Origin Story, page 26
Within decades, Europe’s commercial and military power had undermined ancient states and lifeways. Textile production using spinning and weaving machines powered by steam engines ruined artisan textile producers in India, which had been the agrarian era’s leading producer of cotton cloth. As Britain gained political and military control of the Indian subcontinent, it locked in these imbalances by keeping Indian textiles out of British markets. Even the building of India’s major railroads benefited Britain more than India. Most of the track and rolling stock was manufactured in Britain, and the huge Indian rail network was designed primarily to move British troops quickly and cheaply, to export cheap Indian raw materials, and to import English manufactured goods. In the Americas, Africa, and Asia, growing demand for sugar, cotton, rubber, tea, and other raw materials encouraged environmentally destructive plantations, often worked by quasi–slave labor. In wars that pitted machine guns against spears and assegais, European powers carved up Africa and ruled it for the best part of a century.
Europe’s economic, political, and military conquests encouraged a sense of European or Western superiority, and many Europeans began to see their conquests as part of a European or Western mission to civilize and modernize the rest of the world. To them, industrialization was a sign of progress. It was part of the transformative mission, first advocated in the Enlightenment, to “improve” the world, to make it a better, richer, and more civilized place for humans.
Act 2 of the Anthropocene was exceptionally violent. It began in the late nineteenth century and lasted until the middle of the twentieth century. During this act, the first fossil-fuel powers turned on one another. In the late nineteenth century, the United States, France, Germany, Russia, and Japan began to challenge Britain’s industrial leadership. As rivalries intensified, the major powers tried to protect their markets and sources of supply and keep out competitors. International trade declined. In 1914, rivalry turned into outright war. For thirty years, destructive global wars mobilized the new technologies and the growing wealth and populations of the modern era.
Other parts of the world were sucked into these wars, and they were fought with as much brutality in China and Japan as they were in Russia and Germany. As the red mist of war descended over Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, warring governments competed to develop more destructive weapons. Science gave the combatants terrifying new weapons, some of which tapped the energies lurking within atomic nuclei. On August 6, 1945, a US B-29 Superfortress bomber flew from the Mariana Islands in the Pacific and dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. It destroyed much of the city and killed eighty thousand people. (Within a year, another seventy thousand had died from injuries and radiation.) On August 9, 1945, a similar weapon was dropped on the city of Nagasaki.
Act 3 includes the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century. From the bloodbath of the world wars, the United States and the Soviet Union emerged as the first global superpowers. There were many local wars, most aimed at overthrowing European colonial rule. But there were no more major international wars during the era of the Cold War. By now, all powers understood that there would be no victors in a nuclear war. But there were some close shaves. Soon after the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, President John Kennedy admitted that the odds of an all-out nuclear war had been “between one out of three and even.”1
The four decades after World War II witnessed the most remarkable spurt of economic growth in human history. This was the period of the Great Acceleration.
Global exchanges were renewed and intensified. In the forty years before World War I, according to one influential estimate, international trade increased in value at an average rate of about 3.4 percent a year; from 1914 to 1950, that rate fell to just 0.9 percent; then, from 1950 to 1973, it rose at about 7.9 percent a year before falling slightly to about 5.1 percent between 1973 and 1998.2 In 1948, twenty nations signed the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), which lowered barriers to international trade. Wartime technologies were now put to more peaceful uses. Oil and natural gas added to the energy bonanza of the nineteenth century, and so did nuclear power, the peaceful counterpart of nuclear weapons. Productivity soared, first in the leading fossil-fuel economies and then elsewhere. Consumption soared too as output rose and producers sought new markets at home as well as abroad. In wealthier countries, this was the age of the automobile, of TV, of suburban dream houses, and, eventually, of computers, smartphones, and the Internet. A new middle class started to emerge. This was also when the industrial revolution began to spread beyond the old industrial heartlands. By the early twenty-first century, industrial technologies had transformed much of Asia, South America, and parts of Africa as completely and as fast as they had once transformed European societies. As other areas of the world industrialized, their wealth and power increased. There began to appear, once again, a world with multiple hubs of power and wealth. Within two hundred and fifty years of the first modern steam engine, fossil-fuel technologies had transformed the entire planet.
During the Great Acceleration, humans mobilized energy and resources on such an unprecedented scale that they began to transform the biosphere. That is why many scholars date the dawn of the Anthropocene epoch to the middle of the twentieth century.
Transforming the World: Technologies and Science
Innovation, propelled by cheap energy, was the main driver of change. Innovations created steeper gradients of wealth and power that encouraged competition, which drove innovation, in a powerful feedback cycle. Entrepreneurs and governments hunted down the innovations that might give them an industrial or military edge and invested in the businesses and scientists, the schools, universities, and research institutes that could generate and disseminate new technologies and skills.
