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The
expanding anthroposphere 1. Life
before humans Human
life, like all life, consists of matter and energy structured and directed by
information. All life is part of an ecosystem, all ecosystems together
constitute the biosphere - the total configuration of living things
interacting with each other and with non-living things. Every form of life
continuously affects, and is affected by, its ecosystem. 1.1.
The first environmental crisis in the biosphere.[1] The origins of life remain a mystery; yet it seems safe to assume
that interactions between living and non-living matter are as old as life
itself. According to current insights, life probably began around 3.8 billion
years ago, deep beneath the earth's surface near volcanic vents, feeding on
chemicals such as sulphur. These earliest forms of life consisted solely of
bacteria - unicellular organisms, some of which gradually 'migrated' and
reached the surface of the seas where they made contact with air and
sunlight, and where they acquired the ability to absorb solar energy by means
of photosynthesis. Originally all microbes were
anaerobic - that is, unable to digest oxygen. Any oxygen contained in the
compounds they used as nutrients was rejected by their metabolism and
released into the atmosphere. This made the atmosphere eventually so rich in
oxygen as to be lethally poisonous to the anaerobic bacteria. By that time,
however, some varieties had evolved a metabolism capable of coping with such
high rates of oxygen. While the older varieties could survive only in
anaerobic niches, these new varieties were able to thrive and reproduce in an
atmosphere that had been filled with free oxygen by anaerobic life itself. Thus, the dynamics of the
biosphere brought about a drastic transformation of the non-living planetary
atmosphere. From the earliest beginnings, organisms did not only adapt to the
environment in which they lived: by the very act of living they also modified
their invironment. The impact exerted by each single organism during its
lifetime could only be minute; but the cumulative effect of countless
generations has been enormous. The early environmental crisis also that shows
that in the long run a species may destroy the very conditions for its
survival. However, while the anaerobic organisms perished in their own
emissions, their very destruction created space for new forms of life. As the
biogeologist Peter Westbroek observes: This event must have been the greatest environmental disaster ever.
Oxygen, a calamitous pollutant, made the atmosphere reactive to organic
matter and poisonous to most life then in existence. Virtually all the
existing biota were forced into sediments, stagnant waters, and other
environments where this poisonous gas had no access. Some organisms, however,
managed to survive the reactivity of oxygen, and others even "learned"
to exploit it for energy. They transformed the peril of oxygen into a driving
force of life on earth. (Westbroek 1991: 202) The
crucial factor in the further evolution of life was the potential for
individual cells to combine, and to enter into increasingly more complex
forms of specialization and collaboration such as fungi, plants, and animals.
The great bulk of living biomass is still made up of bacteria, even today
(see Gould 1996). And all the bacteria that live within the intestines of
humans and other large animals are still anaerobic.
All such swarms, flocks, and
societies consist of separate organisms in which myriads of cells are
competing and collaborating. Each organism is a distinct structure of matter
and energy, feeding on its environment, and engaged in a continuous exchange
of information with other members of the flock. Humans, latecomers in the
evolutionary process, are no exception. 1.2.
Continental drift. Globes often contain a small lamp, enabling us to
see two very different aspects of the earth's surface. As long as the light is
switched off, the globe shows the political division of the earth's surface,
with for example Whereas it is generally known that
political boundaries are subject to change, the natural contours of the
earth's surface appear to be fixed. But that is, of course, a misleading impression:
the natural condition of the soil, including the partition of water and land,
is also subject to continuous changes. From a geological perspective, the
very soil on which we live is a transient cover to the planetary surface,
half way between the stages of solid mountain rock and submerged ocean
mineral. At one time The continents continue to move.
South America and About fifteen million years ago similar
processes caused a rupture from south to north in East Africa, splitting the
continent from 2. Early
humans and their first impact: fire. 1. Human
origins and extensive growth. The first stage in human evolution is still
in many respects shrouded in uncertainties (see Lewin 1999). Most experts
agree, however, that climatological changes most likely gave strong impulses
to the process of hominization - in line with the current view that changes
in temperature and precipitation have generally played a major part in the
formation of new species ('speciation') as well as in their extinction (see
Vrba 1995). New evidence for Kortlandt's original idea about the connection
between geological events and the origins of the human species, has been put
forward by the Belgian paleontologist Yves Coppens (1994) under the heading
'East Side Story' - a felicitous allusion to humanity's supposed East African
roots. BOX. It is customary to use the word 'man' in discussing the relations
between humans and the biosphere. There are several reasons for not following
this custom. First of all we have to acknowledge that humankind consists of
men and women; the male form 'man', which is matched by the personal pronoun
'he', actually leaves out half of all human beings - and even more, if we
take into account that it also does not immediately evoke an image of
children. The grammatically singular form of the word 'man' also obscures the
fact that humans are social beings, who live and develop in interdependence
with other humans. So, rather than resorting to the familiar image of a 'man'
as a single, male, and adult individual we prefer to speak of humans or
people, in the plural, in order to bring out the inherent diversity and the
thoroughly social nature of human beings. After they made their first
appearance, humans gradually strenghthened their position in the biosphere -
at first slowly and almost imperceptibly, later at an increasingly more rapid
pace with ever more striking consequences.[2] In the process, they expanded
their domain extensively as well as intensively. They engrossed increasingly
more terrain and incorporated increasingly more non-human resources into
their groups: first fire, then, much later, certain selected plants and
animals, and, later again, fossil fuels. As they incorporated more energy and
matter into their societies, those societies grew in size, strength, and
productivity, while at the same time also becoming more complex, more
vulnerable, and more destructive. Throughout this entire process of
transformation, humans shared the same natural environment with other
species, including microbes, plants, and animals; this fundamental fact
continues to be part of the human condition. The first stage in human history
and 'prehistory' is known in archaeology as the Palaeolithic or Old Stone
Age. During this stage, which lasted for thousands of millennia, the overall
pace of social and cultural development was slow in comparison with later
stages. Yet some momentous changes took place, with great consequences for
the relationships between humans and the natural environment. Humans began
not only to use but also to make tools of their own, and they learned to
control fire. The combination of tools and fire enabled groups of humans to leave
their original habitat, the savannas of East Africa, and to migrate into
other parts of the world, penetrating first into remote corners of Eurasia
and then also into Australia and the Americas. The Palaeolithic can thus be
seen as a long run up, which was later followed by an enormously accelerating
sprint of which our present age is the latest episode. It was the scene of
incipient 'extensive' and 'intensive' growth of the anthroposphere. BOX. THE CONCEPTS OF EXTENSIVE AND
INTENSIVE GROWTH. The concepts of 'extensive' and 'intensive' growth are derived from
economic history (see Jones 2000), and are intended to serve 'sensitizing' or
'heuristic' purposes. The distinction allows us to perceive different
dimensions, and thus to broaden and enrich the idea of growth. Analytically, the
concepts of extensive and intensive growth have distinct meanings.
