never mind: there is another
Zen story in which a novice meets the famous abbot of another
monastery on the forest path. They bow and the novice tremblingly
asked the abbot where true Buddha-nature is to be found. ‘Walk on, walk
on,’ said the abbot.

I  -

One of the buzzwords of recent times has been ‘closure’. In history-writing it
might well be desirable that some level of cut-off horizon has been reached.
Yet quite obviously we are leaving this story in mid-flow and there is no indi-
cation that the year 2000 marked any special stage in the entwined histories of
humanity and nature. There is, then, no Conclusion.
Nevertheless there are certain emerging ideas and themes that come out of
the previous chapters, some of which relate right back to material introduced
in chapter 1. There are a few recurring motifs in different sections and there
are some synergies for which there is no obvious place in the chronological
structure, all of which deserve some comment, though it is impossible to con-
struct a logical sequence. This, too, is the place to start the hares of ‘why’
neatly summarised by Kurt Vonnegut (Cat’s Cradle, New York: Dell, 1981,
section 81):
220 G E H
Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder, ‘Why, why, why?’

Tiger got to sleep,

Bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.

But also to abandon this chase in favour of those with greater stamina.

U  

John McNeill has argued convincingly that the twentieth century was qualita-
tively different from preceding periods and, in the empirical ‘progression’ of
change, the case is well made.1 The emphasis here is on ideas and other non-
material aspects of the complexities that are so difficult to convey in sentences
where one word has to follow ineluctably after the other. Some of the novelties
are intensifications of what went before (the environmental changes resulting
from positive feedbacks within capitalism might be one example) and so any
persistent themes which might, for example, be carried through from hunter-
gatherer ecosystems need to be brought out. Equally, any late twentieth-
century synergies or recent exacerbations of extant processes, that have
environmental consequences, need to be examined. We need to look carefully
at the sort of tempting simplicity that, between 1500 and 1800, the drivers of
environmental change were gold, faith and empire and that, after 1900, these
were replaced by meat and motors, with a century’s transition between.

Minding our language

The post-structuralist movement has emphasised the slipperiness of language.
The wide use of words such as ‘nature’ or the way in which ‘environment’ has
been applied to anything which surrounds, as in, say, ‘retail environment’, are
casual examples, and the attempts to use a workable but bounded language in
this book have not always lived up to the aims. They should alert us to even
simple instances of where meanings may not be the same for everybody, even
users of the same language. Much use of language is metaphorical and con-
structs a model of reality the accuracy of which is difficult to judge.2 The
propositions of the natural sciences have been founded on metaphors such as
the atom as miniature solar system, ‘wormholes’, ‘selfish’ DNA, and ‘elegant’
equations; Dennett goes so far as to describe human consciousness overall as
a war of competing metaphors. Our framing of the world and the language we
use to formulate and test hypotheses, develop tools, and process memory
are all affected by metaphor, especially when we try to cross domain bound-
aries, like associating an idea with something tangible.3 The complexities
of the technological world of the late twentieth century placed great
 E  221
demands on language. Marshall McLuhan (1911–80) was a prophet of the
electronic age whose acknowledged main source was James Joyce’s interweav-
ing of dream, hallucination and multilingual pun in Finnegans Wake. Joyce
(1882–1941) claimed to be a music-maker and a great engineer of heaps
of other things, including intellectual–emotional complexes of the type
encountered in many human–environment interactions, which he called
‘feelful thinkamalinks’.4
The focus of all kinds of people upon ‘environment’ is another source of lan-
guage that carries all kinds of resonances. Some of these are so directed to
achieving a practical end that the term ‘rhetoric’ is often applied, emphasising
the persuasive intent. In a negative usage, consider the expansion of towns. In
Britain in the interwar period, a threat to the essentially rural image of the
nation (especially England) was highlighted by a number of influential writers
and artists. Much of this was, by today’s standards, unplanned and wasteful of
land, expensive to service and consumptive of agricultural land or open space
but its extent was not very great. Yet it attracted the phrase ‘urban sprawl’
which has ever since been aired by any objectors to urban growth beyond some
pre-existing boundary, even though such limits were carefully monitored after
the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act. Many a map of proposed develop-
ments has appeared in neutral colours, only to be transformed by detractors’
presentations into something less attractive, such as dark grey or a vicious red.
A positive example is the use of the word ‘wilderness’. In the English-speaking
context of North America, this was codified in the 1960s to mean landscapes
without enduring human presence and, moreover, land which had not been
subject to human-induced modifications in the past. Hence, large areas of
National Forests, Bureau of Land Management (BLM) tracts and National Parks
were subject to designation as wilderness areas and that became the highest cat-
egory to which protection laws might apply. The cachet was so strong that the
term began to creep into other places, even those where the criteria of absolute
size, lack of human impact now and in the past, and inviolable remoteness could
not possibly apply: the Ardnamurchan peninsula in western Scotland might be
wild but it has none of the other features. The remote (by English standards),
bleak and mostly nineteenth-century industrial landscape of the North
Pennines sometimes attracts the designation of ‘the last wilderness’. In all these
cases, environmental history was rarely taken into account: in the United States
the effects of native North Americans was notably ignored. Then, because
‘wilderness’ had such positive connotations, it was filtered into other terrain sit-
uations, so that people weekending in a busy caravan park in New Hampshire
would agree that they were enjoying a ‘wilderness experience’. Shifts of this type
in experience and language carry the possibility that objects and practices can
be assimilated into a culture to the point that a technology or an attitude may
be so central as not to attract any opprobrium: it is too wonderful for that and
deserves attention and respect rather than critical appraisal. Until the 1970s
perhaps, ‘globalisation’ floating on a sea of cheap oil was an example.5
222 G E H
One trap for many non-academic commentators is hidden disparagement.
Hunter-gatherers ‘camp’, for instance, as if their overnight or seasonal shelters
and settlements were not embedded in centuries of adaptive cultural practices
and aimed, probably, at maximising foraging returns. Similarly, the use of
‘nomad’ in the context of pastoralism very often implies a sort of random
wandering rather than a historically winnowed movement through a set of
resources aligned to the terrain and its seasons. In both, the implication is that
low levels of material possessions are somehow indicative of a primitive state
beyond which we in the industrial economies, thankfully, have progressed.
These are examples of meaning-shift within a language. The whole aca-
demic discussion of environment, nature and history is so dominated by
English-language media that it is easy to forget that its discourses are also
carried on in other tongues and scripts. Not only is there analytical commen-
tary but everyday documentation and discussion, in schools and offices, by the
well and in the tavern. In Japanese, for example, the intellectual tradition of
Buddhism allows for the concept of fūdosei: a relationship which partakes of
both the ecological character and the symbolic cultural meaning of a place or
environment.6 ‘Nature’ in Chinese and Japanese is therefore less of an object
in relation to humans (as used throughout this book) but an integral part of
a whole: ‘not man apart’, as the American poet, Robinson Jeffers, put it. The
word for nature in Chinese is shi-zen; and in Japanese, tzu-jan, both of which
are literally something like ‘self-thusness’. The idea that it is good to have a
human-free environment is not therefore a native East Asian one: it is all one
consciousness, so to speak.7 Closer to European experience is the way in which
a language-bound phrase can evoke resonances. In interwar Germany, the
Nazi party came to espouse certain racial myths which had environmental
consequences in terms of the glorification of the outdoors and the status of
farmers and foresters. So Blud und Boden (‘blood and soil’) was worked into
fascism. Because it was on the surface an environmentally friendly set of pol-
icies, occasional commentaries have subsequently accused late twentieth-
century environmental advocacy of fascism, which is something of a
substitute for rational argument.8 All these examples point towards the rele-
vance of the linguistics scholar, Benjamin Whorf (1897–1941), in his judge-
ment that ‘language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a
defining framework for it’. It can therefore stultify by enshrining a outdated
world view in print. By contrast, language has the great advantage that it is
self-analytical and self-critical. It is inventive whenever new experiences
demand new words, and it allows us to move back and forth in (imagined)
time. No marvel that T. S. Eliot mused upon ‘. . . the intolerable wrestle/With
words and meanings’.9

Postmodernity and environment

The late twentieth century was marked by the appearance in intellectual
circles of the cultural movement which became labelled as ‘postmodernism’
 E  223
or ‘post-modernism’. Postmodernity does not believe in grand narratives,
meaning that people have stopped talking to themselves about the contents of
the supposedly universal stories and paradigms such as religion, conventional
philosophy, capitalism, gender, and the natural sciences, that have defined the
stories about culture and behaviour in the past. Instead, they have begun to
organise their cultural life around a variety of more local and subcultural ide-
ologies, myths and narratives. Spatial and temporal scales assume a revised
importance. Acceptance of postmodernism implies the view that different
realms of discourse are incommensurable and incapable of judging the results
of other treatments.10 This may mean that the fragmentation of ideas sepa-
rates stakeholders from shareholders so that transnational corporations
(TNCs) outrank nation states in their influence and control over the environ-
ment and its resources. The ideological basis for a ‘physical siege’ of the non-
human world is the encouragement by postmodernism of any number of
attitudes towards it. These shelter under the umbrella of ‘nature limits, tech-
nology enables’ in which nature is seen as a mindless force demanding to be
tamed. Any respect is a matter of convention or convenience (or, indeed, fear)
and there is no distinct ontology of the natural world. Without the findings of
the natural sciences, hence, there would be no stopping large corporations
eviscerating the world’s ecosystems for resources. The social setting may see
technology simply as liberation from a pre-industrial societal aspic and ignore
the fact that it may provide a lot of solutions for which there is no problem,
such as space travel. More importantly, once more, it cuts a ‘problem’ from its
tangle of multiple connections with other realities (no resonances across
organ pipes) and the world becomes more like a collection of fragments. To
some, the postmodern age in its multiplicity of sympathies offers more
wisdom but its setting makes acting on that wisdom more difficult; to others
it is simply a not-very-well-disguised form of nihilism.11

The ecology of emotion

Not all attitudes and reactions to environment consist of considered words.
Many sights and pieces of knowledge provoke simpler responses like awe, fear
and pleasure. In any Sunday supplement’s travel section, writers will more than
once use the term ‘stunning’ of landscape though it is unlikely that they mean
it. It does, though, highlight that emotional reactions are likely in individuals
(recall the way to ‘sublime’ in the eighteenth century) but to communicate
them requires words. So the view from the mountain-top may call down
silence but saying why it is so to a companion requires words: observe people
in an art gallery, where most of them are bursting to tell somebody else what
they feel about an exhibit. Likewise with environmental ethics: many people
will feel that something is wrong but lack the language to persuade others.
Emotion is difficult to discuss in relation to environment for that very
reason: words may be some distance from the original state. But that it pro-
vokes action is scarcely in doubt. The campaigns against animal cruelty in the
224 G E H
nineteenth and twentieth centuries were scarcely started after a cool assess-
ment of the philosophical position of cattle in the cosmos or even the cultural
significance of bears in Hokkaido. Instead, a few like-minded people pooled
their emotional reactions and began to act. The extreme case has been the
campaign against the use of laboratory animals, which has allowed some of its
adherents to inflict a great deal of pain and danger on the humans running
such facilities.12 These are examples of a wider scene: that, while abstractions
like ecology or economics portray humans as cold and rational, most humans
and their institutions live in a world of feelings and moods. Unless there is
some emotional response, it is difficult to recognise a stimulus at all. That is
not to say that emotion is a raw neurophysiological matter because feelings are
also constructed cognitively, which is a way of saying that cultural traditions
inform emotional reactions and states: mountains elate some people and
frighten others. Some individuals react negatively to all snakes whereas others
have learnt which ones are poisonous: emotions are clearly not universal and
ethnic differences will never be irrelevant.13
Rationality cannot be discounted, however, and it is fair to conclude that
most humans are both rational and emotional in their responses to their sur-
roundings. A totally self-referential system of being without any relation to the
values outside it (the aim of much neoclassical economics) is as far from being
functional in the world as an emotionally driven condition which elevates
wants to needs and luxuries to necessities; numerous examples with environ-
mental relevance have been seen in chapters 3, 4 and 5. Further, a concentra-
tion on rationality may produce logical principles that do not lead to action,
which requires commitment and motivation.14 In Capital (vol. I, 1867) Marx
thought that a possession like a suit was a social hieroglyphic and perhaps the
late twentieth century saw some movement towards seeing ‘possessions’ in
terms of being social-environmental hieroglyphics. Examples might be the
increasing practice of accompanying flying with planting trees, or the signing
of restaurant food with its local sourcing, and less packaging. The growth of
the movement to ‘re-use, repair and recycle’ in the high-income economies
from the 1970s merits more attention as an idea and in terms of its empirical
effects, though the latter has been an everyday matter in poorer countries.15
Emotional attachment is not evenly distributed through our environment
and E. O. Wilson famously argued 16 that humans had a predilection for an
affiliation with other species, which he called biophilia. In its historical setting,
it points out that humans have come to love and to fear things which our ances-
tors could not have known so that there is at the very least a learned component
to it. This leads to the need to investigate the social settings of emotions
because our attitudes to environment may well derive from social considera-
tions just as much as some quasi-innate reaction to water, spiders or moun-
tains. If, therefore, we learn about the world via interest in it then emotions
have a part to play in that process: the separation of thought and feeling so
implanted by the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and after is
 E  225
no longer valid. What we learn depends upon the quantity and quality of our
personal engagement with it. In historical terms hunter-gatherer children have
plentiful contact with soils, plants and animals whereas the child from a run-
down urban neighbourhood lives in a setting of concrete, brick, abandoned
cars and rats. In the PIE urban economy, most knowledge of nature is likely to
come via the television set unless the formal educational process provides other
alternatives. (Lest we romanticise the rural, many western farms are rather
industrial in their ways with noise and smell, especially those devoted to inten-
sive animal production.) So the historical lesson is one of progressive separa-
tion of humans and their environments as they withdraw into cities and
industrialised locations which are larger and more completely built up. Nature
is not absent from such places (there is still weather, birds learn to adapt, and
there are animal scavengers of some kind) but it is a selection which appears
most of the time to be mediated by the human-constructed structures.17
There is a last historical perspective, in which emotions (in the range in
which we currently know them) are pre-social. They are said to be central to
the evolution of consciousness and thus an integral part of the being of the
species.18 They are, therefore, not immutable and they can, as mentioned
above, be learned. Thus, there may be an emotional content to any changes in
consciousness that came along with, for example, the shift from foraging
economies and the development of agriculture. Historically, we need not
expect that emotional responses to the environment will be the same from one
era to the next: those developed from hybrid experiences of visual electronics
and occasional visits to tropical beaches will be different from those of the
Innuit in the 1920s. Also, while actors and networks are involved in theories
of hybrid artifice and artefact construction, emotion is never far from the
surface of the page.19 The question of immediacy is also relevant for, while
medical ethics became formalised in many countries after 1950, no such
binding developments took place for planetary ethics.20
Much of this comes together in the fields of aesthetics which bear on the
human surroundings. While pictures may give us a new way of looking, or
sensitise us to something not hitherto perceived, they may also reinforce the
propriety of the conventional. So, a representation of nature may, in fact, be a
self-contained formal system (analogous to a still life) as well as a statement
about nature in general in either its own terms or those of a particular culture.
Emotional responses to nature itself are usually conceptual rather than causal
or sequential and, anecdotally, seem often to be beyond representation. Kant
thought that nature was so vast as to exceed any human framing and so it pro-
duced awe. That, of course, was then and it would be interesting to interpret
300 years of the arts in terms of the success of ‘framing’.21
In the dialectic with rationality, a radical position sees that rationality itself
is a feeling and is emotionally constituted. This would contradict any divergence
between rationality and emotion. Hence it works against any of the socially
constituted myths which protect particular interests and ideologies: consider
226 G E H
environmental controversies of the PIE period in which the defenders of the
status quo were accused of being ‘emotional’. Few venture capitalists and devel-
opers would agree with David Hume’s pronouncement of 1739 that ‘reason is,
and ought always to be, the slave of the passions’.22