The wars of the early twentieth century drove a forced march of innovation. During World War I, Germany ran short of natural fertilizers, and German scientists, led by Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, figured out how to draw nitrogen from the air to make artificial fertilizers. Nitrogen doesn’t like to react, so this was not easy. Prokaryotes had solved the problem billions of years ago, but Haber and Bosch were the first multicellular organisms to successfully fix atmospheric nitrogen. The Haber-Bosch process uses huge amounts of energy to overcome nitrogen’s reluctance to combine chemically, so it was viable only in a world of fossil fuels. But artificial nitrogen-based fertilizers transformed agriculture, raised the productivity of arable land throughout the world, and made it possible to feed several billion more humans. It turned fossil-fuel energy into food.
A liquid fossil fuel, oil, was first used in the late nineteenth century as a replacement for whale oil in lighting. The first internal combustion engines, developed in the 1860s and 1870s, showed how to generate mechanical force from oil. Unlike the steam engine, whose heat source was external to the engine’s moving parts, in internal combustion engines, the heat from fossil fuels drove pistons or rotors or turbine blades directly. Internal combustion engines spread rapidly in the late twentieth century, largely because of their wartime use to transport soldiers and equipment and to power the first tanks. They were also installed in the first military aircraft, which pioneered the dark art of dropping explosives from the air. Once the wars ended, manufacturers of automobiles and planes turned to civilian markets to create a world in which more and more individuals owned and used cars or flew in planes. Global trade was transformed by oil tankers, container ships, and large planes.
Information lies at the heart of Anthropocene technologies. Information technologies were transformed when governments invested in a massive expansion of education and research, and businesses and corporations funded research to develop and disseminate new products and services. To break enemy codes, wartime governments funded research into the mathematics of information and computing. This research, combined with the invention of the transistor in the late 1940s, laid the foundations for the computerization of science, business, government, finance, and everyday life in the second half of the century. Rocketry, also developed during the wars, would eventually send humans into space. Wartime governments had launched huge research programs to develop nuclear weapons. The American government’s Manhattan Project developed the first atomic bombs, including the weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. These unleashed the energies of disintegrating uranium nuclei. The Soviet Union soon developed its own atomic weapons, helped by information leaked by spies from the Manhattan Project. Within a decade, the United States and the Soviet Union had also built hydrogen bombs, which released the much greater energies generated by proton fusion, the same mechanism that powers all stars. The first H-bomb was tested in 1952.
Much of this innovation was inspired by breakthroughs in the supercharged collective-learning environment of modern science. Albert Einstein developed his theory of relativity in the first two decades of the twentieth century. It improved on Newton’s understanding of the universe by showing that matter and energy warped space and time, and this warping was the real source of gravity. Einstein also showed that matter could be converted into energy, and that insight provided the scientific foundations for nuclear weapons and nuclear power. Quantum physics, developed in the same era, gave deeper insight into the strange, probabilistic world of atomic nuclei. Without that understanding, nuclear weapons, transistors, global-positioning systems, and modern computers would not exist today. In the 1920s, astronomers such as Edwin Hubble found the first evidence that our universe began in a big bang. In biology, Darwin’s idea of natural selection was combined with Mendel’s understanding of heredity and the improved statistical methods of R. A. Fisher to lay the foundations for modern genetics.
These and many other new insights and technologies powered innovation and growth during the Great Acceleration. Increased productivity allowed human populations to grow faster than ever before. In 1800, there were nine hundred million humans on Earth. By 1900, there were one and a half billion. By 1950, when I was a child, there were two and a half billion humans, despite the huge casualties of the world wars. During my lifetime, human numbers have increased by another five billion. Such enormous numbers can numb the brain, so it’s worth taking the time to grasp what they mean. In the two hundred years since 1800, the number of humans increased by more than six billion. Each additional human had to be fed, clothed, housed, and employed, and most had to be educated. The challenge of producing enough resources in just two hundred years to support an extra six billion humans was colossal.
Remarkably, the challenge was met, with modern technologies, modern fossil fuels, and modern managerial skills. Productivity soared in agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation. Though food and other supplies did not always get to those who needed them, enough food was produced to feed more than seven billion people. The crucial changes were in the production of artificial fertilizers and pesticides, the use of fossil-fueled farm machinery, the building of thousands of irrigation dams, and the production of new, genetically modified crops. Modern farming technologies brought new land into cultivation, increasing the farmed area from half a billion hectares in 1860 to almost three times as much in 1960.3 Fishing trawlers equipped with powerful diesel engines, sonar detection equipment, and massive nets sucked up most of the organisms in the areas they fished. The fish catch rose from nineteen million tons to ninety-four million tons between 1950 and 2000, though overfishing means that many fisheries are now in danger of collapse.