Empirically, however, the processes thus designated need not exclude each
other. They may sometimes counteract, and sometimes support each other. Their
actual interaction is a matter for empirical investigation. In economic history,
extensive growth refers to the extension of human numbers - first of all in a
demographic, then also in a geographic sense. Intensive growth refers to a
general rise in the standard of living: increase per capita in income. The distinction may
be applied to various other fields as well. Thus, in military-political
development, extensive growth may refer to the extension of
military-political units (regimes) - first of all in a territorial, then also
in a demographic sense: more land, more people. Intensive growth may then
refer to a general rise in political commitment and participation and an
increasing complexity of political institutions. We may also conceive
of a similar use of the two concepts in human ecology. Land that has been
cultivated intensively (in which a great deal of human labour has been
invested) represents a high degree of interdependence between humans and the
vegetation. Even a monoculture of sugar cane or soja beans which looks like a
homogeneous extension of one single crop can be shown in a more comprehensive
perspective to reflect a high degree of ecological complexity. Extensive growth in the
Palaeolithic had two related aspects: humans increased in numbers, and came
to occupy more and more territorial space. According to the hypothesis that
is currently considered most plausible, there were at least two big movements
'out of Africa': at first, groups belonging to the species Homo erectus
migrated into Asia Minor, from where they dispersed over large sections of
the Eurasian continent; much later (between 250,000 and 150,000 years ago)
members of the Homo sapiens species followed similar routes. The great waves of migration have
never since come to a halt, and continue to this very day. The Pacific
islands were among the last regions to be reached; human settlement there was
completed by circa 500 CE. Only about the migrations of the past few
centuries do we have sufficient evidence to establish their size and
trajectories. Because of the general growth of human numbers and big advances
in the means of transportation, these most recent migrations were probably
the largest of all time - both in human numbers and in distances covered. In
addition, more and more animals and plant seeds travelled along with these
movements of humankind, causing major changes in the earth's flora and fauna
(see For humanity's early demographic
development we have to rely on informed guesses. As for any other species,
the total number of humans at any given moment has been a function of two
variables: birth and death, fertility and mortality. The available evidence
suggests that, during the Palaeolithic, both were relatively high (although
not as high as in the succeeding, agrarian phase), with a slight excess of
births over deaths. The nomadic way of life tended to act as a constraint
limiting the number of children; it may also have made exposure to lethal
micro-parasites less frequent among foragers than among sedentary farmers (Harris
and Ross 1987: 21-36) The net result of these factors was a slow overall rate
of extensive growth, as explained at greater length in Chapter 4. According to the Italian
demographer Massimo Livi-Bacci (1992: 2), the total human population must
have reached one million at some time in the Paleolithic, ten million at the
beginning of the Neolithic, a hundred million during the Bronze Age, a
thousand million at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution; the next
tenfold increase, to ten billion, may be expected to be completed in the near
future. On the basis of the same material Livi-Bacci (1992: 33) estimates
that the total lifespan of all members of the world population today amounts
to no less than one seventh of the total life span of all human beings who
ever lived. Along similar lines the Russian physicist and demographer Sergey
Kapitza (2000: 40) concludes that the human species now numbers at least one
hundred thousand times more members than any other mammal of similar size and
with a similar position in the food chain. There is only one exception:
animals domesticated by humans. Their numbers include more than two billion
cattle and sheep which consume more food than all humans together. (See also
Grübler 1998: 133-4; McNeill 2000: 264) 2.2.
Intensive growth: technology, organization and civilization. Intensive
growth is harder to define and to measure than extensive growth, but its
impact on the biosphere is at least as important. In the process of intensive
growth, things and forces which were previously completely beyond human
control have been brought within the human domain and subjected to a certain
measure of human control. Intensive growth always implies innovations in
behaviour, which usually lead to a shift (however slight) in existing
balances of power as well as to changes (again, however slight) in mentality
or habitus. Extensive and intensive growth are not mutually exclusive. They
can either support and reinforce, or obstruct each other. A basic trend in all human
history, and certainly during its earliest phases (often designated as
'prehistory'), has been the increasing differentiation between humans and all
closely related animals in terms of their behaviour, their power, and their
general orientation or attitude - their habitus. Thanks to the flexibility
acquired in the course of evolution, humans were able to learn a large
repertory of new forms of behaviour. Especially successful were those
innovations in behaviour that added to human power vis-a-vis other large
animals, both predators and competitors. Transmitted by learning from
generation to generation, those innovations entered into the human habitus,
and became 'second nature'. The primary condition for the
process of differentiation in behaviour, power, and habitus has been, and
continues to be, the inborn human capacity for culture as manifested in
technology, organization, and civilization - each of which represents the
results of social learning. Indeed social learning is the crux of culture:
gathering information and passing it on to others - at first in direct
interaction, at a later stage in history through written texts and today by
other audio-visual means as well. The stores of cumulated information (or
'cultural capital') have enabled people to tap increasingly larger and more
varied flows of matter and energy, and to integrate those flows into their
societies. The term 'technology' refers
primarily to the means of harnessing various forms of matter and energy for
human purposes. With the aid of technology, extra-somatic forces are used to
supplement human strength and to compensate for human weakness and slowness. Technology could not have
developed without 'social organization': the various means by which people
are able to eexchange information, to co-ordinate their activities, and to
take into consideration the intentions and interests of others. Less obvious
perhaps, but equally important is the part played by 'civilization': the
social process in the course of which individuals learn to handle their own drives
and emotions. Simple though this definition may sound, it refers to an area
of human life that is still relatively unexplored, especially if we consider
the historical dimension to the way human personalities are shaped in social
processes (see Elias 2000: 363-447). The controversies that continue to rage
about such issues as 'nature and nurture' reveal the wide margin of
uncertainty and the lack of clarity in this area (see Rose and Rose 2000;
Segerstraele 2000). Still, the theme is highly relevant to this book, too,
since it touches on the problem of how individuals learn to cope with the
outside world in both its social and its natural aspects and to what extent
they are prepared to take into consideration the effects that their own
actions may have on other people and on the natural environment. Both
technology and social organization require civilization; neither can function
without it. Technology, social organization,
and civilization are closely interwoven. They correspond to what the sociologist
Norbert Elias (1978: 156-7) calls the 'triad of controls' over, respectively,
extra-human, inter-human, and intra-human processes. Each of the three forms
of control can only exist and evolve in connection with the other two. It is
possible, of course, to describe the history of technology as a mere
succession of new tools and appliances; yet, while this might look like a
very 'concrete' description, it would actually represent a great abstraction
from reality. Even the seemingly simplest objects from the Paleolithic could
only be manufactured by virtue of socially transmitted knowledge and
motivation. With the expansion of the
anthroposphere, increasingly more natural forces that were originally beyond
human control came to be incorporated in the human domain. Thus new
ecological regimes were formed, in which humans participated, along with the
forces they tried to control. This is clearly illustrated by the
domestication of fire. We shall discuss its early history at some length,
because as the first manifestation of human mastery over a strong and
potentially destructive force of nature, the control over fire was a basic
condition for the subsequent emergence of agriculture and industry which are
highlighted in the chapters that follow. 2.3.