Religion
Religions believe that the cosmos and especially life are subject to transcen-
dental power. Everything can then be situated within that framework, in con-
trast to post-Enlightenment secularism which sees religion as one facet of
culture like sport or marriage customs and especially prone to myth-making.
Religions have mostly had an attitude to nature, though it is unusually risky
to assign them to historical eras because they show considerable spatial and
temporal variation. Western Christianity’s approval of technology was by no
means universal in other faiths.23
As the discussion of hunter-gatherers in chapter 2 showed, there was a close
relationship with non-material beings, whose transcendence was important
and had to be heeded. Any aspect of the world could manifest a presence that
might be helpful (in the hunt, for example) or might be an object of fear and
avoidance.24 The world of the non-material might be accessed via an interme-
diary like a shaman, and the continuity with the past was stressed by the idea
of an annual cosmogenesis. A kind of pantheism was also present in the agri-
culture-based societies of the Classical Mediterranean but this economy was
the one in which adherence to a narrower interpretation of the world became
important, though we cannot prove that it was causal. In the Middle East,
hence, the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Islam and Christianity became
established, with their basis of a God who was extra-terrestrial. Their message
was enshrined in written form and espoused a doctrine that overrode specific
environmental and cultural attachments.25 Further east, the multiplicity of
gods characterised by Hindu religion survived the shift to the worship of the
Buddha and the centrality of his writings in a sacred canon.26 The same is very
roughly true in China and Japan in their adoption of Buddhism and in Japan
of the polytheistic Shinto. Confucian practice, however, was Earth-bound even
if the father figure was all-important. In the breakdown of Marxism as a system
of belief in central Asia, strong indigenous religious beliefs have emerged as
environmentally tender in character compared with those of the Han Chinese
and the Russians. The latter introduced fodder crops and heavy machinery that
reduced the need for flock movement and so 38 per cent of the pastures of
Inner Mongolia are classified as ‘degraded’. This is a term which includes locust
invasions as well as the spread of poisonous plants like Oxytropis glabra which
causes abdominal distension and blindness in domesticated stock. In Tuva and
Mongolia, collective institutions with a communist flavour have, however,
continued to support movement among pastoralists.27
The coming of industrialisation cannot be said to have caused religious
shifts in a direct sense. In Europe, the effects of the Reformation and the
 E  227
Enlightenment preceded widespread use of fossil fuels and were more import-
ant within Christianity than burning coal. The successes of science and tech-
nology, however, together with the separation of fact and value made space for
systems of belief which, though denying sacredness and transcendence, took
on some characteristics of the preceding religions.28 Marxism, for example,
had its sacred texts and its saints and the ‘conquest of nature’ world view which
some interpreters have assigned to Christianity as well; both agree on human
exceptionalism.29 The post-industrial outlook of the late twentieth century
engendered a number of reappraisals of what was described as a ‘disen-
chanted’ world. Attempts to reconnect all things in a holistic fashion almost
inevitably resulted in religious interpretations of Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis
(see p. 15); other developments have included neo-paganism and ritualistic
Green lifestyles. In the mainstream, the World Wide Fund for Nature started
gatherings of world faith leaders in 1986 with the intent of declaring a
common ground on environmental matters, and leaders of organised groups
such as the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches, pronounce from time to
time, without noticeable effect. Some Christians even endorse environmen-
tal degradation as likely to accelerate the final Armageddon which will
precede the Second Coming. Given the tenor of postmodern times, religions
appeal largely to signed-up segments and lack the universalism possible in
pre-industrial centuries even given the slower communications of those times.
Optimists may hope that the intentional and affective (that is, emotional)
effects of a supernatural agency might allow or even ensure that humans
monitor and accommodate themselves to nature’s limits if they expect the
species to avoid extinction.30 (There is among the secular a faith that,
somehow, the processes of organic evolution in the form of species extinction
do not apply to us, just as many religious people assume that the future of
humanity is out of their hands.)
In some eras, religion could certainly cast a protective ring around non-
human entities. Certain animals might not be eaten (the pig and the cow are
the most obvious examples) and sacred groves retained their tree cover in
periods of intensive agriculture in Greece and India, among many other
places.3 In general, such protection declined with the onset of industrialisa-
tion; whether it is possible (even if desirable) to ‘re-enchant’ the world, a sug-
gestion of the late twentieth century, is yet to be seen.32 The desire to follow
Kierkegaard’s road of a ‘gigantic passion to commit to the absurd’ seems
limited; even the more limited syncretic ideal of a spirit of compassion that
‘extends to the ends of the earth’ has a ring of the past and not the future.33

Myth, symbol, value

If we think of myth as a condensed and often poetic statement about what is
taken to be unquestionably true in a given time and place, its role in environ-
mental thinking and attitudes cannot be ignored. There are various ways in
which the myths can be exhibited in symbolic form, sometimes as public
228 G E H
ritual. In hunter-gatherers’ societies there are obvious connections with the
land; propitiation rituals to ensure future food supplies, for example, are
common. In many pre-industrial agricultural groups, there are fertility rituals
which express the hope of securing future food or water. Worship of images
of the corn goddess Demeter in the Classical world is just one sample, trans-
muted into the blessing of the plough in medieval Europe and partially
reclaimed in the shape of the corn dolly. It is difficult to see the carvings of the
‘Green Man’ in many European churches without concluding that fertility is
in some way involved. In industrial times, symbols and myths of power are
everywhere. Missionaries in India claimed (in 1862) that rail travel at 30 miles
an hour was fatal to the slow deities of paganism.34 Later, the developing
symbols of this era all have environmental connections: the tractor, the aero-
plane, clean water, pharmaceuticals, television and above all the private
vehicle and tarmacked roads are replete with consequences for nature.
Perhaps the greatest of all such symbols is the consumption of meat. The
acquisition of hamburger outlets marks the emergence of a country into the
‘modern’ world (for example, in Russia and China). Meat consumption is
divorced from nutrition just as the production of meat is separated from the
animal behind the walls of the abbatoir, the packaging plant and the super-
market cabinet. Disguise became important so that some children have no
idea of the origin of chicken nuggets or fish fingers.35 From the 1960s, the cen-
trality of meat came under questioning, ostensibly on health grounds so that
new products with a lower fat content came to market, such as venison, ostrich
and kangaroo. Some forms of symbolic behaviour persist: the attraction of
hunting and fishing for men is important in many countries even where it is
ritualised into a kind of drinking contest. It is more likely, though, to be a
class-based hangover from the arrogation of sport to an aristocracy than a
wired-in piece of Palaeolithic action.
Because the economies of the industrialised world are so dominant,
attempts to uncover an overriding mythological narrative for most of post-
hunter-gatherer time have been made. The most popular of these is to see
many devices, such as the garden, the development of science and the ability
to oust pests as attempts to regain the Garden of Eden. If only humans had
enough knowledge, they seem to say, they could regain that prelapsarian state,
not least by retelling the story in a less patriarchal way so that there emerges a
true partnership between humans and the cosmos.36 It is a nice thought
and some environments from time to time typify it: islands are an obvious
example, from the eighteenth century on to the marketing of the Caribbean
and Indian Ocean islands in the twentieth century; gardens have followed a
similar trajectory.37 The images of agriculture as a profound departure have
also spawned attempts at long-term mythologies. The cognate nature of
‘culture’ and ‘agriculture’ is central: the primary material theme that emerges
from Roman times onwards is that of the conversion of the savage woods (sil-
vestris) to gardens and cultivation (cultura); the recent inheritor is the Rome
 E  229
Plow (much used in the Vietnam War) which is a bulldozer with a sharp
blade.38 Later developments have also created mythological narratives in the
sense that they are often unexamined: the way in which Malthusian ideas are
implicit in, for example, the discourse of ‘spaceship earth’ is one such.39 In this
context, the natural sciences continue to be important because they are always
questioning myths rather than enforcing them in the way that neo-liberal eco-
nomics, for instance, promotes the myths of a technology-based cornucopia.
In terms of value, there seems little question that humans have moved from
a state in which they and their environmental companions had something
approaching an equal value to one in which humans are top of the pyramid
and the only objects of moral concern. It was perhaps a sign of change that, in
the late twentieth century, there was a flurry of environmental philosophy and
ethics which advocated the extension of moral concern to non-humans at a
legally enforceable level rather than simply the joining of voluntary organisa-
tions.40 But swimming against the tide is scarcely sufficient an image for that
outlook: more like standing in the middle of a riverbed undergoing a
Mediterranean flash flood from a deforested watershed.

Parts and wholes

When writing and talking about humanity and nature, the usual way of using
words is to classify and to formulate smaller units of discourse. The ways of
the natural sciences have influenced almost everybody who ventures into the
field and they are powerfully aligned to breaking down the world into smaller
units the better to be able to model it: hence the popularity of boxes in a flow
chart and the relevance of the imagery of organ pipes (pp. 1–2). This mode
fits neatly on to a cultural history in which there has been a millennium-aged
tendency to categorise phenomena and behaviour into binary pairs. In spite
of any evidence to the contrary concerning intermediates, western thought
has insisted on delineating male versus female, good versus evil, human and
the Other, mind and body and in this context especially, nature and culture.
These are often seen as separate entities despite it now being obvious that
nature has influenced culture (even when people have preferred not to admit
it) just as culture has brought nature within its thrall in many ways. The two
are clearly intertwined like the model of DNA’s double helix, with the base
pairs transferring the effects of both on to the development of the other. The
tendency to form binary opposites is evident in this book, where oftentimes
the two strands are afforded separate paragraphs and where the two themes of
coalescence and fragmentation are juxtaposed. In this type of Zeitgeist, the
advent of the digital computer with only two states (1/0) was bound to find an
easy reception. There, the two are equal but, in most binary pairs, there is a
dominant member with a subservient Other.
An enduring interest in this kind of thinking is also manifest. In western
thought the notion of there being a perpetual and never-to-be-resolved strug-
gle between good and evil came out of early Zoroastrianism and seems to have
230 G E H
been lodged (not without opposition) in our thinking ever since: politicians
routinely assert that if you are not with us totally then you are against us. The
phrase ‘the conquest of nature’ arose in the nineteenth century and has cer-
tainly not fallen into disuse. Even in the present phase of concern over global
climatic change, the effects of nature can be read about as somehow an inde-
pendent malignity to be overcome rather than avoided by changing ourselves,
rather like a heavy smoker complaining that his lung cancer was directly
caused by the chief executive of the cigarette company. Nevertheless, the
urbanisation of populations makes them unaware that food, for example, has
to be produced somewhere and in an ecological and social setting. Into that
gap, it is easy to promote such developments as GM crops without sparking a
general awareness of the consequences41 or to excoriate ‘food miles’ without
looking at the total embedded energy of the product.
The attractiveness of different ways of thought is not surprising. In Asia,
expressions of total unity in, and relatedness among, the whole of the universe
are not rare. They may take the form of everything having a sacredness that
needs to be acknowledged, as when Japanese shinto practice invests every-
thing including the lavatory with kami or gods; of saying that all will be well
if humans simply follow the ways of the universe as water finds its way down
the hill (found especially in the Tao Te Ching) or in models like the Jewel Net
of Indra where a net cast over the universe has faceted jewels in every inter-
section which in turn reflect every other jewel. There is nothing that resem-
bles the A→→B causation with which we are so familiar, coming from an
analytic tradition that demands separate and preferably quantifiable entities.
Some of this type of thinking came into the west in the nineteenth century
with the translations of Asian texts, some more with the ‘alternative thinking’
that swept California in the 1960s and 1970s. It is perhaps there as a seed in
the ground, full of potential but awaiting the right conditions for germination.
In the west, the term holism was coined by Jan Smuts (1870–1950) in the early
twentieth century, and the ideas taken up by Arthur Tansley (1871–1955) in
his development of the conception of the ecosystem. Indeed, in the last 100
years, more holistic thinking has come through the channel of the discipline
of ecology than from any other source. Inevitably, some of the scientific dis-
cipline of that thinking has got lost in the attempts to adapt it to a social and
political movement, but better that way round than have it ignored: it is easier
to trim a beard than to produce hair follicles.
The culmination to date of holistic thinking has been J. R. Lovelock’s Gaia
hypothesis, part of which was outlined in chapter 1 (p. 15). In a reversal of
conventional thinking, Lovelock has argued that life has created many of the
conditions on Earth, not that life has simply adapted to the physics and
chemistry of a cooling planet. The composition of the atmosphere and the
chemical make-up of the oceans would, he has said, be very different if there
had been no life on Earth. Ways in which human consciousness can evolve
may start to reduce the gap between Darwinian thought and the idea of
 E  231
purpose for a whole system such as the Earth. In some ways, holistic think-
ing has been enforced by global climate models (GCMs), with their empha-
sis on complex and at-a-distance feedback loops and by the way in which the
emitters of carbon compounds contribute to a global homogeneity which
affects us all.
There have, of course, been social studies which attempt a comprehensive
view. The most famous of these is the extension of Malthusian ideas into the
whole people–environment relationship and its transformation into a series
of computer models. Taking existing types of relationship and projecting
them forward produced the notion of ‘The Limits to Growth’. The key
element was the nature of exponential growth and the dislocations that it
would produce, especially in resource availability. The social scientists and
economists involved with the topic were especially unhappy and their refuta-
tions of the mostly pessimistic ‘Limits’ publications continued with the work
of Lomborg which attracted much attention in the early twenty-first century.
The ‘Limits’ ideas were re-cast in the ideas of an environmental ‘Kuznets
Curve’. Its basis was that the economic growth of the conventional kind in fact
reduced the demand for resources as technology became more efficient and
also, therefore, produced less pollution. Evaluation of this viewpoint has later
suggested that it may be limited to a few special cases and that the positional
goods effect is still enhancing demand for resources. It does not seem to apply
to, for example, the profligate use of oil by the United States.42 Emerging from
all this debate in the later twentieth century came the label of ‘sustainability’.
Its origin seems to have been biological, in the shape of the J-curve of a biotic
population which levels off after a period of exponential growth. Since its early
appearances, the term has become rather like ‘ecology’ in the 1960s: a hurrah-
word with meanings so elastic as to hold up nothing. It is, however, firmly
entrenched in the rhetoric of environmental management and of develop-
ment. It also became tied in with the notion of resilience. This is a difficult
ecological concept in a world characterised by non-equilibrium states but
hinges around the amount of change which a socio-ecological system can
undergo while still retaining its ecological functions and feed-back mecha-
nisms. An adaptive capacity is obviously part of this set of ideas. The spatial
aspects of it need an acknowledgement that any local sustainabilities must not
rely on a heavy ecological footprint elsewhere.43 In a general sense, climatol-
ogy seems to have revived a basic environmental determinism, just as its neo-
Malthusian form was declining.
The practicality of ‘sustainability’ was paralleled by a more mystical view of
humanity as being on the verge of a mass transition of consciousness to a
different kind of world. Its foundations were in part the Gaia hypothesis and
its less scientific interpreters but also the popular versions of particle physics
in which reality depended upon the questions that were asked. This indeter-
minacy led to ideas about enfolded reality, systems views, autopoietic systems
and wholeness which, with a shot of Californian-style Zen, demanded a move
232 G E H
onwards from neo-liberal economics, Newtonian tramways and Cartesian
duality into the experience of sitting on the beach and feeling a total unity with
the light and the waves. There were times in the 1960s and 1970s when it felt
that the west at least was burgeoning with something new and different which
had not yet been born but which was just on the edge of coming into being,
rather like some of the slow movements of Mozart piano concertos or some
of his opera ensembles. The isomeric and opposite trends to individuation
and fragmentation seem not to have been noticed and these at the moment at
least appear to have become dominant.44 The individual line of particulate
powder seems to be a more accurate symbol than the shared spliff; John Cage
continues the fragmentation of Webern and Schoenberg noticed in chapter 4.
In a different sort of language, Isaiah Berlin reminded us that Utopias were
generally achieved only be trampling on somebody else and that a kind of
equilibrium, necessarily unstable, was likely to prevent mutual destruction;
his context was political but it may have a far wider resonance.45 As Brecht said
[Einverstandnis (Agreement)],46

. . . it takes a lot of things to change the world:

Anger and tenacity. Science and indignation . . .
The understanding of the particular case and the understanding of the
ensemble:
Only the lessons of reality can teach us to transform reality.

One of the lessons seems to be that the ground for agreement and the avoid-
ance of conflict is normally very limited.