Improved information technologies made it easier to accumulate, store, keep track of, and use the huge amounts of information that drove innovation and kept hugely complex modern societies running. Communications and transportation technologies transformed collective learning by creating, for the first time, a single, linked network of minds that spanned the globe and could manage and track down new information in colossal electronic stores of information. The noösphere, the sphere of mind, became a dominant driver of change within the biosphere. Cheap but powerful networked computers gave billions of people access to more information than they could have found in all the libraries of the premodern world. When combined with the mathematically sophisticated techniques of modern statistical analysis, computers allowed governments, banks, corporations, and individuals to keep track of huge flows of resources. They also allowed instant communication between individuals anywhere in the world through telegrams, phones, and the Internet. If the sharing of information is what makes us humans so powerful, computers multiplied that power many times over. As always, there were losses, too. Just as memory skills probably declined with the spread of writing, so calculating skills declined with the spread of computers and calculators.
By 2000, the fossil-fuels revolution embraced most of the world, including many older hub regions. The yawning gaps in national wealth and power of the late nineteenth century began to close. European powers, weakened by the world wars, grudgingly gave up their colonies, and older hub regions in Asia, the eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Americas began to catch up in technology, wealth, and power.
Behind all these changes was the bonanza of cheap energy from fossil fuels. Coal production increased everywhere, but so did the production of oil and natural gas. New oil fields were developed in Arabia, Iran, the Soviet Union, and even along the continental shelves. In the Middle East alone, oil production increased from 28 billion barrels in 1948 to 367 billion barrels in 1972, just twenty-five years later. Natural gas came into its own during the Great Acceleration. Total energy consumption doubled in the nineteenth century and then rose by ten times in the twentieth century. Human consumption of energy rose much faster than human populations.
Transforming the World: Governance and Society
The very nature of society and government was transformed by the new energy flows and technologies of the Anthropocene. Once, all humans had been foragers, and government really meant family relationships. After farming appeared, more and more people lived in peasant villages and supported themselves by farming. In farming societies, government meant, above all, mobilizing energy and resources from peasants. Today, most humans no longer gather or farm to produce their food and other necessities. They have become wage earners. Like the potters of ancient Sumer, they live on wages earned by doing specialized work. And that transformed the nature of government, because now governments had to become involved in the day-to-day lives of all their citizens. This is because wage earners, unlike peasants, cannot survive without governments. Farming villages could exist quite happily beyond the borders of the great agrarian civilizations, but wage earners depend on the existence of laws, markets, employers, shops, and currencies. A specialist wage earner, like a nerve cell, cannot survive alone. This is why a world of wage earners is much more tightly integrated than a world of peasant farmers. Modern governments regulate markets and currencies, protect the businesses that provide employment, create mass educational systems that can spread literacy to most of the population, and provide the infrastructure for the movement of goods and workers. To do all this, they have to draw more and more of their subjects into the work of government and administration.
We can see the changeover to modern types of government in the nineteenth century, as industrialization took off, more and more peasants became wage workers, and governments began to mobilize more of their populations. Revolutionary France, transformed by revolution and under attack from most of Europe, was one of the first modern states to recruit soldiers systematically from the entire population. The government of the United States was also forged in a period of war during which it had to mobilize much of the population. To do that, governments needed detailed records on the number of citizens, on their health and fitness, on their education, skills, wealth, and loyalty. These were problems most traditional governments had been able to ignore. The governments of revolutionary France and the United States began to mobilize the loyalty of their subjects through democratization, which brought more of the population into the work of government, and through nationalism, which appealed to people’s sense of a shared national community. They offered increasing numbers of their subjects (wealthy men, other men, and women, in that order) some role in government through elections. Through schools and the rapidly developing news media, governments tried to reach into the minds of their subjects and generate new forms of loyalty. Nationalism proved a powerful way of uniting people with different traditions, religions, and even languages. It mobilized traditional instincts of kinship by constructing in the minds of citizens a vast, imagined family of millions of people to whom they owed loyalty, service, and, in the extreme crises of war, perhaps even their lives.
The total wars of the early twentieth century turned governments into economic managers, as they tried to mobilize all the people and resources of modern industrial economies. We can roughly track the increasing role of government in economic management. In the late nineteenth century, the French government accounted for about 15 percent of French GDP, a very rough measure of total national production. At the time, that seemed like a lot. Contemporary governments in Britain and the United States accounted for less than 10 percent of their GDP. The wars of the early twentieth century forced governments to intervene more actively in economic management, and by the middle of the twentieth century, their economic role had increased everywhere. In the early twenty-first century, the average share of national expenditure controlled or managed by governments in the countries of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, founded in 1960) was 45 percent of GDP, with most richer countries falling in the range from 30 to 55 percent.4 Some governments, such as the Communist regimes of the Soviet Union and China, attempted to micromanage the entire national economy. Modern governments also wielded coercive power on a much larger scale than traditional governments had, through armies and police equipped with modern weaponry. Such power would have been unimaginable to the author of the Arthashastra, the ancient Indian treatise on statecraft. Modern governments have a scale, reach, power, and heft that make even the most powerful governments of the agrarian era look like featherweights.