The original domestication of fire. The domestication of fire was the
first great act of human interference with natural processes. It had numerous
far-reaching implications, stretching from the first hesitant beginnings to
our contemporary fuel-driven economy. It therefore demands our attention,
even though it took place long before the period in human history with which
this book is mainly concerned. In several ways, the original fire
regime may be seen as a paradigm for the socio-ecological regimes that were
developed later. It presents a paradigm in a double sense: first of all, in
actual practice, the regime by which humans learned to extend their care for
and control over fire could serve as a model for subsequent forms of care for
and control over other forces in non-human nature such as plants and animals.
Secondly, we may regard the domestication of fire as a model case in a more
theoretical fashion, since it brings out the strong link between such
apparently contradictory tendencies as increases in control and dependency,
in robustness and vulnerability, in potential for production and for
destruction. Fire, like all natural forces, has
a history. Chemically fire is a process of highly accelerated oxidation of
matter (fuel) induced by heat (ignition). Three conditions are therefore
necessary for it to occur: oxygen, fuel, and heat. During the first aeons in
the history of the earth, at least two of these - oxygen and fuel - were
absent. Oxygen did not become available until, after at least a billion years,
life emerged. And it was only less than half a billion years ago, during the
Devonian geological age, that life assumed the form of plants, providing
matter suitable for burning. From then on, most places on earth with
seasonally dry vegetation were regularly visited by fire, ignited on rare
occasions by falling rocks, volcanic discharges or extraterrestial impacts,
but mostly by lightning (cf. Pyne 2001: 3-23). Its domestication by humans opened
an entirely new episode in the history of fire. Humans thoroughly altered the
frequency and intensity of fires. They brought fire to regions of the planet
where it seldom or never burned spontaneously. And they tried to banish it
from places where without human interference it would have burned repeatedly.
Thus, increasingy, 'natural' fire receded, and made way to 'human' or, more
precisely, anthropogenic fire. Wherever humans migrated, they
took their fire along. The presence of humans-with-fire deeply altered the
landscape, including flora and fauna. The human impact is amply documented
(though still controversial) for a continent that was colonized by humans
rather late: Humans are the only species which
has learned to manipulate fire. Control over fire has become a species
monopoly, with an enormous impact on other species, both animals and
plants. It provides us with an excellent example of how new forms of
behaviour could chang power balances - in this case, between humans and all
other animals, ranging from primates to insects - and how shifts in power
balances could engender changes in habitus, both among the humans who gained greater
self-confidence from the presence of fire in their groups, and among animals
which might be bigger and stronger than humans but learned to respect and
fear their agility with fire. Control over fire, in addition to
having become exclusivy human, has also become universally human. We know of
no human society of the past 100,000 years that lacked the skills needed to
control fire. The original domestication of fire
was a dramatic transition. Palaeoanthropologists are still debating when
exactly it took place. The estimates range from as many as 1.5 million to a
mere 150,000 years ago. It is still an open and fascinating question whether
the first steps to control over fire coincided with other changes in early
human development. In retrospect, the initial
domestication of fire was an event of momentous import. A wild force of
nature - blind, capricious, and hazardous - was now tended, cared for, kept
dry and supplied with fuel. Our early ancestors went to all this trouble, not
'altruistically', but because it served them well. They put the potentially
destructive and essentially purposeless force of fire to work for their own
productive purposes. They managed to make fire regularly available. They no
longer had to 'hunt' for it, hoping to find somewhere the smouldering remains
of a natural blaze; they made it a part (and even the centre) of their own
group and they revered it as as a symbol of eternal life. The domestication of fire made
humans less directly dependent on natural forces which continued to be beyond
their control such as the alternation of day and night or the cycle of the
seasons. It made the contrast between dark and light, between warm and cold,
or between wet and dry more amenable to manipulation, and thus gave humans a
greater margin of freedom from the grip of nature. It increased their power -
defined as the capacity to influence the outcome of an interaction. Armed
with fire humans were able to open up impenetrable tracts of bush, and to
drive away animals much fiercer and stronger than they themselves were. The
gain in power made their lives more comfortable and secure. The possibilities
of heating, lighting, and cooking all contributed to what we would now call a
higher standard of living. 2.4.