Unpredictable woods and pastures

The poet John Milton (1608–74) was a Puritan and so seems an unlikely
author of the lines:47

Chaos umpire sits

And by decision more embroils the fray
By which he reigns; next him high arbiter
Chance governs all.

But many a process has unpredictable outcomes, even where modern science
is involved. In fact, the natural sciences have developed ways of talking about
non-equilibrium states and the ways in which a sensitive dependence upon
initial conditions might produce trajectories whose differences grew expo-
nentially through time. Even the most simple models of population change in
‘natural’ ecosystems show a variety of behaviours that might include a simple
return to equilibrium but also cycles, cycles upon cycles, and totally irregular
courses. Spatially, these would present themselves as mosaics which exhibited
chance and could be partially described by the tools of chaos theory whose
 E  233
popular image was the butterfly effect, in which a butterfly’s fluttering in
Tokyo results in a storm in New York. This shows some of the gaps in scien-
tific theory and praxis which give rise to predictabilities being overshadowed
by the contingencies of detail in a world which humans have made both mate-
rially and symbolically. There is, too, the idea of emergent qualities: that a
whole can show properties which are not predictable from the component
parts. Those of water, it is argued, cannot be forecast from those of hydrogen
and oxygen. Much of the thinking along these lines came together in the work
of the chemist Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003), a Nobel laureate, who constructed
the idea of self-organising systems. These of necessity were structures which
dissipated energy and thus created entropy but in their lifetimes also created
complexity. Living organisms were possible examples, though the existence of
a genetic blueprint argues against such a label. Ecosystems, on the other hand,
or the Gaia hypothesis, fit the concept quite well. Purely social systems sit less
well, except that they can be so complex that ‘self-organising’ with all its con-
notations of apparently random behaviour as well as foreseeable trends (con-
sider global capitalism as an instance) is an applicable term. Management of
self-organising systems (the word ‘autopoiesis’ – self-creating – is sometimes
used) begins with minimising entropy and preserving diversity.48
No body of theory has yet managed to produce and order historical data
from this restless world, and this was true of many historic sciences, such as
palaeontology and evolutionary biology, until the late twentieth century when
compared with ahistoric fields such as physics, chemistry and molecular
biology. Thus, notions such as ‘balance’ and ‘sustainability’ need very keen
scrutiny.49

‘The balance of nature’

In either an implicit or a direct form, this phrase appears in from the seven-
teenth century onwards European languages. It sits upon a history of think-
ing that encompasses ‘nature’ as a state to be imitated as a basis for human life.
Many human actions upset the balance and, in the words of its Chinese equiv-
alent, ‘lose the mandate of heaven’. In contrast, the lessons from science about
the last million or so years (and, indeed, beyond them) is that equilibrium is
not a normal state. Climatic change, to begin with, imposes all kinds of change
upon non-human organisms and ecosystems in which the adjustment of ter-
restrial biomes to a low-ice planet is still taking place and which has gone on
throughout the Holocene, not always at a steady pace. The biological adapta-
tion has proceeded upon an ecological timescale in which, for example,
tundra was replaced by birch scrub and then by mixed deciduous forest, or in
which woodland climbed up mountainsides, or in which deep deserts like the
Sahara had a moist and green phase in the mid-Holocene. This temporal
change has been accompanied by an evolutionary timescale in which species
have undergone the kinds of adaptation that Darwin and his followers have
made a foundation of our worldview. The Holocene has not been regarded as
234 G E H
a major period for speciation except in very isolated environments such as
islands well separated from other land masses or where humans have created
the conditions for hybridisation.50 Speciation has, until recently, been based
entirely upon measurement of anatomical characteristics but, now that direct
observation of genetic material is possible, any evolutionary shifts will become
much better appreciated. Darwin’s basic ideas, as illuminated by Mendelian
genetics, have been amplified by what is usually called epigenetic change. The
usual definition of this process centres on the study of heritable changes in
gene function that occur without a change in the sequence of nuclear DNA.
This includes the study of how environmental factors affecting a parent can
result in changes in the way genes are expressed in the offspring. Thus, the life
of a parent can be expressed in its descendants. One metaphor expresses it
thus: ‘Just as the conductor of an orchestra controls the dynamics of a sym-
phonic performance, epigenetic factors govern the interpretation of DNA
within each living cell’.51 To which we might add that no two live perform-
ances are ever the same. An analogy of this idea in the field of culture enlarges
our whole view of how cultural history might have possessed a scarcely heard
ground bass upon which the recorded variations dominate the passacaglia of
historiography.
Cultural change can also exhibit disequilibria. There are exogenous devel-
opments as when an agricultural society, for example, is forced by persistent
drought to abandon its territory. Industrial-era equivalents might be the
settling-down of itinerant loggers once an old-growth forest has been
exhausted of its saleable timber or the removal of miners from the location of
a worked-out mineral ore. Cultural inertia is sometimes a factor, as when a
community insists on its practices remaining the same even when its economy
has been totally transformed: what Marilyn Strathern called in the context of
the British BSE epidemic of the 1990s, ‘the fatal traditionalism of the
English’.53 Yet, the conflict between a sensitivity towards nature and material
demands was certainly present in early modern Europe and has not been
transformed in kind, though magnified in intensity.
One consequence of all kinds of disequilibria is the disappearance of
economy–ecology relationships at the largest scales. Once agriculture was
available then hunter-gatherers disappeared: not everywhere and not always
permanently but they were displaced to the margins of cultivated lands in
forests, grasslands and the tundra, and by 5000  most of the world’s popu-
lation had adopted the newer way of life along with its new attitudes and
technologies. Similarly, the penetration of industrialism into solar-based
agriculture was even more rapid, aided as it was by some aggressive empire-
building. So, a way of life that was normal in  1750 had almost everywhere
felt the hand of Birmingham, Springfield or Essen within a century. But if
asked in 9000 , the hunter-gatherers would have said, ‘oh yes, we know how
to get along fine – we’ll be here next spring’ and the farmers would have said
in 1750, ‘we have a famine now and again but we know how to recover, so
 E  235
thanks, we expect to keep this up’. In other words, they both thought they had
a sustainable economy.
This is not the book in which to explore the meaning for the future of the
100-odd definitions of ‘sustainability’.53 Viewed historically, most of them are
rooted in notions of long-term equilibrium achieved after periods of rapid
growth, as in the classic J-curve of a ‘natural’ population. An upper asymptote
and some form of ‘balance’ are assumed. Yet, the historical evidence suggests
that, for a variety of reasons rarely connected with natural phenomena, any
economy can make a rapid transition to another: in other words, there has
never been such a thing as sustainability in the way current advocates would
like to see it. The key reason for the metamorphoses is surely the possession
of technology and, for this reason, to leave out of any development of ‘sus-
tainability science’ the unpredictable effects of, say, biotechnology and nano-
technology seems to be unreal.54 This brings us to the uncomfortable position
that history is not much use in predicting the future, a reason often given as
justification for its access to public money. In geopolitics, it may be the case
that, for western nations to invade a country in the 1920s and again eighty
years later, produces similar chaos but the same is not true of environmental
history. The populations of bacteria, the courses of the rivers and the precip-
itation–evaporation ratios are all different. So disequilibrium is not only
observable in the world but its consequences follow through for those who
want to project its outcomes into the future. As Gellner says, ‘the neolithic and
industrial revolutions cannot plausibly be attributed to conscious human
design . . . [their social order] simply could not be properly anticipated or
planned or willed’.55 To which we might add ‘environmental order’ as well.
The relationships of disequilbria to indeterminacy are related to energy use. A
plentiful supply of energy leads to complexities in society (including hierar-
chy) and thence to non-linearities, few of which are foreseeable and some of
which may exceed the human capacity to adapt.56 A diminishing supply (since
oil production might have passed its peak around the 1980–2000 period) is
equally likely to produce non-linear social and environmental effects. It is an
interesting thought that capitalism produced relaxed population-resource
ratios and that these allowed choices, including post-1789 democracy, which
tighter relationships do not. If climate change, biodiversity loss, the spread of
HIV and the fear of global pandemics of SARS or avian flu are put into one
frame, then the resulting hologram might well be that of the ghost of Thomas
Malthus.

The ‘nature’ of consciousness

All through this chapter runs the nagging question of what constitutes ideas,
attitudes and thought. The neurophysiology of the human brain is central but
there are also enquiries about transmission of ideas, their modification and
their translation into action. The literature from all kinds of scholars on this
matter is immense and this is not the book in which to explore it save for one
236 G E H
particular aspect that merits a mention: if we accept that there is a holistic
entity called ‘consciousness’, then has it changed during the time of human
tenure of the Earth or is it a constant which can adopt new world views from
time to time without altering its basic characteristics? (There is, too, the add-
itional complication that only consciousness can talk about consciousness and
the possibility that there is ‘unconsciousness’ in which all sorts of models may
be made.)
The historical evolution of consciousness is a difficult topic because it
depends more than usual upon inference from incomplete evidence. A
complex set of arguments by Mithen57 locates the origin of today’s conscious-
ness in the Middle Palaeolithic, between 100,000 and 30,000 years ago,
growing with the evolution of Homo sapiens sapiens. The biological function
of consciousness is firstly to allow the building and testing of hypotheses in
the social sphere: if one can examine one’s own mind, then it predicts to some
extent what others think as well. Mithen proposes that the Neanderthals did
not possess an advanced degree of development and that language is the key
to progress. The critical process is the import of non-social information into
what had previously been the domain only of social intelligence. Only thus
could people consider environment reflexively so that moose became good to
think as well as good to eat. If the Middle Palaeolithic was the key time, then
what about other transitions such as that from foraging to agriculture? Mithen
considers that the evolution of the mind to a recent biological-social format is
central, and that all other changes are contingent on local factors. Thus, the
‘invention’ of agriculture in more than one place shows that the mind deals
with certain problems in a certain way but that the details are dependent on
what is to hand. This view is the core of one debate about the suitability of the
human mind to cope with the environmental pathologies which are detected
after industrialisation.58 The main strand of thought here is that the human
mind is still basically a hunter-gatherer or early agricultural mind. This can
cope with short-term and limited-space difficulties, but the abilities of today’s
human beings to deal with the consequences of rapid changes lag behind the
facility to create new situations. It is a controversial hypothesis but some evi-
dence for it can be seen in the political approach to environmental instabil-
ities, most days of the week.
Much of the anxiety is condensed in thinking about security. Security is
a feature of the conditions of the individual and of society, including the
nation state. It involves a sense of well-being derived from protection
against harm and injury, together with access to basic needs. Thus, an
unpolluted set of surroundings, clean water, food, a stable climate and a
comprehensible social matrix are all affected by environmental considera-
tions. Without security, then there is often conflict, whether local violence,
civil war or interstate struggles, with poor people and poor nations the
most likely to suffer. Exacerbations include rapid population growth that
causes not only depletion and degradation of resources and environments
 E  237
but also subdivision of their availability and hence more scope for argu-
ment. There are also late-twentieth-century shortages, as with water in the
Middle East, and worries about shortages, as with oil. In that period, too,
the concerns over climatic change and its likely sudden flips became highly
visible.59
In historical perspective, insecurities with an environmental dimension are
likely to have been a concomitant of human life all along. For foraging
groups, famine was probably a recurrent feature, though one which could be
ameliorated by social reciprocities and, in any case, an annual cosmogene-
sis gave hope. Agricultural societies were responsive at larger scales when city
states kept grain stores against lean years or enforced periods of fallow for
fields and trees. The limitations of their powers were set off as Acts of God,
outside their realm entirely. The same attitude came through into the
Industrial era when insurance began to be widespread. States found that they
could act, as against gross pollution, for example, but might not always
choose to, as in the British refusal to help with famines in India and Ireland
in the nineteenth century and, indeed, in Bengal as late as the 1940s. Since
1950, truly international action has been possible and has been deployed
against famine and in the aftermath of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
Even (to move outside the time-frame of this book) the great Asian tsunami
of 2004 was not regarded as outside either practical help or human mental
boundaries, for few except the immediate victims resorted to call it an Act of
God. Security is, then, better for some people and worse for a great number,
with (as so often) the poor being more vulnerable to increased insecurity,
even to global processes such as climate change, let alone the kind of rapid
population growth that forces them to live in places vulnerable to environ-
mental instability.

The drive to dominion

The message of Genesis I of the Bible encapsulates an entrenched human trait,
no matter how much theological wriggling can be applied to subsequent
material: humans are to have dominion over all the living things of the Earth
and to get to name them.60 In two chapters of one ‘book’ we have the theme
of many others: that there is an empirical story of action and a cultural story
steeped in language.
The species to which we belong has lived in two worlds during its evolu-
tionary history: an ecological world and a psychological cosmos, but they are
not separate, as many examples show. In the spirit of looking beyond the
binary divisions to which our culture is prone, the question can be asked, ‘are
coalescence and fragmentation parts of the same thing?’ Coalescence can be
seen as a vast market being created by international institutions so that it can
be dominated by a few megacorporations that can externalise their costs. Most
of them then fall upon environment, with the coalescence extending to all
the inhabitants of the world via environmental instabilities. Fragmentation
238 G E H
stratifies communities so that either there is a cascading hierarchy of power
from those who Know the Truth, or power is so decentralised that everybody
feels that, in their small way, they are in control of something: ‘For every man
alone thinks he hath got / To be a phoenix, and that then can be / None of that
kind, of which he is, but he.’61 Donne could not have known just how obvious
that might become in the twentieth century when individualism at many
scales became both possible and desirable (thanks to energy accessibility) at
the expense of the collective and of any sense of connection to everything else.
As one consequence, in the west at least, we seem to be poor at enjoying the
Other without possessing and controlling it. At least, power can be tempered
by contingency: it is interesting that out of 148 species of mammals with
adults weighing over 45 kilograms only fourteen have been domesticated and
nine of those were found in south-west Asia; sub-Saharan Africa had fifty-one
of the heaviest but none has become really tame. Likewise, two-thirds of the
heavily seeded wild grasses that were candidates for domestication grew in
western Asia.62
So, it comes to dominion. Human consciousness is deeply imbued with
the need to control. People, it appears, are not happy unless they have some-
thing to dominate, even if it is only a pet parrot. Even cultures which eschew
environmental interventions in their literature carry them out in practice,
and the brief upsurge of interest in Erich Fromm’s ideas of freedom to be,
rather than freedom to possess, did not survive the 1970s even in northern
California.63 This urge is easily exploited by those who have the tools to
make us want to possess things, especially in terms of positional goods, and
so the rich do not make the choice not to have things; the poor of course,
do not have choice. So dominion can come through symbolic practices
such as using a private vehicle. Even meat can contribute to the definition
of national identity: beef is implicated in John Bull’s love of freedom, in
the centrality of ‘steak et frites’, and in the supersize steak bigger than the
plate.
There is scope, therefore, to investigate the history of humans’ sense of
identity and the degree to which it depends upon an ability to control other
people and to have power over nature. Not least, we might be better off for
knowing how much we fear nature. In the west at least, it would be interest-
ing to know (and perhaps not without practical application) whether the men
in black clothes are always happiest when cutting down trees, or at the very
least ordering others to do so. In other words, the power relations between
men and women are part of the whole cultural setting for environmental
change.64 All are perhaps wrapped up in the ability to be literate, because the
ability to write and to preserve written accounts have been a source of power
within and between societies for thousands of years.65 Another layer to the
ideas of control is ‘space’ in the sense that the more humans there are, the more
control is exerted over both the social and environmental systems of what is
seen as a ‘full’ or at any rate crowded planet.66
 E  239

A   2000

The year 2000 was the occasion for a great deal of stocktaking, review and advo-
cacy. Most of it provided a great wealth of empirical studies, one of which is quar-
ried here for its information on the 1950–2000 period. There were fewer urges
to round up and enclose material on environmental thought, so here the former
is followed by a superficial collection of a few of the non-material themes that
seem to have become sufficiently crystallised out to be coherently described.67

