Peter Frankopan: “The story begins with the betrayal of the planet”

The first thing written in the story is a warning about environmental sustainability. In the founding myth of monotheism, God creates an ecologically perfect environment in which to place the first couple of human beings.

Human history begins with the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, that is, with their condemnation to a life of ecological uncertainty. The different religions, whether Judaism, Christianity, Islam or Buddhism and Hinduism, conceive the ecosystem, animals, plants differently, give different ethical responses, but all highly sensitive to the issue of the environment.

It is evident, reading the religious texts, the importance in each different faith of the conception of the climate and of the moral warnings that each provides in this regard. At the center of most belief systems is the sky, where there is the sun, which hits the earth with its heat, and the clouds, which send it rain, too little or too much, as in the case of the great myth of the flood.

These messages have a particular ring today, in the twenty-first century, an era of collapse of respect for the environment, of its reckless exploitation, of disobedience or lack of ecological morality.”

Peter Frankopan, professor of Oxford, “rockstar don”, as he was defined by the BBC, commentator listened to by the general public as well as by governments, is one of the greatest exponents of World History. His Silk Roads — international bestsellers and longsellers, contemporary classics — have taught millions of readers to look at history on a global scale, broadening their gaze horizontally to the connections and interactions that the West has always had with the East and with the South.

In his latest book, acclaimed by critics all over the world, a bestseller in seven countries and just translated into Italy (Between Earth and Sky. Man and nature, a thousand-year history, Mondadori, pages. 767, euro 35), the gaze extends vertically to that order of relationships that binds human beings to the earth, to describe their impact on the history of the planet, from the origins of life to our times.

Has he gone from world historian to earth historian? He smiles, sitting in his Summertown home on the eve of one of his continuing trips. «The point is that as a global historian I have the obligation and responsibility to write about what is excluded from history. At the beginning of my career, I began with Byzantium, a thousand-year-old empire literally removed from the West, but then, traveling from there along the silk roads, my gaze extended to a number of other worlds. In this book I go even further, into regions I had never ventured into, from Thailand to Africa, from the Pacific to Mesoamerica, I explore indigenous cultures, tribal communities, forest populations, nomadic people, united by a different preservation of their past and therefore excluded from traditional history. Already in this I have become even more global. But the attention to unwritten history also led me to analyze historical matter through the hard sciences.”

How? Some examples.

«Traditional historiography deals with the powerful. But to understand the formation of social hierarchies we must take into account the consumption of calories, therefore the cooking, mainly of meat, necessary to make it digestible. Which brings us to the deforestation of the Roman Empire, the price of lumber. And at the same time to the religious taboos that surrounded the exploitation of the land, in Herodotus as in Koran, and which demonstrate how worried the ancient world was that felling trees could on the one hand change the pattern of rainfall, and on the other hand cause soil degradation due to its overexploitation. Making global history means thinking big, across eras, in macro-themes, understanding what unites us and what divides us, and where and why the collapses and fractures occurred, and understanding what and how to learn from the past as a whole. And doing it is beautiful.”

Speaking of fractures and collapses, we find ourselves, in Europe and in general in the old world, in a phase of decline, or at least of change. There are those who compare it to the eve of the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and, as nineteenth-century historians already traced it back to the great Antonine plague, they trace the worsening of the economic crisis, the end of the globalized economy, the revival of nationalism and sovereignism.

«I do not agree with this analysis. I don’t think we are witnessing deglobalization, even if there is a lot of talk about it, nor that there is an economic crisis underway. As a historian I distinguish what I can think or feel from the evidence of the data. As of today, April 2024, global trade levels are the highest the world has ever known. Last year, trade volume between the United States and China reached an all-time high. Which suggests that exactly the opposite of economic deglobalization is happening: that the world is moving ever faster towards integration.

And even if, it is true, the old Western world is isolating itself, we must not forget that 85 percent of the globe is neither Europe nor the United States. It doesn’t seem to me that ours is a world in which everyone is on the verge of taking up arms. Rather, the problem is the enormous debt burdening developed nations. And the fear of the future that the Covid-19 has unleashed in these countries has led to decisions dictated by anxiety and often reckless and harmful. Furthermore, we are on the eve of an election in many Western countries, where politicians will unfortunately continue to propose simple solutions to complex problems.”

As long as they face them. What do you suggest to resolve those of ecology and climate, after having read the entire history of the world in the light of these factors in his book?

«First of all we need to educate citizens to understand reality. We need to explain to people that ecological collapse is the current reality of the continent they live on, not a distant threat. We must explain that 8 percent of deaths in the European Union are linked to the inhalation of microparticles produced by fossil fuels or car tires. We must understand that these deaths do not depend, or not only, on bad rulers, but on the way of life that we ourselves have chosen. This morning I read a new report published by a medical journal on the results of tests for microplastics performed on the placentas of women who had just given birth. Every single placenta contained microplastics. The cause is the detergents we use. In this case, it is a regulatory flaw, coupled with shareholder profit expectations. But personally I don’t think it’s a problem of leadership or ruling classes. It simply depends on the fact that we don’t understand. We go to the pub and we don’t realize that it is carbon dioxide that produces the bubbles in our beers.”

One of the main causes of global warming.

«Europe is warming faster than other continents. The water crisis in Catalonia means that in one of Europe’s most important cities, Barcelona, ​​citizens cannot turn on the water taps unless under heavy restrictions. The soil chemistry of much of Spain has been devastated over the past twenty months by drought. A quarter of Europe, including the UK, is in a water emergency. Wheat prices are rising not only because Putin has invaded Ukraine but also because it is more difficult to grow crops in a world where too many farmers didn’t bring home their harvest last year because there was too much rain. In the south of England no one has sown this year due to torrential rain, on an almost unprecedented scale in history. I was traveling in mid-December. Do you know how much above average the temperature of the Northern Hemisphere as a whole has risen? I would have already been shocked if it had gone up two or three degrees. I can hardly say it…”

Say it.

«In mid-December 2023 the temperature of the northern hemisphere was twenty degrees above average. What does it mean? Not just for us, but for plants, for other animals, for crops, for water? Don’t think about these things, here, now, well, it’s as dangerous as falling asleep at the wheel.”

The book

Between Earth and Sky by Peter Frankopan (Mondadori, translation Tullio Cannillo, page 767, euro 35)