Long-term consequences. 'Wherever primitive man had the opportunity to
turn fire loose on a land, he seems to have done so from time memorial.' This
statement by the American geographer Carl Sauer (1981: 340) may sound like an
exaggeration; but it still fails to convey the full impact which the
domestication of fire has had, both on the larger biosphere and, within the
biosphere, on human society itself. The most immediate effect of the
domestication of fire on the biosphere in general was an increase in the
frequency with which fires occurred. Prior to its human mastery, fire had
been ignited mostly by lightning. From now on another source was added: even
before they learned to make fire themselves humans were able to preserve it
in their hearths and to apply it wherever they saw fit. Consequently, as the
number of anthropogenic fires increased, the proportion of natural fires
diminished. It has been suggested, in an admittedly speculative manner, that
the earliest human fire use may have affected the planetary atmosphere and
caused some of the major climate changes in the Pleistocene
(Westbroek et al. 1993). More substantive evidence indicating
modification of the landscape by human foragers equipped with fire has been
brought forward for BOX. The human impact on the environment raises problems similar to
those in a thriller. When a murder has been committed, the coroner
establishes the effects of the interaction, and the detective examines the
causes: the motives and the means of the perpetrator. What made him do it,
how was he able to do it? When we are
considering the issue of anthropogenetic fire (and most fire on our planet
today is anthropogenetic), the natural sciences deal with the
consequences, the effects; the social sciences deal with the conditions, the
causes, the motives and the means of the perpretators. This is, of course,
only an analogy. Instead of a single suspect, an individualized, masculine
'he', we have to look at 'us', humans, in the plural: including men, women,
and children, and including our earliest ancestors as well as ourselves who
are living today. (We are links in a chain of generations. Our current interactions
with fire are to be seen in that context.) In dealing with the
distant human past, it may be more appropriate not to speak of 'we' but
'they'. Our early ancestors who were the first to domesticate fire were akin
to us, but they must also in many ways have been very different. In fact, in
learning to control fire, they became more like us, and less like our closest
relatives among the mammals. If indeed the basic
long-term trend in human history (underlying most other developments and events)
has been the very process of increasing differentiation in behaviour, power,
and habitus between humans and all related species, the domestication of fire was an important step in this long-term
trend - not the single cause, but an integral part of it. Since the control
over fire became a species monopoly, exclusively human and shared equally by
all human societies, it made humans everywhere more alike among themselves,
and more different from all other creatures. From
the very beginning humans used fire in two basic forms: the hearth and the
torch. The hearth was the original site at which a fire was kept, usually at
a cave entrance where it could be protected against the rain and still
receive some air circulation. Since it had to be tended and since fuel had to
be brought to it, it served almost naturally as a centre for group life,
providing heat, light, and a common focus. From the hearth developed in the
course of time a variety of fire containers such as crucibles, stoves, kilns
and furnaces, and, in our day, the mobile engines of motor cars and
aeroplanes. The hearth-like uses of fire have
always had two kinds of environmental side-effects. First of all, fuel had to
be supplied. As long as human communities were small and living in areas with
abundant wood, this did not cause much of a problem. When greater numbers of
people started living in large urban concentrations, however, the need for
fuel became a strong contributing factor to deforestation over big areas and,
in our own age, to depletion of fossil resources. The second side-effect of
hearth-like fire consists of its waste products: ashes and smoke. Although
smoke might be useful in driving away insects and other insidious creatures,
it has always been considered mostly as a nuisance to be got rid of. As long
as people lived in isolated caves or huts, this was relatively easy.
Urbanization and industrialization have seriously aggravated the problem. While the functions of the hearth
were originally primarily turned inward ('centripetal'), the torch was a more
outward directed ('centrifugal') implement. It was used not only to provide
light at night, but also by day to set fire to shrubs and grasses -an
effective way to destroy obstacles for foraging and to rout animals, both
predators and prey, and thus to extend the human domain. Torch undoubtedly
contributed to deforestation: wood was burned wholesale, regardless of its
possible value as timber or fuel. In the age of agriculture, the torch was
used for slash and burn and other techniques for clearing land, and it served
as the model for a whole array of fire weapons culminating in our own time in
rocket-propelled missiles. Surveying the entire trajectory of
the human use of fire from its earliest beginnings, we can distinguish three
stages. During the first stage, there were no groups possessing fire; there
were only groups without fire. Then, there must have been a second
stage, when there were both groups with fire and groups without
fire. We do not know how long that stage lasted - nor how often it may have
recurred. All we know is that it has come to an end. It was a transitional
stage, leading up to the stage in which humankind has now been living for
thousands of generations: the stage when there are no longer any groups without
fire. All human groups are groups with fire. Although we lack empirical
evidence for the first two stages, that very lack leaves us no choice but to
accept an unavoidable conclusion: societies with fire were in the long
run obviously more 'fit to survive' than societies without fire. If we
then ask why it was that societies without fire disappeared, there seems to
be only one plausible answer: because they had to co-exist with societies with
fire - and apparently in the long run such co-existence proved impossible. This may sound like a dismal
conclusion suggesting fierce contests ending in the elimination of the
loosers. If such contests did indeed take place, they have left no trace of
empirical evidence; we only have the highly imaginative evocations of what
might have happened in books and films like The Quest for Fire,
directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud. However, we can also view the fact that
possession of fire has become a universal attribute of all human societies as
an important example of the general rule that changes in one human group lead
to changes in related other groups. If group A had fire, and the neighbouring
group B did not, group B 'had a problem'. It could either try to minimize
contact with group A and perhaps move away, or do as group A had done and
adopt a fire regime - which should not pose insurmountable difficulties as
long as the capacity to learn from the others was sufficient. In the latter
case, instead of a 'zero-sum' elimination struggle there would have been what
the American freelance author and scientist Robert Wright (2000) calls a
'nonzero' situation, with an outcome in which neither party was a loser. The rule that changes in one human
group lead to changes in other related groups may sound like a rather
tautological explanation for social change, but it is not. It is a highly
generalized empirical observation, similar to an observation we can make
about fire: fire generates fire - and in a similar fashion, more generally,
change generates change, and social change generates social change. Such is the nature of the dynamics
of human society and culture. After the original domestication of fire, it
was never humans alone who interacted with other human groups, and with
non-human nature. It was always humans-with-fire, equipped with fire and with
the products of pyrotechniques: cooked food, pointed spears and arrows,
earthenware, metal objects. Their presence put an end to humans-without-fire. Another general conclusion to be
drawn from these observations is the following. Changes in climate and
precipitation have never ceased to be important causes for humans to change
their way of life. Humans are no different from other species in that they
will always have to accommodate the basic conditions of earthly nature, such
as the alteration of day and night or of monsoons and seasons. In the course
of human history, however, in addition to these overridingly powerful
extra-human conditions, conditions brought about by humans themselves have
become increasingly more important - to the extent that, in our contemporary
world, humanity has become a major agent of ecological change. 2.5.
Regimes. The domestication of fire meant that people tamed a strong
and potentially destructive natural force, and made it into a regularly
available source of energy. In so doing they initiated changes in the natural
environment, in their social arrangements, and in their personal lives. These
three aspects (ecological, sociological, psychological) are all part of the
changing human relationships with fire. In its ecological aspects, the
domestication of fire affected the relations between humans and the non-human
world so deeply that we may call it the first great ecological transformation
brought about by humans, which was followed much later by the second and
third such transformations - generally known as the agricultural and
industrial revolutions, and better characterized in terms of the long term
processes of agrarianization and industrialization. Each of the three transformations
spelled the formation of a new socio-ecological regime: the fire regime, the
agrarian regime, and the industrial regime, marked by, respectively, the
utilization of fire and elementary tools, the rise and spread of agriculture
and animal husbandry, and the rise and spread of large-scale modern industry.