Knowing where we are

It is common currency that environmental change has been faster than ever
before during the 1950–2000 period. The Millennium Assessment (MA)
jointly carried out for international agencies talks of alteration ‘more rapidly
and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history’68
and applies this precept to ‘ecosystem services’. These are the ‘natural’ systems
(no longer unaffected by humans, of course) which supply or affect food,
water, disease management, climatic regulation, and non-material aesthetic
and spiritual demands. The Assessment calculates that 60 per cent of the
‘ecosystem services’ are being degraded or used unsustainably, a group which
does not include fossil fuels which are non-renewable anyway. The work sug-
gests that the costs of degradation are often shifted from one group to another
(notably from the rich to the poor) and from one generation to another. These
are judgements about environmental futures and, as such, are not germane to
the present study, except in so far as they contain historical resonances, too.
Whenever there has been exploitation of nature by a particular stratum of a
society, then the costs have been borne elsewhere whenever possible. Medieval
aristocracies allowed the preservation of game for hunting to diminish the
diets of local peasantry; industrial barons made sure they lived upwind of the
smoke and stink that their factories visited on the working classes. Storing
up trouble for the future is not new, either: wastes from eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century industrial plant still influence the development of cities
directly as unreclaimable land and radioactive material from careless atomic
establishments keep appearing despite assurances to the contrary over the
years. By contrast, though, some practices store up wealth and gain, as with
tree-planting or with continued attention to the fertility of fields, achieved by
judicious cropping and manuring. It may be that the burning of fossil fuels
has allowed energy to be turned into knowledge of how to do without them.
What has been different in the last fifty years, it is argued, is the extent
and intensity of metamorphosis which, in turn, leads to a high degree of
irreversibility. We could say that all changes through history conform to
Heraclitus’ dictum that you cannot step into the same river twice, but we can
agree that systems taken beyond their renewability limits or used to push other
ecosystems to a new state (perhaps stable, perhaps fluctuating) can be
regarded as irreversibly changed. Further, study of the past suggests that not
240 G E H
all changes occur on a gradual timescale that allows slow adjustment: there
may be sudden changes in the physical parameters of an ecosystem (be it a
‘natural’ one or one with a high degree of human influence) or in the abilities
of a given society to cope with the changes it encounters.69 The probability that
any global environmental change will first have a differential impact accord-
ing to place and power, and then cascade on to everybody, seems high.70 The
ecological footprint is already like a mountain path, in the sense that separate
bootprints have coalesced into a bare track which is open to erosion and which
gets wider as people use the edges more and more.
The timing of major accelerations in the rate of change of human-driven
processes is variable: carbon dioxide concentrations increase markedly from
1800, but much-manipulated ecosystems (including urban growth) and the
loss of tropical forests are 1900-onwards changes. Energy usage underwent a
number of quickenings but those after 1950 are critical. The nineteenth and
twentieth centuries involved a much more rapid response to medical emer-
gencies, such as pandemics, and also to famine. The perception of poverty and
a feeling of pessimism about the human-environment relationships came
about mostly after 1950. The period 1950–2000 was also a time of enhanced
measurement and dissemination of knowledge about all kinds of ecosystem
change leading to amplifications and shifts in our understandings and inter-
pretations of them, several of which are informed by environmental histories
(Tables 6.1 and 6.2). None is more graphic than the International Panel on
Climate Change finding that the globe’s atmosphere is in a state never before
experienced. The rapid metamorphoses of the last 300 years have been high-
lighted by international programmes such as the LUCC (Land-Use and Cover
Change) and PAGES (PAst Global chanGES) programmes of the International
Geosphere–Biosphere Programme (IGBP). Much other work of the kind dis-
cussed in chapters 2 to 5 has made for a far more complex but, clearly, much
more accurate picture than would have been possible twenty years ago.71 The
kind of assumptions (still occasionally to be found) that all ecosystems were
in a pristine condition until hit by intensive agriculture, or that all grasslands
were virgin until converted to cultivation or ranching, and that tropical forests
were basically ‘natural’ environments, have all been replaced; this is possibly
the most important long-term finding of historical studies. Not the least of the
implications is that land-use change is an integral and significant component
of the surface-energy budget of the planet as well as of the carbon cycle.72
Beyond such studies, another major shift in knowledge has brought the real-
isation that climatic shifts are often non-linear on all scales and, hence,
episodic and abrupt, with multiple equilibria. In such a world of chaos and
complexity, prediction becomes a much more difficult enterprise, even when
good accounts of long-term trends exist.73
An economics-based view of such impacts also has lessons for historical
interpretation. As an ecosystem enters a wider market (as when coalescence
brings about trade opportunities, for example) then its non-market benefits
 E  241
T 6.1 Changes in the understanding of land-cover and land-use changes
Previous interpretations End-of-twentieth-century understandings
Rate of land-cover conversions Importance of last 300 years
indeterminate
Concentration on tropical forests Acknowledgement of effects on grasslands,
open woodlands, wetlands
Assumption of pristine condition Millennial depth of manipulation
in a previous era
Changes are permanent Trajectories are reversible, not forecastable
and in constant state of flux
Spatial homogeneity Local and contingent fragmentation is
important
Population growth the main cause Responses to changes in economy and policy
trigger events in both physical and cultural
spheres
Localities are key Hotspots of change are important but local
influences interplay with global and
worldwide processes which may be either
attenuated or amplified
Impact on carbon cycle a main focus Wider considerations such as human health,
biodiversity, albedo, hydrology, methane,
nitrogen oxides and many more
Impact on humans dependent on Impact dependent upon vulnerability of
magnitude of biophysical change settlements and economies

Source: modified (with permission) from E. F. Lambin and H. J. Geist, ‘Global land-use and land-
cover change: what have we learned so far?’ Global Change Newsletter 46, 2001, 27–30.
Note: ‘Previous’ is not defined closely but most of them could be found in the mainstream thinking
of the 1960s and 1970s: the end-of-twentieth-century understandings have come up quite fast in
the 1980s and 1990s. The driving force underlying many of them has been research into climatic
change and modelling, but concern with biodiversity loss and the life-support of poor people have
also been key features. Compare with the pivotal role of the 1980s in Table 6.2.

are often lost or degraded, even if in the long term they may be higher than
the market values. Had the forests of Indonesia been harvested for renewable
products rather than logged off then their income-producing potential would
be much higher and there would be fewer watershed disasters. A long-term
and relatively low-level output from a system (and especially those depend-
ing upon biological resources) will last longer and be more stable than inten-
sive reaping followed by abandonment: this was a lesson learnt in the
twentieth century by the managers of federally owned forests in the United
States in the face of an aggressive private sector. The consequences of short-
term exploitation are often high: the collapse of the Newfoundland cod fish-
eries in the early 1990s cost tens of thousands of jobs and a monetary loss of
$2 billion; in the United Kingdom in 1996 alone water pollution and eutroph-
ication cost $2.6 billion in clear-up charges, and, in Italy, algal blooms (again,
caused by eutrophication) in 1989 deprived aquaculture of $10 million and
242 G E H
T 6.2 Shifts in attitude in recent decades
Pre-1980s 1980s 1990s
Culture is natural Nature is cultural Nature and culture have a
reciprocal relationship
Humans react to Humans are pro-active Humans are interactive
environment in the environment with the environment
Environment is dangerous Humans are dangerous With care, neither is
to humans for the environment dangerous; without it,
both are dangerous
Environmental crises hit Environmental crises Environmental crises
humans are caused by humans are caused by interactions
between humans and
environment
Adaptation Sustainability Resilience
Technofixes No new technology Minimal and careful use of
technology

Source: adapted (with permission) from S. E. van der Leeuw, ‘ “Vulnerability” and the integrated
study of socio-natural phenomena’, IHDP Update 2, 2001, 6–7.
Note: this Table is a companion to Table 6.1. In a sense it acts as a context for 6.1 by providing
more general ideas within which 6.1 sits. But some of the broader concepts of this table have fed
back into the more specific notions of 6.1. Some of the headings of 6.2’s column 1 are nineteenth
century in their formulation, others like ‘environment is dangerous’ are much more recent.

tourism of $11.4 million. One dichotomy made clear in the 1970–2000 period
was the one between those who believed in regulatory approaches to environ-
mental ‘problems’ and those who believed equally fervently in the ability of
‘free’ markets to produce solutions via the routeways of neo-liberal econom-
ics. It is, of course, possible that some of the triumphs of the ‘free market’
were, in fact, diffuse responses to environmentalist publicity and campaign-
ing. The simplicities of single-cause changes in human–environment rela-
tionships have to be accompanied by those that acknowledge complexity and
are place-specific.74
Any discussion of the last fifty years has to recall that economic forms of
hybridity have been common. Early agricultural societies carried on hunting;
advanced solar-powered agriculturalists adopted some powered tools but not
others (think of the slow rate of introduction of the tractor into Europe); and
‘alternative’ movements look askance on bagged fertilisers and hook up small
wind turbines to their power supplies. A late-twentieth-century Thai village,
for example, may produce its staple foods by solar agriculture except that
some of the equipment used is industrial in origin. The population will
migrate seasonally to a city to earn some cash but their way of life is also
touched upon by government development programmes. So, if there is
enough forest for some hunting, then they encompass most of the lifeways of
the last 10,000 years. They are, though, closely connected to their environment
and so are able to respond quickly to any perceived loss of capability of the
 E  243
local ecosystems to process wastes or yield useful materials. At a wider spatial
scale, when such feedbacks are retarded or decoupled, then the kinds of prob-
lems listed by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) authors become
significant. The Thai experience also points to the drawbacks in simple tables
of energy use as a surrogate for environmental impact, such as Table 1.1 in
chapter 1. Such data can be made more sensitive to ‘ground truth’ but they still
conceal massive qualitative differences: even with an allowance for an 80:20
split in the late twentieth century between the low-income- and high-income-
economy sectors of the human population, the 1,800 years of pre-industrial
agriculture seem still to have had the highest long-term impact but it was
nearly all in worldwide patches whereas the recent impacts are truly global,
involving the atmosphere as well, to a measurable degree. Our understanding
of the nature and magnitude of environmental changes is itself always in flux,
not least when the variety of both temporal and spatial scale is considered
(Tables 6.1 and 6.2). One difficulty for most normal humans is that under-
standing environmental change requires measurement and judgement,
science and emotion, interpretation and being there, plus the interaction of all
of these.75 No wonder that the demands and uncertainties of modern living
have been labelled as ‘liquid life’ so that a quantifiable concept of ‘risk’ has
emerged since the nineteenth century as a simplifying aid.76
At a sub-global scale, one of the surprising findings was a correlation
between human population density and species richness. This was first
shown for the tropics: human population densities lined up with terrestrial
vertebrates and higher plants in sub-Saharan Africa, and bird endemism
with human settlement in the tropical Andes.77 Extended to Europe, similar
relationships apply for plants and mammals but not for birds. In Britain,
solar energy availability correlates with human population density which, in
turn, correlates with total species density, that is, richness.78 In this analysis
there seems to be no place for history or fossil fuels. Looked at more widely
in time and space, however, these findings (though not so discouraging to
environmentalists as might be imagined) are the outcomes of a decline in
worldwide avian abundance. This seems to have gone down by 20 to 25 per
cent since agriculture became widespread: Oceania alone lost 8,000 species.
In Britain, breeding wild birds numbered fewer than chickens, and there was
one cat for every seventeen wild birds. The end of the twentieth century
yielded the information that there were then fewer than fifteen birds per
person worldwide.79
This reinforces the idea (chapter 5) that humans come less and less into
contact with wild forms, and that our knowledge of the ‘worldwide’ and the
‘global’ is inevitably mediated by technology; unmediated contact (if such a
thing is possible) is local, small scale and contingent.80 ‘The living moment’
restores meaning to local flows but has no sense of precision or global con-
nections. It is parallel to a reminder, however, that small-scale communities
(whether agricultural or foraging) were capable of species extinction, though
244 G E H
usually by a combination of predation, biotic introduction and the alteration
of vegetation rather than by predation alone. In terms of purpose, few such
societies deliberately managed their resource base with the aim of ‘conserva-
tion’ and so effects on biodiversity were consequential impacts rather than
management aims.81

R -
The poet Philip Larkin is famous for his dyspepsia but there is also a lot of
affection shown, for instance, in his account of an agricultural show where
‘. . . time’s rolling smithy-smoke / Shadows much greater gestures;’82 The
smoke of detail needs pulling back a little to see how some of the ideas in
chapter 1 have fared, in longer perspectives than in the Tables of this chapter.
The notion of a ‘Golden Age’, for example, is alive and well in many spheres
but not in environmental history where the evidence of permanent change is
now so massive, and its consequences so pervasive, that no era of the past can
be considered rationally as golden. (Rationality is never the whole story, of
course.) Similarly, the idea of the sublime, a learned behaviour from the eigh-
teenth century in the west, has been replaced by a more existentialist set of
attitudes in which we are on our own in a secular world. Thus, ‘progress’ is not
guaranteed, especially when the twentieth-century assumption that it equals
‘growth’ is subject to questioning, albeit without much effect at the level of
those driving economies. The technological fix is another area in which the
pen is deployed to little effect against the sword. There are now so many words
that those with the power to deflect or redirect the sword run the high risk of
getting lost: what now constitutes a greater gesture in the way of Capital or The
Origin of Species? The flows of the cosmos, so important to foragers and to the
Chinese, are now understood to be too vast (especially since the universe
seems to be still expanding) to be reckoned with: Gaia is big enough. After a
difficult start, the Gaia idea seems to get more support from conventional
science every year and, though many natural scientists would prefer another
name, a holistic approach to feedback systems is an aspiration for many mod-
ellers. Focus on climatic change can be seen as a resurgence of environmental
determinism. Fatalism is also alive and well, as are many binary concepts.
Though recognised and analysed by many intellectuals, they provide a useful
shorthand in the ‘practical’ world. An either/or presentation is always more
impressive than a both/and alternative; metaphorical black and white (absent
from the Powerpoint repertoire) more impressive than anything with inter-
mediate shades in it, even if greying is more important in practice.
All this points to a realisation that ideas are mutable: they weave in and out
of the material world and so cannot escape being influenced by it even if there
is neither environmental nor technological determinism. In a new world there
is new thinking, though there is never any guarantee that the two will be syn-
chronous, for one may run ahead of the other, as happened with Darwin’s and
 E  245
Russel Wallace’s ideas in the nineteenth century and with biotechnology
today. Yet, some of the themes of our first chapter remain important through-
out the 10,000 years of history examined here. Material linkages and their
interweaving non-material equivalents are as important as ever though their
scales have changed in spatial terms and in degrees of intensity. That the activ-
ities of the 1950–2000 years have affected the composition of the atmosphere
and the surface of the Earth as never before is agreed by even those commen-
tators who do not agree on the climatic and economic consequences. When
we look at the whole picture – temporally and spatially – then one process can
surely dominate all the others: if there had been very slow or zero population
growth then everything mentioned in these pages would have been different
in some way or other.83

Indra’s internet?
In his concept of the noosphere, V. I. Vernadsky anticipated the degree of
worldwide instant communication which many (but by no means all)
humans can use. One of its consequences is that an event in one place can be
instantly transformed into opinion in another: a tiger is shot in India
and later that day ten more people in Luxemburg decide to join a wildlife-
protection group. Another upshot, however, is that with very little effort we
can find another three hundred environmental stories to which we could
respond in some way, even if only with indifference. Yet a dead tiger is not
simply an inert beast: it is one part of a worldwide (indeed perhaps global)
network of ideas and capabilities in which the fact of its death (irreversible
though it is) has to be accompanied by an examination of the context of ideas
in which it occurred. One consequence is that we may know about many
factors which influence environmental history but find it difficult to work
them into broader treatments.84 Historical events and processes happen
within Newtonian principles and the laws of thermodynamics but after that
there is whole world of chance and contingency. These preclude prediction
because even an identical starting point would give different results if it was
rerun. As Stephen Jay Gould summarises it, ‘The law of gravity tells us how
an apple falls, but not why that apple fell at that moment, and why Newton
happened to be sitting there, ripe for inspiration.’85
One factor in the communications net is that of authority. What do we
know, do we believe, do we act upon? In the times of the foragers, there were
many instances of a continuous flow of authority between the humans and
their spirit equivalents, with humans usually at the receiving end of instruc-
tions. Access to the knowledge of the other world was often mediated by a
special person such as an elder or a shaman. In an agricultural era, authority
is locally contingent to begin with but expands with conquest and empire. It
tends to be hierarchical, with an off-planet Ultimate source, mediated as a
mystery by specially endowed individuals (mostly but not entirely male),
typically with restricted access to a written set of instructions.
246 G E H
The industrial era saw the written word as print taken to the far ends of
the Earth by trade, conquest and empire-building, and the beginnings of
electronic transfer by telegraph and telephone. Also important was the
agency of the visual image following the development of photography. The
dominance of western science and technology (and hence of ‘the scientist’)
was spread by all these means. In the ‘post-industrial’ time since 1950 the
dominance of science and technology has been ever greater, not least via the
visual media of television and film. The downsizing of technology seems to
have given greater influence to the small screen. Its combination with a
person in a white coat and an on-screen computer seems to be the mid-
twentieth century onward’s equivalent of the newspaper and before that the
sermon and the shaman.
Above all, the natural sciences offer us a narrative of authority to which we
have to respond. We accept that the findings of the science are provisional but,
because they are self-critical, are regularly tested and can be measured against
their predictive value, then some reaction is essential. It is above all the natural
sciences which laid the foundations for the greater intensity of environmental
concern after 1950. Their authority has, nevertheless, been challenged from
time to time. One attitude is a refusal to accept the ‘facts’ of scientific investi-
gation for reasons such as:

● The people publishing the research are biased towards a particular

finding because they are on a funding/promotional gravy train that
favours their outlook. This is levelled against manipulators, who are often
accused of concealing evidence of environmental effects, and against
environmentalists, who are said to have ‘their own agenda’, whatever that
may be.
● There is an obviously political motive, often on the part of national gov-
ernments. The refusal to accept as definitive the fisheries science in
Canada or in the European Union is based in a fear of the fishing indus-
try; the refusal to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol is a refusal to join sym-
bolically in a world endeavour even if it may be an inadequate set of
measures.
● There is a rooted world view which regards any limits imposed by ‘nature’
as inconvenient: some social scientists would like to regard the laws
of thermodynamics as temporary hindrances to the perfectibility of
humankind, or the size of the human population as irrelevant to any
environmental matters: ‘that old Malthusian thing’.
● The local and the contingent are overlooked in the discourses of science,
politics, technocratic attitudes and moral discussions which make for
worldwide and global evaluations. The intricate enmeshing of the envi-
ronmental and the social at local scales is difficult to relate to bigger pic-
tures, especially when abstraction and reflexivity are dominant. One
outcome is an ‘informed bewilderment’.86
 E  247
Setting aside the critical validity of the natural sciences does not impede the
embrace of technology as a solution to perceived difficulties. It will, the advo-
cacy runs, provide more of something, in the way remote sensing and (to a
lesser extent) the geographic information system (GIS) open up the possibil-
ities for more roads, more quarries and bigger irrigation projects based on
larger dams. It will make the world cleaner because atomic power emits no
carbon dioxide (not from the plant once it is running, at least87), some carbon
dioxide can be piped under the oceans and stored and, in any case, hydrogen
fuels can replace the carbon economy. Low-income economies can be encour-
aged to omit the carbon-fuelled stage of development and go straight to
renewables.
There is resistance to this hyper-technological view of the world in both rich
and poor countries. But in spite of 50 years of devoted environmental activism
and thinking it has not been all that influential; from time to time radical
leaders seem to throw up their hands, as when James Lovelock endorsed
nuclear power in 2004. Some parts of the world still look like ‘nature’ even if
an environmental historian knows that there has been human influence upon
them. But their transition to control seems very likely: they will become ‘envir-
onment’ and then part of an energy-dense network of urban settlements the
surroundings of which leave no room for contingency.
This book is about history, not futures, but a few last remarks may have
some relevance to coming decades, taking their imagery from the pipe-organ
at Lübeck. It looks as if the organist is becoming increasingly constrained to
play from the one score, with his freedom to improvise being restricted to a
few of the less important pipes. Some observers wonder if the resonances will,
in fact, cause the whole machine to disintegrate; if so then we cannot com-
plain that it was not built to cope with such pressures and that we never knew
that the structure was shaking loose. But, equally, we were sure for many years
that we knew how to make repairs and not to ask for impossible volumes.
Somewhere in history, those restraints were overwhelmed by a mythology that
triple forte was always best. There’s none so deaf as those that will not hear,
we could add. Frederich Schiller (who wrote the famous ‘Ode to Joy’) thought
in 1786 that ‘Die Weltgeschicte is der Weltgerichte’ (The world’s history is the
world’s judgement), without always remembering that it was made with a
great deal of chance and contingency, was always changing and was distinctly
unpredictable; who can say what the results of developments in biotechnol-
ogy, electronics and nanotechnology will be? In human history, business was
rarely as usual and this seems even less likely to be the case in future. We have
now learned that our actions can bring about fluctuations of almost unimag-
inable amplitudes and that it is possible to reduce both cultural and natural
diversity. If we wish to turn away from that trajectory then there has to be
mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon: the organist has to decide upon a
theme and to play it, even if some variations are allowed and the instrument
moves from hand-blowing to solar power. At the same time, many of us may
248 G E H
hear for ourselves as individuals the unharmonious resonances coming from
more than one pipe, and decide to lower the volume.88

