The Earth didn’t move

Roger Lewis

The Earth Transformed: An Untold History

By Peter Frankopan Bloomsbury £30

The birth of my first grandchild is imminent but, frankly, who’d want to be born into the world as it is today?

The planet is, as Peter Frankopan says with some relish, a vale of ‘sorrow and sadness’, brought on by acid rain, the threat of nuclear apocalypse, climate change (which on its own ‘threatens the very future of the human family’) and a general belief that ‘Entire ecosystems are collapsing.’

To which the only possible reaction is: so what? Beginning his story several billion years BC, Frankopan chronicles nothing other than what might be called Biblical catastrophe.

What mortal could have done anything about changes in the earth’s orbit around the sun; the impact of giant meteorites; tectonic shifts, which create mountain ranges and new continents, ‘pushing land that had been at sea level upwards, with the result that marine fossils can be found at or near the summit of some of the highest peaks’? And cause the horrific earthquakes that struck poor Turkey and Syria in February.

Disaster is what has made us, as animals and men, adapt to ‘a series of flukes, coincidences, long shots and serendipities’. Moths and butterflies in the Himalayas, for example, have moved up a thousand metres to find more amenable conditions.

Fish and crustaceans have dived deeper in the Mediterranean, searching for cooler currents. As deserts spread, humans migrate to the more equable, greener north, where crops can be grown.

Frankopan likes to dwell on the effects of the moon on tides, weather and reproductive cycles: ‘Albatrosses are more active on moonlit nights’ – as are werewolves, come to that.

Volcanoes fascinate our author. ‘Volcanic eruptions bring wide-ranging consequences for the natural world,’ apparently. Clouds of ash fill the sky, temperature plummets and nothing grows, leading to ‘large-scale deforestation and the transformation of woodlands into grasslands’. Herbivores vanish, as there’s a paucity of leaves to munch on.

‘I guess when we spoke on the phone, I thought “Renaissance man” was a figure of speech...’

The lesson of The Earth Transformed is that life exists under continuous sentences of death and destruction: storms, floods, droughts and severe winters, which ensure harvest failures and malnutrition, if not outright starvation.

The periods of ‘favourable climate conditions’, when people can build towns and cities, ‘develop writing systems, religions and complex economies’, are incredibly brief and few.

Even if civilisation does come about, it will collapse. Prosperity alternates with recession and poverty. Conflicts and wars abound, provoked by territorial aggression, and arguments over rights and private property.

Indeed, when people band together, there is immediate trouble. Higher population densities create bacterial disease and sanitation issues.

Agriculture was perhaps a bad idea, as illnesses jumped from cattle, goats and sheep to their handlers – chickenpox, smallpox and monkey pox. Maybe we should have done without meat, milk, clothes and textiles.

Frankopan generally doesn’t think much of mankind’s contribution at any stage. It is our fault insects and birds have gone, as this stems from ‘deforestation, heavy use of pesticides and urbanisation’.

For reasons undivulged, he travels regularly to New Delhi, Bishkek and Lahore, where pollution is rife, the air quality ‘acrid, damaging and dangerous’.

In Afghanistan, in 2017, the death toll from pollution and asphyxia was eight times higher than the number of casualties in battles with the Taliban. It makes you think, though I’m not sure about quite what.

Fossil fuels, open fires, motor traffic and the rest are sending ‘polycyclic hydrocarbons into the atmosphere’, which contribute, says our alarmist author, to mental illness and dementia, ‘as well as an elevated risk of self-harm’.

But then Frankopan is frightened of washing machines. He wants us to lose sleep over ‘microplastic fibres, shed from synthetic clothing, discharged’ by a fast spin.

I don’t have to believe any of this if I don’t want to. Though Frankopan, a Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford, says he has analysed the chemical constituents of shells and made evidential inferences from midges trapped in Danish sediment, it’s not particularly original to point out how everything is interconnected and in permanent flux.

I think I knew cycles of aridity and glaciation are a planetary norm, but then I did O-Level geography.

Global warming, furthermore, is nothing new – so why blame governments and the Industrial Revolution? Three million years ago, sea levels were 25 metres higher than today, and temperatures three degrees Celsius higher. That wasn’t the fault of factories.

In 6,150 BC, a chunk fell off Norway, causing a massive tsunami, which submerged the areas connecting Britain and the Continent, turning us into an island. In Frankopan’s reasoning, this geomorphological event ‘consequently’ caused everything from our need for a navy, and hence our imperial ambitions, the Second World War and ‘the exceptionalism that helped drive the Brexit vote’.

As when Frankopan mentions the ‘linguistic similarities between Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iran subfamilies’, are we meant to be incredibly impressed by his cleverness, wit and erudition? It seems simply selfregarding, something to impress undergraduates with.

This big, flabby bore of a book fails to reach the obvious conclusion – that another way of interpreting the evidence is to say how resilient and persistent people are, as they adapt to circumstances outside their control.

This is a cause for celebration, not modish complaint and phoney hand-wringing.

Roger Lewis’s Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor is out later this year