The later regimes have not made the earlier regimes obsolete; rather, they
have absorbed them and, in so doing, transformed them. Each new regime
brought an expansion of the anthroposphere within the biosphere. Defining the three regimes jointly
in similar terms is helpful in order to better understand each of them
separately as well as in their interrelations. A common conceptual model
invites and facilitates comparison. The comparison allows us to explain the
sequence in the emergence of the regimes, and to perceive not only their
similarities and differences but also their interlocking. 3. Intensified
human impact: agrarianization The
history of the past ten thousands years may be read as a series of events
accompanying the process of agrarianization of humankind - a process in the
course of which humanity extended the domain of agriculture and animal
husbandry all over the world, and in so doing made itself increasingly more
dependent upon this very mode of production. In terms of geology, the era of
agrarianization coincides with the Holocene - the relatively brief and
climatologically relatively stable era following the much longer and, in its
overall effects, much more turbulent era of the Pleistocene.[3] The Pleistocene lasted approximately 0.8 million years, and saw at
least nine oscillations between extremely cold and somewhat milder global
climates known as the glacial and interglacial periods. The last of these ice
ages, from between 130,000 and 109,000 BP, reached a peak between 22,000 and
16,000 BP, and was succeeded by the Holocene, our contemporary epoch, which
may well turn out to be one more interglacial. The transition from Pleistocene to
Holocene was marked by great environmental changes. As the ice melted and the
glaciers receded, the sea level rose worldwide by a hundred meters and more,
terminating the land bridge between Siberia and During the Holocene, climate
continued to change, but in a less drastic fashion. The most extreme
fluctuation was a prolonged increase in precipitation in northern Africa,
which allowed savanna vegetation to flourish in the 3.1.
Emergence. As the reference to the Thus, at least for the time being,
we have to accept the fact that some of the most intriguing problems
regarding the emergence of agriculture and animal husbandry remain unsolved.
According to current insights, there appear to have been multiple origins:
the transition to agrarian production was probably made independently in
different periods in different parts of the world, including Mesopotamia, the
East-Asian mainland, Fortunately some important points
regarding the transition and its consequences are beyond dispute. Until
recently, established scholarly opinion held that the 'agricultural
revolution' meant the first big human impact on the biosphere. As shown in
the preceding section, humans already initiated far-reaching changes in the
biosphere at a much earlier stage, with the domestication of fire. Contrary to common usage, we have
decided to drop the term 'agricultural revolution' altogether, and to speak
consistently of 'agrarianization'. An obvious advantage of the latter concept
is that it draws attention to the close parallel with the subsequent process
of industrialization. It also conveys clearly that, like industrialization,
agrarianization is not to be seen as a one-time event but as an ongoing
process. Having started on a relatively small scale, the agrarian mode of
production and way of life have never ceased expanding. Nor did
agrarianization even stop at the advent of industrialization; on the contrary,
the rise of modern industry has given it strong new impetus toward further
development. So far the era of
agrarianization has been marked by a steadily increasing rate of change.
Between the original domestication of fire and the first appearance of agriculture
lay a period of 100,000 years at the very least. By contrast, only 10,000
years passed between the rise of agriculture and the rise of modern industry.
And while industrialization began to gain momentum no more than 250 years
ago, we may now well be witnessing the onset of another great
socio-ecological transformation. The most plausible explanation for
this acceleration is probably implied in the principle expounded above to the
effect that, once social and cultural development get started, they have a
tendency to become self-propelling and self-accelerating. For a very long
period in early human history (the period comprising the era known as
'prehistory'), changes in the non-human environment posed the greatest
challenge to human adaptability. As discussed in Chapter 4, it was perhaps
still this kind of 'external' change, and especially the great rise in
temperature at the end of the last Ice Age, which triggered the first
emergence of agriculture in The argument is indeed persuasive.
As the sea flooded fertile coastal land, and the advancing forest encroached
upon more and more savanna, there were many areas where both humans and the
large herbivores upon which they hunted found their natural habitats under
severe stress. It seems hardly a coincidence that precisely during this
period at the end of the Pleistocene many large mammals became extinct,
including herbivores such as the woolly mammoth as well as their predators
such as the sabre-tooth tiger. As living conditions for the freely roaming
herbivores deteriorated, and the competition for the resources of food and
fresh water grew more intense, humans may have used their technical and
organizational superiority to destroy a number of their rivals forever - thus
also depriving themselves of the chance of any future use of those species.
The areas that were most vulnerable to the rising water levels were coastal
zones where humans had been able to prosper on plentiful supplies of both
land and sea food. It stands to reason that especially in those regions which
were hardest hit, with relatively great numbers of people being confronted
with gravely deteriorating environmental conditions, the more active
cultivation of edible plants was adopted as a substitute for the diminishing
chance of obtaining food by fishing, gathering and hunting. Again, Chapter 4
reports some impressive recent evidence on these issues. 3.2.
Continuities. The initial transition from gathering and hunting to
agriculture and animal husbandry was not necessarily abrupt. A group that
started to cultivate a few crops would not have to give up its older ways
altogether. There would have been only very few, if any, agrarian societies
from which gathering and hunting disappeared completely at once. However, the
proportion of products acquired in the older way inevitably diminished as
agriculture and animal husbandry advanced. From the very beginning, the
process of agrarianization was linked closely to the domestication of fire.