N
1. J. McNeill, Something New under the Sun. An Environmental History of the
Twentieth Century, New York: W. W. Norton, 2000/London: Allen Lane, 2000.
2. There are examples of metaphors in ‘tribal’ groups in N. Bird-David, ‘Tribal
metaphorization of human–nature-relatedness. A comparative analysis’, in
K. Milton (ed.) Environmentalism. The View from Anthropology, London and New
York: Routledge, 1993, 112–25.
3. D. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, Boston MA: Little, Brown, 1991/London:
Penguin Books, 1993, summarised in the source of much of this paragraph: S.
Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind, London: Thames & Hudson, 1996/Phoenix,
1998, pp. 245–6.
4. M. McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage [sic], New York: Random House, 1967;
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, London: Faber & Faber 1939, Part 4, episode 15.
There are many later editions and the whole text is online at more than one loca-
tion.
5. B. Latour, Aramis or the Love of Technology, Cambridge MA: Harvard University
Press, 1996, trans. C. Porter. Originally published in French, 1993. The example
of oil is mine, not his.
6. A. Berque, Le Sauvage et L’artifice: les Japonaises devant la Nature, Paris:
Gallimard, 1985.
7. H. Tellenbach and B. Kimura, ‘The Japanese concept of “nature” ’, in J. B. Callicott
and R. T. Ames (eds) Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought: Essays in
Environmental Philosophy, Albany NY: SUNY Press, 1989, 163–82; D. E. Shaner,
‘The Japanese experience of nature’, ibid. 183–209. See also the special issue on
the state of the field of ‘nature in Asian traditions’ in Worldviews. Environment,
Culture, Religion 10 (1) 2006.
8. A. Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century. A History, New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1989.
9. B. L. Whorf (ed. J. B. Carroll), Language, Thought and Reality, London: Chapman
& Hall, 1956/Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1956, reprinted by MIT in 1974 and avail-
able from them on CogNet subscription service. Whorf ’s arguments have been con-
troversial because they are very difficult to test without using language. Empirical
tests have mostly been about the naming of colour. Language’s historical functions
are discussed in W. H. McNeill, ‘A short history of humanity’, New York Review of
Books, 29 June 2000, 9-11; The Eliot quotation is from ‘East Coker’, the second of
his Four Quartets. The whole of this Quartet is of relevance to any historian.
10. This paragraph is extracted from the opening material in the online Wikipedia
at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism#Uses_of_the_term accessed on
16 January 2006. The basic document is generally held to be F. Lyotard,
The Postmodern Condition. A Report on Knowledge, Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1984 and amplified by F. Jameson, Postmodernism or, the
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London and New York: Verso, 1991. An appli-
cation to the present discussion is in M. Gandy, ‘Crumbling land: the post-
modernity debate and the analysis of environmental problems’, Progress in
Human Geography 20, 1996, 23–40.
11. In order of topic: A. E. Gare, Postmodernism and the Environmental Crisis,
London and New York: Routledge, 1995; M. Soulé and G. Lease (eds) Reinventing
 E  249
Nature? Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction, Washington DC: Island Press,
1995; Z. Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, Oxford and Cambridge MA: Blackwell,
1993. See also M. E. Zimmerman, Contesting Earth’s Future. Radical Ecology and
Postmodernity, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press,
1994. Nihilism is especially strong in A. Gare, Nihilism Incorporated. European
Civilization and Environmental Destruction, Bungendore NSW: Eco-Logical
Press, 1993. There is a very interesting analysis and a set of prescriptions in
C. Birch, ‘Eight fallacies of the modern world and five axioms for a postmodern
worldview’, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 32, 1988, 12–30.
12. The campaigners can be so hostile that, in Britain, new legislation was enacted in
2005 to make some of their activities criminal offences.
13. D. P. Tolia-Kelley, ‘Affect – an ethnocentric encounter? Exploring the “universal-
ist” imperative of emotional/affectual geographies’, Area 35, 2006, 213–17.
14. K. Milton, Loving Nature. Towards an Ecology of Emotion, London and New York:
Routledge, 2002; N. R. Anderson, Emotion, Belief and the Environment, New York
and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Both authors are anthropologists and
we need to be grateful that they have ventured into this difficult area of study.
15. As an example, see M. Pacheco, ‘Recycling in Bogota: developing a culture for
urban sustainability’, Environment and Urbanization 4, 1992, 74–9; a more
general paper is P. J. H. van Beukerin and M. N. Bowman, ‘Empirical evidence on
recycling and trade of paper and lead in developed and developing countries’,
World Development 29, 2001, 1717–37.
16. E. O. Wilson, Biophilia. The Human Bond with other Species, Cambridge MA:
Harvard University Press, 1984.
17. The leaflet accompanying the vast and wonderful installation (‘The Weather
Project’) by Olafur Eliasson in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London in
2003–4 tells us that ‘47 per cent believe that the idea of weather in our society is
based on culture’ and ‘53 per cent believe that it is based on nature’. As worded,
the two propositions are not necessarily a binary pair, but we can see what they
(the ‘Tate Weather Monitoring Group’) mean.
18. A. R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, New York:
Putnam, 1994.
19. B. Braun and N. Castree, Remaking Reality. Nature at the Millennium, London
and New York: Routledge, 1998, Part 3.
20. The efforts of, for example, UNEP, UNFPA, and international development agen-
cies should not be denigrated. But they rarely produce binding outcomes, partly
because of the diversity of cultures and purposes which they consider.
21. There are relevant discussions in, for example, R. W. Hepburn, ‘Wonder’ and
Other Essays, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984; A. Berléant, ‘The his-
toricity of aesthetics. I.’ British Journal of Aesthetics 26, 1986, 101–11 and II, ibid.
195–203. See also A. Carlson, Aesthetics and the Environment. The Appreciation of
Nature, Art and Architecture, London and New York: Routledge, 2000.
22. My friend and mentor the late Dan Luten used to say, when confronted with such
an accusation by Californian developers, ‘the love of money is emotional, too’.
Many terms that are difficult to define, such as ‘balance’ and ‘nature’, are links
between the scientific community and the wider emotional responses of so many
people. See K. Richards, ‘Psychobiogeography: meanings of nature and motiva-
tions for a democratized conservation ethic’, Journal of Biogeography 28, 2001,
677–98. The Hume quotation is from A Treatise upon Human Nature, bk 2, pt 3.
23. But see, for example, the socio-ecological links in J. Goudsblom, ‘Ecological
regimes in the rise of organized religion’, in J. Goudsblom, E. Jones and
S. Mennell, The Course of Human History. Economic Growth, Social Process, and
250 G E H
Civilization, Armonk NY and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1996, 31–47 and chs 1–3 of
M. Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness, New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1991. Technology and medieval Christianity are dealt with by L. T. White,
Medieval Technology and Social Change, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964.
24. K. Milton, ‘Nature and the environment in indigenous and traditional cultures’,
in D. E. Cooper and J. Palmer (eds) Spirit of the Environment: Religion, Value and
Environmental Concerns, London and New York: Routledge, 1998, 86–99.
25. S. Afran, In Gods We Trust. The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion, New York:
Oxford University Press, 2004.
26. K. Vatsyayan, ‘Ecology and Indian myth’, in G. Sen (ed.) Indigenous Vision.
Peoples of India Attitudes to the Environment, New Delhi: Sage, 1992,157–80. [Title
is sic]
27. E. Erdenijab, ‘An economic assessment of pasture degradation’, in C. Humphrey
and D. Sneath (eds) Culture and Environment in Inner Asia, vol. 1: The Pastoral
Economy and the Environment, Cambridge: White Horse Press, 1996, 189–97;
Chen Shan, ‘Inner Asian grassland degradation and plant transformation, ibid.
111–23; C. Humphrey and D. Sneath (eds) The End of Nomadism? Society,
State and the Environment in Inner Asia, Durham NC: Duke University
Press/Cambridge: White Horse Press, 1999.
28. B. Szerszynski, Nature, Technology and the Sacred, Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.
29. The more that is learned about genetics and ethology, the less this type of excep-
tionalism (i.e. the notion that humans are totally different from other species)
seems to hold up.
30. S. Afran op. cit. 2004, p. 272.
31. M. D. S. Chandran and J. D. Hughes, ‘Sacred groves and conservation: the com-
parative history of traditional reserves in the Mediterranean area and in South
India’, Environment and History 6, 2000, 169–86.
32. J. D. Proctor, ‘Resolving multiple visions of nature, science and religion’, Zygon
39, 2004, 637–57; A. McGrath, The Reenchantment of Nature. The Denial of
Religion and the Ecological Crisis, New York: Doubleday/Galilee , 2003.
33. Compassion and quotation from the closing pages (396–9) of K. Armstrong, The
Great Transformation. The World in the Time of Buddha, Socrates, Confucius and
Jeremiah, London: Atlantic Books, 2006. The dissent is mine.
34. A Revd J. Cummings, quoted in M. Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science,
Technology and Ideologies of Western Dominance, Ithaca NY and London: Cornell
University Press, 1989.
35. A. Franklin, Animals and Modern Cultures. A Sociology of Human–Animal
Relations in Modernity, London: Sage, 1999.
36. C. Merchant, ‘Reinventing Eden: Western culture as a recovery narrative’, in
W. Cronon (ed.) Uncommon Ground. Toward Reinventing Nature, New York and
London: W. W. Norton, 1995, 132–59; idem, Reinventing Eden: the Fate of Nature
in Western Culture, London and New York: Routledge, 2004.
37. R. H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the
Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1995. Aldous Huxley’s novel about heaven (little known in con-
trast to his vision of hell in Brave New World) is called Island (1962). Its paradise
is destroyed by the discovery of oil.
38. R. Waswo, The Founding Legend of Western Civilization: from Virgil to Vietnam,
Hanover NH/London: University Press of New England, 1997.
39. M. Leach and J. Fairhead, ‘Challenging Neo-Malthusian deforestation analyses in
West Africa’s dynamic forest landscapes’, Population and Development Review, 26,
2000, 17–43.
 E  251
40. The seminal work was C. Stone, Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights
for Natural Objects, Los Altos, CA: William Kaufmann, 1974. In, 2006, Spain con-
sidered a law which gave ‘legal person status to great apes (Guardian, 7 June 2006,
page 9 of SocietyGuardian).
41. C. B. Herrick, ‘’Cultures of GM’: discourses of risk and labeling of GMOs in the
UK and EU’, Area 37, 2005, 286–94.
42. The computer models were developed by J. Forrester, World Dynamics,
Cambridge MA: Wright-Allen Press, 1971; the key work was D. H. Meadows, D. L.
Meadows, J. Randers and W. W. Behrens, The Limits to Growth, London: Earth
Island, 1972, with its counterblast H. S. D. Cole et al. (eds) Models of Doom. A
Critique of the Limits to Growth, New York: Universe Books, 1973 (in the UK it
was called Thinking about the Future). The riposte is D. L. Meadows, D. H.
Meadows and J. Randers, Beyond the Limits, London: Earthscan, 1992; then
comes B. Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the
World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. The later discussion of
types of curve can be seen in D. I. Stern, M. S. Common and E. B. Barbier,
‘Economic growth and environmental degradation; the environmental Kuznets
Curve and sustainable development’, World Development 24, 1996, 1151–60.
American society is built on the profligate use of oil according to D. Nye,
Consuming Power. A Social History of American Energies, London and Cambridge
MA: MIT Press, 1998.
43. ‘Resilience’ was the focus of an issue of the IHDP Update, Bonn: IHDP, 02/2003.
For a more formal treatment see C. Perrings, ‘Ecological resilience in the sustain-
ability of economic development’, Economie Appliquée XLVIII, 1995, 121–42.
44. Contrast F. Capra, The Turning Point. Science, Society and the Rising Culture, New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1982/London: Fontana 1983, with R. Bennett, The Fall
of Public Man, New York: Knopf, 1977/London: Faber & Faber, 1986 and Penguin
Books, 2002.
45. I. Berlin, ‘The decline of Utopian ideas in the West’, in H. Hardy (ed.) The Crooked
Timber of Humanity, London: Fontana 1991, pp. 20–48. There is only a limited
treatment of the environment in F. E. Manuel and F. P. Manuel, Utopian Thought
in the Western World, Oxford: Blackwell, 1979.
46. Poems 1913–56, London: Methuen, 1987.
47. Paradise Lost, Part I, line 907 et seq.
48. I. Prigogine and I. Stengers, Order out of Chaos. Man’s New Dialogue with Nature,
London: Flamingo Books, 1984; F. Capra, The Web of Life, New York: Random
House, 1997.
49. Many of these ideas are brought together in I. G. Simmons, ‘History, ecology,
contingency, sustainability’, in J. Bintliff (ed.) Structure and Contingency.
Evolutionary Processes in Life and Human Society, London and New York:
Leicester University Press, 1999, 118–31.
50. R. L. H. Dennis, ‘Butterfly habitats, broad-scale biotope affiliations, and struc-
tural exploitation of vegetation at finer scales: the matrix revisited’ Ecological
Entomology 29, 2004, 744–52.
51. The cultural interface with biology is explicated in E. O. Wilson, Consilience. The
Unity of Knowledge, London: Little, Brown, 1998. The nature–nurture dichotomy
and the role of epigenetic change is the topic of M. Ridley, Nature via Nurture,
London: Harper Perennial 2004, which is written in accessible language, as was
most of the website http://epigenome.eu in November 2006, from whence comes
the quotation.
52. M. Strathern, After Nature. English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992, p. 198.
252 G E H
53. J. Holmberg and R. Sandbrook, ‘Sustainable development: what is to be done?’,
in J. Holmberg (ed.) Policies for a Small Planet, London: Earthscan, 1992, 18–38.
Much of the original writing is collected in the seventy-two papers edited with an
introduction by M. Redclift, Sustainability, London and New York: Routledge,
2005, Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences, 4 vols.
54. Influential statements, such as those of Kates et al. (see below), are sufficiently
general so as not to exclude ‘complex self-organizing systems’ but seem to me to
lack a sense of dealing with rapid and radical technological change. They are not
in any sense ‘wrong’ but perhaps do not go far enough. R. W. Kates et al.,
‘Sustainability science’, Science 202, 2001, 641–2.
55. E. Gellner, Plough, Sword and Book. The Structure of Human History, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1988, p. 20.
56. R. N. Adams, The Eighth Day. Social Evolution as the Self-Organization of Energy,
Austin TX: University of Texas Press, 1988; J. Gray, False Dawn. The Delusions of
Global Capitalism, London: Granta Books, 1998.
57. S. Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind, London: Thames & Hudson, 1996.
58. R. Ornstein and P. Ehrlich, New World New Mind, London: Methuen, 1989.
59. This paragraph relies on N. Myers, Ultimate Security. The Environmental Basis of
Political Stability, New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1993; P. Roberts, The End
of Oil, London: Bloomsbury, 2003, ch. 10; F. Dodds and T. Pippard (eds) Human
and Environmental Security. An Agenda for Change, London and Sterling VA:
Earthscan, 2005, Part 2; and a focused number of IHDP Update, ‘Conflict and
cooperation’, Bonn: IHDP, 03/2004.
60. Genesis 1: 29 and 2: 19.
61. An Anatomy of the World. The First Anniversary. (c.1600)
62. W. J. Burroughs, Climate Change in Prehistory, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005, p. 278.
63. E. Fromm, The Fear of Freedom, London: Kegan Paul, 1942, reprinted down to
1980. The relinquishing of the desire to control is best achieved by experiencing
a relation to the eternal, says M. E. Zimmerman, Contesting Earth’s Future. Radical
Ecology and Postmodernity, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of
California Press, 1994, p. 373.
64. In the west, wearing black has for centuries been associated with powerful men,
especially in the nineteenth century when it became a kind of uniform. The tree-
feller is William Gladstone (1809–98, Prime Minister of Great Britain at various
times) and the commentary on power and clothing (in the west) is J. Harvey, Men
in Black, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. See also M. French, Beyond
Power: Men, Women and Morals, London: Cape, 1985; L. C. Zelezny, P.-P. Chua
and C. Aldrich, ‘Elaborating on gender differences in environmentalism’, Journal
of Social Issues 56, 2000, 443–57.
65. J. Goody, The Power of the Written Tradition, Washington DC and London:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000.
66. The ‘full planet’ idea has always been associated with the books of Herman Daly,
such as Economics, Ecology, Ethics. Essays towards a Steady-State Economy, San
Francisco: Freeman, 1980. A recent exploration is in J. A. Swaney, ‘Are democracy
and common property possible on our small earth?’ Journal of Economic Issues 37,
2003, 259–88.
67. There is a very broad and penetrative historical treatment of the social facets of
world systems in J. Friedman, ‘General historical and culturally specific proper-
ties of global systems’, Review 15, 1992, 335–72.
68. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005, accessed at www.millenniumassess-
ment.org in August 2005: ‘Summary for Decision-Makers’, p. 1. The meaning of
 E  253
‘comparable period’ is not immediately clear but I take it to mean a fifty-year
interval.
69. Examples of ‘choice’ in the face of environmental adversity are the main theme of
J. Diamond, Collapse. How societies choose to fail or survive, New York: Viking
Penguin 2005/London: Penguin Books 2006.
70. See the careful discussion of this by D. Liverman, ‘Vulnerability to global envi-
ronmental change’, in J. X. Kasperson and R. E. Kasperson (eds) Global
Environmental Risk, Tokyo: UNU Press/London: Earthscan, 2001, 201–16.
71. There is a good summary in IHDP Update 03/2005 with links to appropriate web-
sites.
72. R. A. Pielke et al., ‘The influence of land-use change and landscape dynamics on
the climate system: relevance to climate-change policy beyond the radiative effect
of greenhouse gases’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London
A 360, 2002, 1705–19.
73. J. A. Rial et al., ‘Nonlinearities, feedbacks and critical thresholds within the Earth’s
climate system’, Climatic Change 65, 2004, 11–38. An excellent summary account
of both biophysical and social trends is given in R. W. Kates and T. M. Parris,
‘Long-term trends and a sustainability transition’, Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences [of the USA] 100, 2003, 8062–67. There is a contextual dis-
cussion in S. R. Dovers and J. W. Handmer, ‘Uncertainty, sustainability and
change’, Global Environmental Change 2, 1992, 262–76. A treatment in tune with
the present book is in M. Fischer-Kowalski and H. Haberl, ‘Sustainable develop-
ment: socio-economic metabolism and colonization of nature’, International
Social Science Journal 50, 1998, 573–87.
74. E. F. Lambin et al., ‘The causes of land-use and land-cover changes: moving
beyond the myths’, Global Environmental Change 11, 2001, 261–9.
75. This is a free adaptation of a quotation from T. O’Riordan in H. Haberl,
S. Batterbury and E. Moran, ‘Using and shaping the land: a long-term perspec-
tive’, Land Use Policy 18, 2001, 1–8 at p. 3. O’Riordan’s original is in his intro-
duction to T. O’Riordan (ed.) Environmental Science for Environmental
Management, London: Prentice Hall, 2000, p. 15.
76. Z. Bauman, Liquid Life, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005; U. Beck, Risk Society.
Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage, 1992, first published in German 1986.
77. A. Balmford et al., ‘Conservation conflicts across Africa’, Science 291, 2001,
2616–19; L. Fjeldså and A. Rahhek, ‘Continent-wide conservation priorities and
diversification processes’, in G. M. Mace, A. Balmford and J. Ginsberg (eds)
Conservation in a Changing World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998, 139–60.
78. M. J. Araújo, ‘The coincidence of people and biodiversity in Europe’, Global
Ecology and Biogeography, 12, 2003, 5–12; K. L. Evans and K. J. Gaston, ‘People,
energy and avian richness’, Global Ecology and Biogeography 14, 2005, 187–96.
79. K. J. Gaston and K. L. Evans, ‘Birds and people in Europe’, Proceedings of the Royal
Society of London B 271, 2004, 1649–55; K. J. Gaston, T. M. Blackburn and K. K.
Goldwijk, ‘Habitat conversion and global avian biodiversity loss’, Proceedings of
the Royal Society of London B 270, 2003, 1293–300.
80. D. Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, New York: Vintage Books, 1997.
81. E. A. Smith and M. Wishnie, ‘Conservation and subsistence in small-scale soci-
eties’, Annual Review of Anthropology 29, 2000, 493–524; D. K. Grayson, ‘The
archaeological record of human impacts on animal populations’, Journal of World
Prehistory 15, 2001, 1–49.
82. ‘Show Saturday’, in Collected Poems (ed. A. Thwaite), London: The Marvell
Press/Faber & Faber, 1988, 199–201.
254 G E H
83. A nice subject for some counterfactual history writing: a change from
Napoleon winning at Waterloo or a different outcome to the War of American
Independence.
84. Many of the creative arts fall into this category, but think also of our sonic envir-
onment: P. A. Coates, ‘The strange stillness of the past: towards an environmen-
tal history of sound and noise’, Environmental History 10, 2005, 636–65. Even in
a more conventional context, consider the diversity of material in the proceedings
of the 2nd international conference of the European Society for Environmental
History: L. Jelec̆ek, P. Cromý, H. Janů, J. Miškovský and L. Uhlír̆ová (eds) Dealing
with Diversity, Prague: Charles University Faculty of Science, 2003.
85. S. J. Gould, Wonderful Life, London: Penguin Books, 1989, p. 278. The preceding
sentence is an adaptation of his statement on contingency in the same paragraph.
86. This theme is explored for the Classical times to nineteenth century period by
R. Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies. A Global Theory of Intellectual Change,
Cambridge MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998,
esp. ch. 15; M. Castells, The Information Age. Economy, Society and Culture.
Vol. III. End of Millennium, Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Baumann (op. cit. 1993) says
something very similar.
87. There is no consensus as to how much carbon dioxide is produced in the early
stages of the nuclear fuel cycle and in the decommissioning.
88. Not in the volume of talking to ourselves, clearly. The years 2006 and 2007 saw a
remarkable burst of book-length treatments in the field of environmental history,
most of which became available after this book was completed. The world scale
gets attention but there seemed to be an interesting concentration on the regional
and continental scales. An outstanding volume rooted firmly in a scientific world-
view is F. Oldfield, Environmental Change: Key Issues and Alternative Perspectives,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
 Further reading

The chapter notes lead to a very wide variety of source material but most of it is from
books and journals. Every new book is, however, undertaken in the context of what
went before and which has remained in the memory or the filing system of the author.
Yet between the writing of this paragraph and its appearance in print there will almost
certainly be published some other relevant book-length works. So this section will
attempt very briefly to suggest a few follow-on sources for readers interested in general
treatments of human impact and management in the environmental sphere, which
have a historical dimension.
The books that attempt a worldwide scale of treatment are dominated by North
American writers, and the names of John McNeill, Donald Hughes, John Richards
and Donald Worster stand out. Any list must include:
D. Worster (ed.) The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental
History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
J. D. Hughes, The Environmental History of the World: Humankind’s Changing Role
in the Community of Life, London and New York: Routledge, 2001.
J. R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the World
in the Twentieth Century, London: Penguin Books, 2001.
J. F. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern
World, Berkeley and Los Angeles; University of California Press, 2003.
I have tried to put these and other works into context in:
I. G. Simmons, ‘The world scale’, Environment and History 10, 2004, 531–6.
A very approachable text on land cover and land use through time is:
A. M. Mannion, Dynamic World. Land-Cover and Land-Use Change, London:
Arnold, 2002.
A taster of the variety of work being pursued under the banner of environmental
history is seen in:
Leoš Jelec̆ek et al. (eds) Dealing with Diversity. Proceedings of the 2nd International
Conference of the European Society for Environmental History, Prague 2003, Prague:
Charles University Faculty of Science, 2003.
Books and journals are now supplemented by an immense array of web materials.
Most of these are concerned with today’s anxieties, though global orientation usually
includes attempts at a historical setting even if only of the last fifty to a hundred years.
The PAGES programme in Bern should be consulted, along with the IPCC, the IHDP
and UNEP. The Worldwatch Institute’s annual printed State of the World will convey
any reliable data that can be found and is backed up by web material. The websites of
the two major scholarly organisations in the field (ASEH and ESEH) are also worth
scanning for bibliographical guides. The journals Environment and History and
Environmental History carry the field further, as do those of a more ideas-based nature
such as Environmental Values and Worldviews; Environment, Culture and Religion.

255
 Glossary

Algal blooms Sudden surges in growth of algae in aquatic environments, often

colouring or clogging the water; bacterial decay then uses up much of the oxygen in
the water and causes the death of, for example, fishes.

Anoxia Without oxygen. Hence a toxic and usually fatal environment for animals.
Most often used for a zone of the water column that has suffered pollution by over-
loading of nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen.

Biodiversity The variety of species per unit area or, more specifically, the totality of
genes, species, and ecosystems of a region. This may comprise all or some of genetic
diversity, species diversity and ecosystem diversity.

Biological productivity The amount of living tissue per unit area per unit time
added during periods of growth of plants and animals. Usually expressed in units such
as kg/ha/yr, and the weight of tissue is usually dry weight.

Biomass The quantity of living matter per unit area at one moment in time, usually
given in units such as kg/ha or t/ha. The weight of biomass is usually given as the dry
weight.

Browse Plant matter within the reach of a herbivorous animal but not growing in
the soil, that is, twigs and leaves of a shrub, not grasses.

Deep Ecology An environmental philosophy based on the idea of the intrinsic value
of non-human components of the cosmos; the world is not our oyster, we share it with
the oysters. Associated especially with the Norwegian thinker Arne Naess (1912– ) and
much influenced by Buddhism, Mahatma Ghandi and Spinoza.

Desertification The loss of plant biomass from an area with low and probably irreg-
ular rainfall. Climatic change (possibly cyclical) and grazing intensity are both ele-
ments of its cause and there is often controversy about which is the most important
at any one time.

Dinoflagellates Simple plants, often part of the marine plankton. If human activity
floods the sea with phosphates, dinoflagellates may form a bloom and their exudates
colour the water forming a Red Tide, which is often toxic to shellfish and thence to
humans fond of oysters or mussels.

Discourse A way of thinking and writing which is institutional because it delimits

what can be said about a particular topic and the language which is used. Thus, it
affects what can be accepted as ‘truth’.

256
 G 257
Dualism The idea that there are two fundamental classes of things or categories
which are opposed to each other, like ‘man’ and ‘nature’, or ‘economic’ and ‘uneco-
nomic’. ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ are also examples.

Ecofeminism The movement that saw women as being guardians of environmen-

tal values, because they were essentially caring and nuturing and not exploitive.
Coined in 1974, the core ideas were much thinned out by the 1990s.

Ecotone The transition zone between two ecological formations, such as the
reedswamp between dry land and open water in a lake, or an area of scrub between a
woodland and open grassland.

Ecumene The parts of the planet Earth that are inhabited by humans.

Endemic Species of plants and animals that have a very limited and specific distri-
bution. Islands and mountain chains are often high in endemics that have evolved
there and had little chance to spread: the subspecies of finch and tortoise found on
different islands in the Galapagos are famous endemics owing to Charles Darwin’s
notice of them in his thinking about evolution.

Energy The ability to do work, coming in forms such as chemical, potential and
kinetic. It is measured as force times distance: the joule is one newton applied through
one metre. The transformation of energy from one form to another entails the loss of
the ability to do work, in the form of heat. (See also Entropy.)

Energy density The amount of energy stored in a unit mass of a resource (often in
joules per kilogram): a good comparator for foods and fuels.

Energy intensity The cost of a product or service in energy terms. Aluminium is

energy intensive (230–340 MJ/kg), whereas steel (20–50 MJ/kg) is not.

ENSO El Niño-Southern Oscillation, a set of interacting parts of a single global

system of coupled ocean–atmosphere climate fluctuations caused by oceanic and
atmospheric circulation. ENSO is the most prominent known source of variability in
weather and climate around the world on a time scale of 3 to 10 years. Its effects are
felt in all the major oceans and in South America, Africa and Oceania.

Entropy A difficult concept in energy studies which, in environmental contexts,

usually refers to the production of disorder in a system through time. The presence of
life seems to be contrary to the formation of entropy but is achieved only at the cost
of the dissipation of potential energy to heat.

Equids Horse-like animals, including, for example, zebras.

Feedback loop A mechanism in a machine or a living system which keeps it stable.

Gaia hypothesis Associated with the chemist, former NASA scientist, and environ-
mentalist, James Lovelock (1919– ), this postulates that the planet functions as kind
of super-organism which tends to maximise the conditions for life, though not nec-
essarily the human form. The concept is controversial among many biological scien-
tists because it appears to have elements of teleology in it.
258 G E H
High forest Apparently mature forest, with many trees growing close enough for
their canopies to overlap or have only a very narrow space between them.

Holism The notion that the whole is more than the sum of its parts; a system can
only be understood as a whole and not by breaking it down into subsystems. An
important idea in the science of ecology.

Hydrocarbon A chemical compound consisting only of carbon and hydrogen.

Many hydrocarbons are combustible in normal conditions.

Infield In pre-industrial agriculture, a field that is usually near a settlement and is

cultivated in most years, carefully manured and regularly allowed periods of fallow.

Intrinsic value The idea that non-human entities have their own value and not
simply that placed on them as elements for human usage; the opposite state is called
‘instrumental value’.

Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804) German philosopher and geographer whose ideas

have had a lasting impact upon environmental thinking as well as in many other
spheres. The importance of rationality in formulating morality is central.

Land ethic Associated with Aldo Leopold (1886–1948), American zoologist, who
formulated it as ‘A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and
beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.’ Along with
Henry David Thoreau (1817–62), his ideas are often central to American thinking
about environmental matters.

Malthusian Pertaining to Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834), demographer and

political economist. He thought that the potential of population growth to outstrip
resources was ever-present. His influence is still strong.

Mendelian Pertaining to Gregor Mendel (1822–84), the father of modern genetics.

Using sweet peas, he demonstrated that inherited characteristics could be predicted
on a probabilistic basis.

Mutualism The connection between two organisms which is to the benefit of both.
It may be essential to both species or they may be able still to exist in its absence. The
closest form of mutualism is symbiosis.

Nietszche, Friederich (1844–1900) A philosopher of complex ideas but often quoted

as an ‘existententialist’: the freedom of the individual to exist, act and formulate
morality is central and more important than, for example, systems of rationality.

Nomadic pastoralism An economy based on herding domesticated or semi-

domesticated animals which involves a seasonal round of movement between pas-
tures and/or water sources. Commonest in dry or mountainous regions.

Normative Normative statements tell us how things ought to be, how to value them,
which things are good or bad and which actions are right or wrong. Clearly many
statements made in an environmental context are of this kind.
 G 259
Objectivity The suggestion that humans can step back and view a phenome-
non as it really is, without bias. The natural sciences most frequently make such a
claim.

Outfield In pre-industrial agriculture, a field taken in from wild vegetation and

used for a limited period before its fertility declines and it is allowed to revert to an
earlier condition.

Ovicaprids In archaeology, bones of either sheep or goats but which cannot be

determined any further.

PCB Polychlorinated biphenyls. A class of organic compounds used in many indus-

trial processes which are very stable and break down very gradually in the environ-
ment. Thus they have the potential to be long-lived pollutants.

Pelagic The open sea: the zone away from the coast and above the sea-floor.

Photosynthesis The way in which green plants ‘fix’ solar energy into chemical form.
In a simple expression it can be represented by the equation:
Carbon dioxide
Water
Light energy → Glucose
Oxygen
Water

Phytolith A microscopic spicule of silica found in the stems, roots and leaves of, for
example, grasses. Its size and shape may be specific to a species or other taxonomic
group and hence useful in environmental archaeology.

Phytomass As in biomass, but confined to plant material.

Pollarding A form of tree management: the trunk is cut off just above the browsing
level of domesticated animals and the young sprouting stems harvested for fodder or
other uses.

Positivism The belief system underlying the natural sciences, especially the need for
observation, the formulation and testing of hypotheses, and the logical structure of
any statements made.

Prometheus In Greek mythology, the Titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it
to humankind. In the course of conflict with Zeus, he was chained to a rock and an
eagle came and ate out his liver, which grew again every night. Thus, his presumptions
(hubris) were punished.

Pyrophytes Plants which are not damaged by fire; some even need it for successful
reproduction.

Qanat An irrigation system from south-west Asia in which water from the foot of
mountains is led to fields in a series of parallel tunnels with vertical air shafts. An
Arabic word, pronounced ‘kanat’.

Saqiya A water-lifting device powered by a draught animal, such as a donkey, mule

or camel, used in pre-industrial irrigation systems. An Arabic word.
260 G E H
Sentientism The idea that moral precepts apply only to ‘sentient’ creatures such as
mammals and birds.

Shaduf A counterbalanced pole used as a lifting device in pre-industrial irrigation

systems. The power source is a human. An Arabic word.

Shaman An intermediary between the natural and spirit worlds who can travel
between worlds in a state of trance. Commonest in, but not confined to, hunter-
gatherer societies.

Shredding A form of tree management in which the side branches are all lopped to
provide animal fodder or usable wood.

Tao A Chinese word, usually translated as ‘The Way’. The source and guiding prin-
ciple of the universe. Adherence to it is necessary for harmony in the world. Often
pronounced ‘Dao’.

Teleology The proposition that a process is purposeful and has a goal or predeter-
mined end. A main characteristic of Darwinian thought is that evolution has no tele-
ology: it is open-ended.

Theriomorphy In which a spirit takes the form of an animal or even in which a

human-other animal hybrid is formed.

Transhumance This occurs when domestic animals are taken to a different envir-
onmental zone for a season and some of the human population follow them: for
example, to use mountain pastures only available in the summer.

Xerification Drying out. An early stage in desertification, when the overall phy-
tomass is diminished and more drought-tolerant plants replace those requiring more
water.

Zoonoses Diseases transmissible to humans but originating in wild animals.

Anthrax and Ebola virus are examples.
 Acronyms

ACLS American Council of Learned Societies

ATC Air Traffic Control
BSE Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (‘mad cow disease’)
CEO Chief Executive Officer
CHC Chlorinated Hydrocarbons
DNA Deoxyribonucleic Acid
ENSO El Niño-Southern Oscillation
FAO Food and Agriculture Organization [of the United Nations]
GCM Global Climate Model (or General Circulation Model)
GIS Geographical Information Systems
GM Genetically Modified
GNP Gross National Product
HEP Hydro-Electric Power
HGV Heavy Goods Vehicle
HIE High-Income Economy
HIV/AIDS Human Immunodeficiency Virus/Acquired Immunodeficiency
Syndrome
IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
LIA Little Ice Age
LIE Low-Income Economy
MNC Multi-National Company (see also TNC)
NGO Non-Governmental Organisation
PIE Post-Industrial Economy
SARS Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome
TNC Trans-National Company (same as MNC)
UNEP United Nations Environmental Programme
WWF World Wide Fund for Nature

261
 Index

Abu Hureyra, Syria, 54 Beuys, J., 167–8, 204

Africa binary pairs resolution, 5, 13, 229–30
cattle, 71, 123 biofuels, 176–7
forests, 126 biomass, 62, 142
game hunting, 128 Black Death, 19, 69
African Research Survey, 146 and individualism, 84
agriculture see industrial era agriculture, Boltzmann, L., 147
pre-industrial agriculture Brazil, 74
air power, 130–1 Brecht, B., 232
Al-Andalus, 70, 85 Brown, William, 125
alternative farming, 87 Buddhism, 218–19, 222, 226
Amazonia, gatherer-hunter impacts, 33–4 bull cults, 72
Amish cultures, 87
Apis bulls, 58 Cage, John, 232
aquaculture, 193–4, 241–2 Callitris intratropica, 33
aquifers, 191, 192 canals, 68
Argentina, transhumance system, 71–2 industrial era, 112, 113, 144–5
Arrhenius, S., 147 cane beetles, 147–8
atomic bombs, 130 canning process, 124
atréttur, 67 carbon, 17–18, 206
Attica, 65 carbon dioxide, xiii, 17, 145–6, 149, 193,
Auden, W. H., 80 247
Australia and cities, 189
and fire, 32–3, 62 Çatalhöyük, 93
wool production, 123 cattle, and colonialism, 122–3, 124
autopoiesis, 233 cellulose, 70
Ayllu community, 66 cemeteries, significance, 41
chaos theory, 206–7, 232–3
Bach, J. S., 90, 117 charcoal production, Roman, 76
Bacon, F., 15, 61 Chase-Dunn, C., 89
balance of nature, 233–5 Chauvet, Ardèche caves, 24–5, 42–3
Bali, irrigation, 70 chemical compounds, effects, 149
baptism, 84 chemical industry, 18, 112
Barbados, sugar production, 74 Childe, G., 56
beaver China
harvest, 37 early agriculture, 55
reintroduction, 187 irrigation, 70