It is hard to imagine how people could have begun to cultivate plants and to
domesticate animals had the art of handling fire not already been thoroughly
familiar to them. For one thing, they needed a hearth fire to cook on. The
first crops cultivated on any large scale were cereal grains such as wheat,
rice and maize which, owing to their high nutritional value and their
capacity to withstand storage for long periods, formed a very appropriate
staple food for a human community; to serve this purpose, however, they had
to be made more easily digestible with the help of fire. A second and very different reason
why the control of fire formed a precondition for agrarianization was the
human predominance over all other mammals, which was grounded partly in the
use of fire. The human species' monopoly over fire was so solidly established
by the time agriculture began, and is today so easily taken for granted, that
it is seldom given separate attention in this context. Yet it deserves
mention. Their hegemony in the animal kingdom enabled people not only to
bring certain species, such as goats and sheep, under direct control, but
also - at least as important - to keep most of the remaining 'wild' animals
at a distance from their crops and herds. Thirdly, experience in controlling
fire may have furthered plant and animal domestication in another, even more
intangible way, which our distance in time makes it difficult to assess
precisely but which we are also, for that very reason, likely to
underestimate. The time-honoured practice of handling fire could not have
failed to prepare humans for the many chores involved in agriculture and
animal husbandry. It taught them that extending care upon something non-human
could be well worth the trouble and thus made it more acceptable to them to
accommodate the strains of an agrarian life, full of self-imposed
renunciation for the sake of a possible future yield. The most immediately visible link
between early agriculture and ancient use of fire lay in the custom of
burning off land with an eye to food production. Of old, foraging peoples
were wont to apply their torches in order to keep the land open for gathering
and hunting. Even in recent times those firing practices were continued in
some parts of the world, as in Australia where the Aborigines' judicious use
of fire in keeping their land open for kangaroos and humans has become known
as 'firestick farming' (cf. Flannery 1995; Pyne 2001) - a term suggesting a
form of 'proto-agrarianization'. 3.3.
Sequences. The rise of agriculture was in many respects remarkably
similar to the domestication of fire. Again, humans added new sources of
energy to their own, this time by adopting certain plants and animals and
integrating them into their societies. Plants that were formerly 'wild' now
began to be cultivated, 'wild' animals were tamed and used for food or other
purposes such as traction, and all these species were made part of the human
domain - of the anthroposphere, which thus increased in size and complexity. The transition from foraging to
agriculture did not automatically make people happier and healthier. Agrarian
life brought new hardships. Diets became more monotonous. Sedentary life in
villages increased the susceptibility to disease. It allowed for a rise in
fertility, but it also caused higher mortality. The result was large numbers
of children, many of whom never reached adulthood. Not surprisingly, research
on skeletons reveals that, after agrarianization, human lives tended to
become briefer, and bodies shorter. It is equally understandable that the
texts of the great religions of The very nature of agrarian life
foreclosed a return to foraging, however. There are a few known cases of such
a return, but those are exceptions (see Diamond 1997: XXX-XXX). Almost
everywhere, with so many people, and so little land, the only option for the
survival of an agrarian population was cultivation. 'Work' was writ large
over the agrarian world. If, at a very early stage, the
domestication of fire had made human groups more productive but also more
vulnerable (because from now on they had to rely on their fire), the rise of
agriculture had the same twofold effect. Being able to grow more food, human
groups grew more populous, and became more dependent on their crops, and thus
more vulnerable to failure or loss of their harvests. As the expansion of
agriculture and pastoralism left increasingly less land available for
foraging, the opportunites to escape from this vicious circle dwindled. The very first stage in the
process of agrarianization necessarily involved clearing the land, removing
any existing vegetation that would compete with the planted crops. In many
cases, the most efficient procedure to accomplish this was by means of fire.
As long as land remained plentiful, continued recourse was often taken to
fire in a system practiced throughout the world, and known under various
regional names which are usually subsumed in the standard literature under
the label 'shifting cultivation'. Shifting cultivation implies that a piece
of primary forest is first cleared by the method of slash and burn, and is
then used for one or more harvests of crops. When, after a while, crop
nutrients in the soil become exhausted and undesired plants ('weeds') begin
to dominate, the farmers temporarily abandon the land, and turn to an
adjacent lot, burn the vegetation down, and bring it under cultivation, again
until they find harvesting unrewarding. Eventually they return to their first
plot, which by then has become 'secondary forest' or 'secondary bush', and
resume their activities of burning, planting, and harvesting there. The
duration of the entire cycle may vary as to time and place, but the principle
remains the same. In many parts of the world, in the
course of time, burning the land and letting it lie fallow for a number of
years or seasons ceased to be a regular practice and was replaced by more
intensive methods of working the soil, requiring greater investments of labour
but yielding a larger output per acre and thus making it possible to feed
more mouths. The most common means of accomplishing higher yields by harder
work were irrigation and ploughing. The actual practices of
agriculture varied greatly, of course, according to differences in climate
and soil. Yet, wherever cultivation was intensified this led to structurally
similar results. There was a recurrent sequence which almost reads like a
series of simple equations: more food meant more people, living in increasingly
large concentrations in permanent settlements, with the possibility for some
of the people to specialize in other pursuits than tilling the land. The
process of specialization, in turn, was accompanied by increasing
organization of people in larger economic, religious and political units
(such as markets, churches, and states), and by increasing social
stratification, or a division of people into upper and lower tiers with
greater or lesser access to power, property and prestige. This complex of interrelated
processes unfolded in different epochs in different parts of the world.
Because of the distances in place and time, those trends led to the
development of apparently highly divergent cultures, marked by very specific
traditions in such aspects of life as preparing food, religious worship, and
the building of houses and palaces. The brilliant results of cultural
divergence in those fields may easily blind us to the convergence of some
underlying social trends - notably the process of social stratification. 3.4.