262
 I 263
pre-industrial oil, 81 copper
trade routes, 87–8 mining, 141
water management, 76 use, 174
wet rice cultivation, 69 coppicing, 77
chinampa, 68 cosmic flows, frustration of/alignment
chlorinated hydrocarbons (CHCs), 149 with, 5
chlorofluorcarbons (CFCs), 200 cotton crops, 144
Christianity crop rotation, 64
and environmentalism, 227 culture, 3
and hunting, 80 Czech privatisation, 197
and technology, 89–90, 93
and trade, 88 dam construction, 190–1
Christo (artist), 204 Darwin, C., 3, 119, 154, 244
cities Darwinism, 57, 80, 230, 233–4
industrial era, 132–9; as cultural Social, 129
phenomenon, 136; environmental de Maria, W., 203
impacts, 132–6; growth, 132; public Deep Ecology, 5
parks, 127–8; resource demands, 132; deer hunting, 77–8
water use, supply, 137–9 defoliation, 184
PIE metabolism, 189–90 deforestation see forests
pre-industrial, 82; Asian, 96; water Demeter, 228
supply, 83–4 demography, 6–7
climate interruptions, 6–7
and agriculture, 56 population growth, 6–7
change, 206, 233, 240 social contexts, 7
and environmental history, 18–19 Dennett, D., 220
global models (GCMs), 231 Derwent, River, 112
and industrialisation, 114–15 Derwentcotes Steel Mill, 109–10
and PIE, 172–3 Descartes, R., 15, 61
clover, 73 Detroit, 136
coal developing countries, 152
industrial era effects, 113, 117–18 development diseases, 6–7
pre-industrial, 81 dimethyl sulphide, 15
Cobbett, W., 153 dimming world, 200
cod, 139 disequalibria, 234–5
colonialism DNA
agricultural imposition, 152–3 epigenetic change, 234
and cattle management, 122–3, 124 molecule module, xii–xiii, xv, 229
penetration, 146–7 dogs, domestication, 29, 40, 41
common fields, 151–2 domestication, 52–3, 56–8, 65, 205–6
common reed, 17 Donne, John, 25, 95
communications, improvements, 146 Durkheim, E., 207
concentration camps, 151
Confucianism, 226 early dryland agriculture, energy use, 11
conquest of nature, 3, 197, 230 earth system science, 15
consciousness, nature of, 235–7 earthquakes, 19
Constable, J., 155 East Germany, 142
consumerism, 207 ecological footprint, 19
consumption levels, 208 Table ecology, restoration, 187
Cook, Captain, 140 economic theory, 153–4
264 G E H
ecosystems excrement, human, 69, 96, 142
fragmentation, 151–2 exploration, 128–9
perceptions of change, 240–2
protected areas, 185–7 falconry, 78
Eden, Garden of, 79 Falkland Islands, 95
Egypt, ancient, 58 Falun (Sweden), copper mining, 141
irrigation, 68, 69 famine, worldwide, 115
Nile rituals, 84 fatalism, 5
ships, 85 fenland drainage, 96
Eisenhower, D., 185 Fertile Crescent, 56
El Niño, 115, 173; see also ENSO fire, 29–35
phenomenon and Australia, 32–3
electrical applications, 116, 170 and climate, 173
Eliot, T. S., 155, 222 landscape tool, 30–1, 44, 45
Ely Cathedral, 76 and Latin America, 33–5
emissions trading, 206–7 natural ecology, 29–30
emotional attachment, 223–6 and pre-industrial agriculture, 61–3
Empires, effect, 88, 89–90 in ritual, 63
employment, fragmentation, 151 and woodland, 31–2
enclosure, 75, 151 firepower, 62
energy fishing
access history, 10–12 cultural framework, 140
embedded content, 9–10 freshwater, 84
and materials, 8–12 sea, 85; industrial era, 139–41; PIE,
somatic/extrasomatic, 8–9 193–4; short-term exploitation, 241
transformations, 11–12 food
England, royal ponds, 84 industrial era: demand, 120;
Enlightenment, the, 150, 226 translocation/processing, 124–5
ENSO phenomenon, 17, 18–19, 62, 77, PIE: processing, 180; product sourcing,
115 179
entropy, and evolution, 8 pre-industrial agriculture: and gardens,
environment, 3 78; origins, 53–4; and pastoralism,
hybridity of change, 242–3 72–3; salt extraction, 75, 80; sugar
linguistics, 222 production, 74–5, 144, 147; yield
philosophies of, 96 increases, 54, 64
postmodernity, 222–3 foragers see gatherer-hunters
regulation v markets, 242 Ford, Henry, 111, 151
resonances, 221 foreign travel, 183
environmental determinism, 5 forests
environmental ethics, 3–5, 229 industrial era, 125–32; conversion to crop
environmental history, xiii, 239–44, 247–8 production, 143–4; cultural context,
environmental insecurities, 236–7 126–7; regional impacts, 125–6; total
epidemics, 148 impact, 125; and warfare, 131
equilibrium world, 207 PIE: cultural context, 181;
ethics, 3–6 deforestation, 180–1, 191–2, 241
Eucalyptus, 148 pre-industrial, 76–7; clearance, 91–2;
eutrophication, 195, 241 cultural contexts, 79–80; and warfare,
Evelyn, J., 79 131; and watersheds, 77
evolution, and entropy, 8 Foucault, M., 14
evolutionary biology, 233 fox hunting, 128
 I 265
fox, survival, 91 grand narratives, 15–17
Frisch, M., 203 grape cultivation, 64–5
fur seals, 140 grasslands, conversion to crop production,
143–4
Gaia hypothesis, 5, 15, 227, 231, 244 Great Exhibition 1851, 115
Gainsborough, T., 155 greenhouse effect, 145–6
game hunting, 128 and prognostication, xiv
gardens, 78–9 Grimes, P., 89
Gaskell, E., 153 groundwater, draw-down, 191
gatherer-hunters, 24–46 grouse, 128
ancient-lineage, 27 Gulf War, First, 184–5
antiquity, 25–6 Gutenberg, J., 153
cultural ecology, 24–5, 26, 37–8;
cohesion, 39–40 Hadrian’s Wall, 84
diminution, 38–9 Haldane, J. B. S., 2
and energy flows, 44; see also fire Hall, P., 136
energy relationships, 27–9 Hall, S., 93
energy use, 11 hare hunting, 129
evolution/dispersal, 26–7 Heizer, M., 203–4
extirpation impact, 35–8, 44–5 Heraclitus, 239
fragmentation processes, 40–1 herring fisheries, 85, 139
hidden disparagement, 221–2 Hill, M., 168
population density, 45–6 Hinduism, 63, 226
representations, 41–3 differentiated land conditions, 66
territory, 7, 43–4 HIV/AIDS, 7
transition to agriculture, 55 Table population effect, 171
trapping technologies, 36–7 Hoffman, R. C., 195
Geertz, C., 68–9 holistic thinking, 230–2
Gemeinschaft, 110, 151 Holocene
Genesis, message, 237 and climate change, 233
genetic modification, 58–9 early, 28–9, 54–5
genetic pre-programming, 57 and LIA, 115
George III, King of England, 89 and tropical diseases, 57
Germany Hong Kong, 190
coniferous forests, 126 Houseman, A. E., 155
Nazi myths, 222 Hudson’s Bay Company, 37
timber production, 125 human behaviour, 3–6
Gesellschaft, 110, 151 ambiguity, 5
Gilgamesh, 55 dominion drive, 237–8
Giorgione (Giorgio Barbarelli) del impact, 19
Castelfranco, 93 human excrement, 69, 96, 142
Glasgow, 136 human existence, antiquity, 25–6
global climate models (GCMs), 231 Humboldt, A. von, 153
global cycles, 17–18 Hume, D., 226
global, distinct from worldwide entity, hunter-gatherers see gatherer-hunters
xiii–xiv hunting
globalisation, 199–201, 207–8 cultural context, 80
Goldsworthy, A., 168, 204 industrial era, 128–9
golf courses, 182–3 PIE, 184
Gould, S. J., 245 terrain, 77–8
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Huntington, E., 119 and theorisation, 119
Huskisson, W., 119 whole environments, 125–32
Huxley, T. H., 5, 140 influenza pandemic, 148
hybridisation, 234 Ingold, T., 60
hydraulic civilisations, 69 inorganic production, 80–2
hydro-power generation (HEP), 137, 173 insecurities, 236–7
hydrocarbons Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
application, 145, 210 Change (IPCC), 172, 240
contamination by, 195 internal combustion engine, 115–16, 210
Iraq, 184
Iceland, 67 irrigation, 63, 67–70
India canal systems, 68
game hunting, 128 industrial era, 121–2, 137
irrigation, 121–2 and political control, 69–70
timber production, 125–6 post-industrial agriculture, 179
Indian Ocean trade, 71 spectrum, 67–8
Indonesia, irrigation, 68–9 vulnerabilities, 69
industrial era agriculture, 120–5 wet rice cultivation, 64, 68–9
crop: production, 143–4; yields, Islam, 67, 226
120–1 and trade, 88, 89
food see food, industrial era
irrigation, 121–2 Japan
mechanisation and movement, 120 forestry, 127
pastoralism, 119, 122–4 modernisation, 113, 152
and rural recreation, 129–30 Joyce, James, 150, 221
whole environments, 125–32 Jung, C., 147
industrialisation, 109–57
background, 109–10 Kant, I., 14, 96, 225
cities see cities, industrial era kermes oak, 62
and climate, 114–15 Kingston, Jamaica, 190
coalescing tendencies, 146–9 knowledge
conclusion, 154–7 categories, 13–14
consequences, 143–6 fragmentation/coalescence, 16–17
core zones, 112–13 grand narratives, 15–17
cultural ecology, 111 local-relative interpretations, 14–15
ecology, 113, 156–7 and philosophy, 14–15
energy and environment, 117–19 Koyukon Indians, 37, 39
environmental relationships, 114–17 Kurosawa, Akira, 205
evolution/dispersal, 111–13 Kyoto process, 206–7
exports/imports, 118–19
and food/crops see industrial era land use, pre-industrial, 94–5
agriculture land-based systems, for organic
fragmentations, 150–3 production, 63, 64–75
fundamental factors, 155–6 animals see pastoralism
key period, 110 ecological changes, 65
minerals see mineral extraction and enclosure, 75
outputs, 120 intensification, 73–5
representations, 153–4 and irrigation see irrigation
scale, 110 and population shifts, 66
seas see fishing, shipping and private ownership, 73–4
 I 267
rain-fed, 64 Maya civilisation, 68
and ritual, 67 mechanical clock, 95–6
social group arrangements, 65–7; Medawar, P. B., 14
internal changes, 67 Medieval Warm Epoch, 97
understanding of changes, 241 Table Mendelian genetics, 234
larch, 126 Mercator, G., 90
Larkin, P., 244 methane, xiii
Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), 26 Mezhirich, 26
Lawrence, D. H., 153 milk, non-use, 66
Leavis, F. R., 150 Millenium Ecosystem Assessment (MA),
leguminous crops, 73 239–40
Leopold, A., 15, 136 Milton, J., 232
limestones, 141 mineral extraction, 141–3
limits to growth ideas, 231 cultural context, 142–3
Linnaean system, 147, 151 and energy, 142
Lisbon earthquake, 96 industrial era, 141–3
literacy, extension, 153 management, 141–2
Little Ice Age (LIA), 63, 67, 82, 96, 97, PIE, 188–9
114–15, 172 pre-industrial, 80–2, 95
Little Red Riding Hood, 79 recycling, 142
living planet index, 19 from sea, 195
local cycles, 17 wastes, 141, 142
London miniaturisation, 174
firewood, 62 Mithen, S., 236
royal hunting parks, 78 Mnong Gar, Vietnam, 67
royal zoo, 89 modernism, 150
water supply, 84, 137 Mondrian, P., 150
Long, R., 204 Montreal Protocol, 200
Louis XIV, 77 morality, 3–4
Lovelock, J. R., 15, 227, 230, 247 Moser, W. G. von, 125
Luhmann, N., 13 Mozart, W. A., 232
Mumford, L., 132
Macaulay, T., 146 Muromachi era (of Japan), 218–19
McLuhan, M., 221 Muslim conquests, 68
McNeill, J., 220 mythological narratives, 227–9
Madeira, sugar production, 74
Magdalenian phase, 42 nanotechnology, 174
malaria, 6, 7 Nash, Paul, 131
Malthus, T./Malthusianism, 7, 97, 172, nation state
229, 231, 235 as environmental agent, 96
map-making, 90 and industrialisation, 116
Marco Polo, 81 and resource management, 152
Marsh, G. P., 154 national parks, 130, 153, 221
Marx, K., 147, 224 nátturá, 67
Marxism, 226, 227 natural capital, 15
material world, 2–3 natural sciences, 246–7
materials nature, 3
and energy see under energy ‘balance’ of, 233–5
mass movement, 144–5 conquest of, 3, 197, 230
Mauritius, 76 nature’s services, value, 187
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Nazi myths, 222 perfectibility of human kind, 5
Nehru, J., 15–16 pharmacology, and disease control, 151
Nelson, R., 37 philosophies of environment, 96
Netherlands, water management, 76, 84 philosophy, 14–15, 61, 96
Newcomen, T., 112 photosynthesis, 8
Newton, I., 93, 117, 232, 245 Picasso, P., 150
Nietzsche, F. W., 14 PIE see post-industrial economy
El Niño, 115, 173 Pinchot, G., 153
nitrogen, 69, 73–4 plague, 6
nitrogen levels, 64 plankton, 15
nitrous oxides, xiii plantain, 17
nomadic pastoralism, 71, 72–3, 221 plastics, 174
non-equilibrium states, 232–3 Plato, 15, 65
noösphere, 207, 245 Pleistocene
Norman conquest, 66 and agriculture, 56
North Sea fisheries, 139, 140 extinctions, 35–6
nuclear power, 173–4, 177, 208, 247 migration, 26–7
nuclear warfare, 185 overkill, 40–1
nutrient retention, 64 Pliny the Elder, 81
pollarding, 77
oaks, 77, 126 Polynesia, political control, 70
oil Pomo de Ayala, Guaman, 52–3
industrial era effects, 118 population
pre-industrial use, 81 density and species richness, 243–4
and warfare, 184–5 environmental limits, 7
Oppenheimer, R., 16 gatherer-hunters, 45–6
organic production see land-based and industrialisation, 114, 156
systems, for organic production PIE growth, 171–2
owls, environmental/cultural associations, pre-industrial growth, 97
24–5 shifts, 66
Portugal, ships, 85
Pacific positional goods, 196–7
fisheries, 139–40 post-industrial agriculture, 177–80
weapons testing, 185 cultural resistance, 178–9
palaeontology, 233 domestication, 179–80
Paris, fish supply, 84 intensification, 177–8
parks, 78–9, 152 irrigation, 179
national, 130 post-industrial economy (PIE)
tree-plantings, 126 cities, metabolism, 189–90
particle physics, 231 consumer aspirations, 196–7
pastoralism, 58, 70–3 cultural ecology, 169–70
animals, 70–1 demand for meat/fish, 210
and communism, 226 environmental relationships, 171–6
ecology, 70 environmental surprises, 175 Table
and fire, 62–3 evolution/dispersal, 170–1
impact, 71 extravagances, 169
in industrial era, 119, 122–4 fundamental factors, 209–11
management, 71–2 globalisation, 199–201, 207–8
and ritualism, 72–3 mineral extraction, 188–9
peat growth, 31–2 new energy, 176–7
 I 269
protected areas, 185–7 Pushkari, 26
representations, 203–5 pyrophytes, edible, 30
seas, 192–5
technology: fragmentations, 201–3; rabbit management, 71
intensification, 195–9; trends, 197–9 radiation, 131–2, 177
televisual world, 168–9 rain-fed agriculture, 64
tensions, 205–9 ranching, 73, 122–3, 124
whole environments, 180–5 rationality, 224, 225–6
post-structuralism, 220 Reagan, R., 181
postmodernity, 222–3 recreation
potato, 73 industrial era, 127–30
in industrial era, 121 PIE, 181–4; cultural context, 183
pre-industrial agriculture, 52–97 red deer, 77–8, 128
accessory changes, 75–86 Reformation, the, 226–7
animals see pastoralism refrigeration, 124, 139
beginnings, 53–4 religion, 226–7
conclusion, 97 Repton, Humphrey, 126
cultural ecology, 54 restoration ecology, 187
domestication, 52–3, 56–8, 65 rice cultivation, 64, 68–9
ecosystems, development, 59–60 Richards, J. F., 96
environmental relationships, 58–61, road building, post-1918, 144, 145
65–6 Rome
environmental/cultural origins, 56–7 aqueduct builders, 137
evolution/dispersal, 54–8 charcoal production, 76
and fire, 61–3 mining, 80–1
fragmentations, 90–2 water supply/sewage, 83–4
genetic modification, 58–9 Rome Plow, 228–9
as ideological alternative, 87 Roosevelt, T., 153
management/impact see land-based Rousseau, J.-J., 15
systems, for organic production rubber trees, 127
outcomes, 94–7 Rudradeva, King of Kumaon, 80
raised-bed, 57–8 Rutherford, E., 147
representations, 93–4
romantic appeal, 87 Saddam Hussein, 184
separations of roles, 61 Sahlins, M., 46
shifting agriculture, 153 sailing ships, 85
social attitudes, shifts, 60–1 St Eustace, 80
survival, 86–7 St Jacobskirche (Lübeck), Kleine Orgel,
transition from hunting/gathering, 1–2
dates, 55 Table salmon farming, 193–4
whole environments, 76–80 salt extraction, 75, 80
pre-industrial inorganic production, sand dunes, 129
80–2 Scandanavia, reindeer herding, 123–4
Prigogine, I., 233 scapegoat, 72
printing, 153 Schiller, F., 247
progress, idea of, 5 schistosomiasis, 57
Prometheus, 5, 13, 63 Schoenberg, A., 150, 232
protected areas, 185–7 science
Proulx, A., 179 fragmentation effect, 151
public parks, 127–8 and PIE problem solving, 176
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scripts, 61 Suez Canal, 136
seas, 84–6 sugar production, 74–5, 144, 147
contamination, 192–5 supernatural agency, 227
discarded munitions, 131 superpower coalescence, 199–201
interpretations, 86 sustainability, 231, 233
and recreation, 129 and disequilibria, 235
see also fishing; shipping Suzuki, D. T., 219
Seattle, Chief, 40 Sweden, iron production, 76
self-organising systems, 233
Senegal, 67 Tambora, eruption, 115
Seurat, G., 150 taro, 68
sewage, 82, 83–4, 139 technological determinism, 15–16
shipping technologies
and forestation, 76–7 post-industrial, 195–9, 201–3
improvements, 75, 85 pre-industrial, 95–6; and Christianity,
mass movement of materials, 144–5 89–90, 93; trapping technologies,
naval, 130 36–7
steam, 136, 139, 146 televisual world, 168–9, 207, 225
Sienna, water supply, 84 terrace construction, 64, 65
sierra redwood, 126 thermodynamics, second law, 12
Silk Road, 87–8 Thoreau, H. D., 15, 125, 130
skyscrapers, 136 tin mining, 81
slash-and-burn cultivation, 62 Titicaca, Lake, 68, 69
slave labour/trade, 74–5, 82, 88, 147 tobacco production, 144
Smith, Adam, 93, 153 Tocqueville, A. de, 153
Smithson, R., 203 trade, pre-industrial, 87–90
soil loss, 65 coalescence effect, 88–9
and deforestation, 126 environmental effects, 89
solar-powered agriculture, energy use, 11 transfer of ideas, 89–90
South/Central America, irrigation transitions, xiv–xv
systems, 68, 69 trapping technologies, 36–7
Spain, Islamic Trollope, A., 128, 157
irrigation, 68, 70 tropical diseases, 57
wood supply, 85 trout, transference, 148
speciation, 234 Turner, J. W. M., 155
species Tyne, River, 138
extinction, 186
richness and population density, 243–4 United States of America
spread, 147–9 and globalisation, 200–1
Sphagnum bogs, 32 National Parks Service, 153
Stalin, J. V., 110 PIE impetus, 171
states of change, xiv–xv ranching, 124
steam Upper Palaeolithic, 29
boats, 136, 139, 146 uranium, 141
engine, 112, 115 urbanisation, 221; see also cities
trawlers, 139
steel production, 109, 141 values, 13
stones, extraction, 80–1, 141 Vernadsky, V. I., 207, 245
Strathern, M., 234 Vico, G. V., 2
sublime, notion of, 5 Victoria, Queen, 115
 I 271
Vietnam, 67 whaling
defoliation, 184 industrialisation, 140–1
Visigoths, 66 post-industrial, 194
volcanic eruptions, 88, 115 pre-industrial, 85, 95
Vonnegut, K., 219–20 White, L., 89–90
Whitman, W., 113
Wallace, R., 245 whole environments
warfare, 130–2 industrial era, 125–32
changes, 130–1 PIE, 180–5
and cities, 136–7 pre-industrial agriculture, 76–80
and industrialisation, 131 Whorf, B., 222
post-industrial, 184–5 wilderness, 221
and radiation, 131–2 Williams, M., 92
role in accelerating trends, 170 Wilson, E. O., 224
wastes windmills, 83
animal, 178 wine-making, spread, 148
mineral, 141, 142 winter sports, 182
water, as free good, 138–9 Wittfogel, K., 69
water management, 83–4 woodland, and fire, 31–2
background, 83 Wordsworth, William, 5, 79, 126,
and fish supply, 84 153
industrial era, 112, 137–9 World Fairs, 147
PIE, 190–2 Great Exhibition 1851, 147
and ritualism, 84 World Wars I and II, 131
supply, 83–4 world-views, commonality, xv
and warfare, 131 worldwide, distinct from global
wetlands, 92 entity, xiii–xiv
watersheds, 77 writing techniques, 95
waterways, modification, 76
Watt, James, 111, 112 Yamaguchi Seichi, 201
Webern, A., 150, 232 Yarquon-Taminin aquifer, 192
weeds, differentiation, 91 Younger Dryas period, 54
West Indian sugar production, 74
wet rice cultivation, 64, 68–9 Zagros Mountains, 72
wetland habitats, 92 Zen Buddhism, 218–19, 222, 231
Weyler y Nicolau, Valeriano, 151 Zoroastrianism, 63, 229