Hypertrophy and atrophy. Social stratification as a long-term process
led to the formation of agrarian societies in which some groups managed to
attain a 'high' position with great power and privilege, while others (the
'lower' majority, consisting mostly of peasants) were deprived of such power
and privilege. This process occurred in every part of the world, from the
British Isles to Religious-agrarian regimes have
played an important part in shaping the relations between humans and the
biosphere in agrarian societies. Human beings are not equipped by birth with
a natural aptitude for agrarian life. They have no innate calendar telling
them when the time has come for preparing the soil, for planting the seeds,
for removing weeds, for harvesting. The only calendar available to them is a
sociocultural one, roughly geared to the alteration of the seasons but
regulated with greater precision by human convention, as a part of an
agrarian regime. Agrarian regimes provide people
with the competence and the motivation needed to carry on life in an agrarian
community so that they are capable and willing to work hard in order to
produce crops of food, prepared to store stocks of those crops as food and
seed for future use, and respectful of owner rights on the land and its
produce. A typical set of such instructions
can be found in the teachings of the Old Testament. An important function of
the priests who propagated those teachings consisted in upholding the
agrarian regime. Recognizing that function may give us a clue to a better
understanding of the prominent position of priests, not only in ancient Wherever religious-agrarian
regimes were established, however, they found themselves in the course of
time in competition with, and having to make room for, military-agrarian
regimes, led by warriors. Originally, in tribal agrarian societies, the
warriors would include virtually all adult men, who would assemble for war on
special occasions. They might go on a raid after an unsuccessful harvest, or
defend their own community against invaders. In the wake of extensive and
intensive growth, warring activities became more specialized - a process with
an inextricable momentum that is well characterized with the term 'arms race'
(cf. Wright 2000: 270). The result was that eventually most agrarian
societies found themselves ruled by warriors whose primary function it was to
fight - against other warriors. While this may sound like a
tautology, it actually refers to a predicament into which many agrarian
societies were trapped. The majority of the people lived a farming life that
was productive but also deeply vulnerable. The warriors formed a robust
minority specializing in destructive violence. This simple formulation
captures the basic mechanism of military-agrarian society. The peasants'
productivity and vulnerability and the warriors' powers of destructive
violence were drawn together like the opposite poles of a magnet. Once a
warrior class was formed, the warriors needed the peasants to supply food,
and the peasants needed the warriors for protection. This unplanned - and, in
a profound sense, fatal - combination formed the backdrop for a great variety
of mixtures of military protection and economic exploitation that generally
mark the history of advanced agrarian societies. New inventions added to the force
of warriors and helped to widen the gap between them and the rest of the
population. Thus, the development of metallurgy did not only create, during
the Bronze and the Iron Ages, 'a whole range of valuable objects worth
hoarding in quantity' (Renfrew 1972: 339) but it also supplied the weapons
with which these objects might be appropriated. It reinforced the trend,
present in most settled agrarian societies, toward accumulation of property,
and it also turned this trend in the direction of a highly uneven distribution
of the accumulated property. The possession of weapons, which had tended for
a long time already to be the monopoly of adult and fully initiated men, to
the exclusion of women and children, now came to be monopolized by the
warriors as a specific class of 'noblemen' or 'aristocrats'. Increasingly, as
the American sociologist Gerhard Lenski notes, 'the energies of this powerful
and influential class were ... turned from the conquest of nature to the
conquest of people' (Lenski 1987: 174). The trend indicated by Lenski had
antecedents stretching a long way back. As human dominance over many other
species increased, the relations among and within human groups became
increasingly important in the dynamics between humans and the biosphere.
Challenges posed by other people often took precedence over challenges posed
by nature. With the intensification of
agriculture, more and more land was transformed into fields, terraces, and
meadows, yielding an increasing amount of food and other products upon which
society at large grew increasingly more dependent. Those who owned the land,
however, were inclined to regard it mainly as an economic and political asset
- a source of revenue and prestige. Since they managed to appropriate a
sizeable portion of the total wealth produced and accumulated in their
societies, increases in wealth did not result in either clearcut extensive or
intensive growth, but in a lopsided increment of luxury possessions that may
be typified as hypertrophy. The material remains from episodes of such
hypertrophy in the past are numerous; they range from the Egyptian pyramids
to the Taj Mahal, from the triumphal arches of Hypertrophy had a reverse side: increasing
poverty on the part of the peasants and the landless poor, resulting in
briefer lives and shorter bodies (cf. Harris and Ross 1987: 76; Tilly 1998:
1-4). Using the same metaphor we may call this a tendency toward atrophy. The combined trends toward
hypertrophy and atrophy led to a social degradation of ecological regimes.
Members of the ruling elites tended to take a greater interest in the
vicissitudes of military and political affairs than in the day to day
management of their rural estates. The peasants and slaves, on their part,
were living in destitute circumstances which were only likely to add to their
masters' contempt for those matters. Altogether the process of
stratification in advanced agrarian societies amounted to a form of differentiation,
resembling the primal differentiation in behaviour, power, and habitus
between humans and related species in the animal world. The crucial
difference was that differentiation now took place among and within human
groups themselves. One result of social
stratification was the relative decline in the esteem of ecological regimes.
As elites became further divorced from the work of tilling the land, the
aspects of social life directly related to the control of the natural
environment were relegated to peasants and slaves and their overseeers - in
other words, to the lower orders. Working the land tended to be regarded as
dirty and degrading to a person of rank. The degree to which the leading
elites became divorced from direct ecological pressures was highly important
for the way the relationships between humans and the biosphere developed in
various societies. In general, Lenski's rule, that control over people
prevailed over control over nature, applied - if only because the latter was
exercised by means of the former. As the American sociologist Randall Collins
(1986: 107) observes, the most ancient monuments of advanced agrarian
societies, the megaliths, testify to the ability of those societies to employ
'massed human energy'. Constructions such as the Egyptian pyramids embodied a
combination of technology and social organization, as did the irrigation
works in 'hydraulic societies' in river deltas from In many cases, hypertrophy ended
in catastrophe, in the collapse of established hierarchies and their cultural
trappings. Still, the longterm trend toward extensive growth persisted,
leading in time to continuing pressures toward ever more intensive use of the
available land. More and more people came to live in villages and towns, and
in the cities that emerged as the centres of accumulated power and wealth.
Those who flocked the towns and cities needed large supplies of food and
fuel, while at the same time creating great problems of waste disposal and
pollution. Among them were specialists such as tanners and dyers whose work
produced noxious side-effects. Altogether a number of environmental impacts
were so obtrusive that the urban elites considered them hardly bearable and
had statutes drawn up to eliminate the worst excesses of pollution of water
and air. Outside the urban centres,
however, elites do not seem to have shared such great concern for
environmental issues. In advanced agrarian societies such as medieval Europe
or late imperial 4. Industrialization:
the rise of the third regime. Historians
nowadays tend to avoid the once popular term 'Industrial Revolution'. Most of
them do so, not because they wish to diminish the importance of
industrialization, but in order to stress that industrialization is a
longterm process that was not confined to a relatively brief 'revolutionary'
period in one particular country but is still continuing, and making its
impact felt all over the world. In our perspective,
industrialization means the rise and spread of a third socio-ecological
regime - the industrial regime, following upon the fire regime and the
agrarian regime. It did not put an end to the older regimes. On the contrary,
at the very core of industrialization lay new applications of fire: using
fossil fuel to generate steam power and to smelt and refine iron. The
smokestacks of the coal and iron industries became the icons of early
industrialization. There were also close connections
with agriculture. Agrarian production had to provide a subsistence base for
all workers employed in the mines and factories. Moreover, as soon as
industrialization came to comprise the production of textiles and food
stuffs, the raw materials had to be supplied by agriculture. And before long,
factories started producing means of production for agriculture: first simple
iron tools, then more complex new mechanized implements, and then, in the
twentieth century, all sorts of combustion-driven machines, fertilizers,
pesticides. By the end of that century, agriculture and industry in many
parts of the world had become inseparable and often even barely
distinguishable. Since the beginnings of
industrialization are so much closer to us in time than the beginnings of
agrarianization, they are much better documented. There is a fairly general
consensus about the question where and when the transition first occurred: in
In the last resort,
industrialization constitutes a unique historical process, which is part of
the even more encompassing and equally unique process of the expansion of the
anthroposphere. It will never be possible to repeat the beginnings of
industrialization under experimental conditions. Attempts at 'modelling' the
incipient stages under artificial circumstances can be no more than
approximations, helping at best to sharpen our imagination. As in biological
evolution, it is far more difficult to explain why a successful mutation or
innovation arose at all than why, once it existed, it survived and became
successful. This pertains equally to the
staying power of the control of fire, of agriculture, and of fossil fuel
industry. The words that the sociologist David Riesman (1961: xxix) used for
modernization apply to industrialization as well: it 'appears to proceed with
an almost irreversible impact, and no tribe or nation has found a place to
hide'. Like the earlier socio-economic regimes, the industrial regime has
kept expanding; the explanation for this fact must be sought in some of its
effects - its functions.[5] This is not to say that all
effects of industrialization were beneficial in every respect. Far from it;
but the point is that industrialization maintained its momentum because it
apparently had certain effects or 'functions' which were valued positively by
sufficient numbers of people with sufficient means to keep the process going.
It is up to the human sciences (anthropology, sociology, psychology,
economics, history) to trace those functions and understand the valuations. The primary effect of
industrialization was that immense supplies of fossil fuel energy were made
available which had lain virtually unused by any living species. In the
eighteenth century, a series of inventions made it possible for humans to
start tapping those supplies and to use them for generating heat and
mechanical motion. No longer were people completely dependent on the flows of
energy which reach the earth from the sun and which are partly converted into
vegetation by means of photosynthesis. Just as at one time humans had been
able to strengthen their position in the biosphere by learning to control
fire, they now learned the art of using fire to exploit the energy contained
in coal, oil and gas. With the extra energy they also developed means of
technology and organization enabling them to make much more extensive and
intensive use of materials such as tin and copper and, subsequently, to
develop a range of new 'synthetic' chemical substances. Seen from a wide perspective, all
these developments concerned humanity at large. At closer quarters, however,
it was only a tiny section of humanity that took the lead and was the first
to profit. A small entrepeneurial class in Still, while industrialization
began on a modestly local scale, it was from the very start enveloped in a
context of much wider range. Industrialization was preceded by European
expansion, and that gave strong impetus to it from the very start. British
society in the eighteenth century was connected in many ways to a larger
world: not just to the European continent but to other continents as well. It
had a strong navy and a big commercial fleet; trade with other continents
(including the slave trade) brought in substantial wealth; emigration across
the The combined thrust of industrialization
and globalization has produced an enormously accelerating rate of intensive
and extensive growth all over the world. Growth did not continue evenly.
There were 'peak' periods of economic development such as 1870-1913 and
1950-73 which were later dubbed 'golden ages', whereas in other periods such
as 1913-50 the world economy grew much more slowly (Maddison 2001: 22). Nor
did growth affect the entire world in the same way. On the contrary, up to
now it has proceeded in a very uneven fashion, leading to such extremes that
per capita income in the United States of America today exceeds that in
Ethiopia by a factor 70 (Maddison 2001: 224, 276). Still, while economic growth has
hardly raised the living standards of billions of people, it has affected the
economy and the forms of land use in practically every country on earth. It
has also resulted in an enormous increase in population. In the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, most nations in The reduction of the death rates
in the industrializing world was clearly connected with advances in public
hygiene which, in turn, were predicated on a general rise in societal
affluence allowing the construction of public waterworks and sewers, as well
as on concomitant developments in technology and science and in standards of
individual behaviour. The next phase in the demographic transition, the
decrease in fertility, was conditioned by the same pair of factors: new
techniques of birth control, based on scientific research, and new attitudes
toward family size. The demographic structure of
contemporary societies has thus become clearly influenced by a steadily
developing corpus of information by which individuals let themselves be
directed in their behaviour. The information as such is a form of cultural
capital: the collective result of the efforts of a great many researchers.
How it is applied at the level of personal conduct depends on the way the
individuals perceive their own situation and prospects - which is yet another
kind of information. The entire state of affairs is in
many ways paradigmatic for contemporary society. Flows of highly complex
information are widely available, in a standardized and easily understandable
form. Many of them are hardly recognized as information because they come to
people in the shape of material objects, delivered with a manual. Owners are
apt to forget that the instructions are an integral part of the appliance. If
a machine is abandoned in the absence of anyone prepared to carry out the
instructions, the dead and rusting object is testimony to the vital
importance of information in an age of advanced technology. Information is the decisive principle
in the organization of matter and energy. It holds global society together:
the networks of long-distance transportation and communication, the worldwide
division of labour and land use. Its exponential growth in the era of
industrialization has enabled people to mobilize energy and matter in
unprecedented quantities and over distances spanning the entire globe - often
with consequences that turned out to be detrimental to the biosphere. Assessing the physical
consequences, and establishing human responsibilities is also a matter of
information. In this context people sometimes speak of a paradox because one
and the same factor appears as both cause and remedy (see Grübler 1998: 341).
As so often, underlying the apparent paradox is a real tension, inherent in
all evolutionary processes: every successful strategy of growth is bound to
reach limits where further growth becomes too costly. Here the primeval
'oxygen crisis' mentioned at the beginning of this chapter can serve as a
parable. The parable fails, obviously, in
one respect: although there must have been some exchange of information,
there is no trace of consciousness among the bacteria of two billion years
ago. This is in stark contrast to the anthroposphere today in which
continuous efforts are being made to collect information and to use it
intelligently. Science and technology have not only been instrumental in
designing machinery that has inadvertently contributed to the depletion of
natural resources and the pollution of air, water and soil - they also
provide the means for monitoring and, possibly, solving environmental
problems caused by human action. Public
alarm over those problems reached a first climax around 1970. The report to the
Club of Rome and similar publications aroused the concern of large audiences
and prompted politicians and businessmen to action. An awareness dawned that
humanity might be squandering natural energy and matter in an ill-informed
and irresponsible manner, creating unmanagable quantities of waste, and thus
jeopardizing its own future. The same concern is directly
reflected in one of the central issues addressed in this book - in what sense
are today's environmental problems really new, and to what extent? Is it
mainly a matter of quantity or scale? Or do recent developments also have
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