Introduction

Three broad generalizations form the heart of this article. The first is that since 1800 humankind has lived in an age of fossil fuels, even those people who never saw a lump of coal or a drop of oil. The adoption of fossil fuels represents one of the three or four most crucial ‘choices’ in the history of our species, and more than anything else has shaped the relationship between human society and the ecosystems on which it depends [1].

The second broad generalization is that the two centuries since 1800 have also hosted the most rapid population growth and urbanization in the history of our species, facts closely bound up with the adoption of fossil fuels. These processes were, and remain, profoundly destabilizing, both socially and ecologically, but at the same time pregnant with economic opportunity.

The third generalization is that within this period since 1800, it is sensible to see two different eras, one an intensification of the other, but, at the same time containing a riposte to its predecessor and to itself. The first period extended from c. 1800 until c. 1950 and was the age of coal and of (approximately) 1% per annum population growth. The second, from c. 1950 until the present, is the age of oil and of (approximately) 2% per annum demographic growth. The first era was turbulent; the second tumultuous. [For those of you who may be unsure of what distinction I see between these two terms, let’s just say that tumultuous means ‘super-turbulent’.] The tumult after 1950, however, invited a reaction, or Hegelian antithesis if you prefer, in the form of modern popular environmentalism, a young cultural and political force whose ultimate impact remains uncertain.

Fossil Fuels

The acquisition of fire and language made our ancestors fully human. The adoption of agriculture laid the basis for civilization and states. The adoption of fossil fuels made us modern. Each of these was a great leap in the human career, in the sense that each allowed, indeed encouraged, greater complexity in human society and in the human relationship with the earth [2].

For most of human history, our ancestors used, per capita, only 1-2% of the energy we use today. For all practical purposes, they were limited to what they could ingest in the way of chemical energy in their food, which their bodies converted to heat and mechanical or kinetic (muscular) energy. It was, in effect, a solar energy regime. Plants turned a tiny proportion of incoming solar energy (less than 1%) [3] into chemical energy via photosynthesis. People ate a tiny proportion of those plants, and ate an even tinier share of animals that also ate plants. This process captured an infinitesimal proportion of incoming solar energy, but there were few ways to improve its efficiency.

Domestication of plants and animals, which began a bit more than 10,000 years ago, was one way. By raising easily edible plants and weeding out others, early farmers could increase their food supply and energy intake. The domestication of animals, especially those which ate plants humans could not digest, permitted yet a further expansion of the energy supply, as animal muscle power complemented human efforts. According to calculations made by Rolf-Peter Sieferle, agrarian societies making full use of domesticated plants and animals, harvested about 4-6 times as much energy as did hunting and gathering societies [4].

Water and wind power added further to the human energy supply. Sailing craft have existed for perhaps 60,000 years or more. Windmills, perhaps 2,000 years old, first came into widespread use in Persia in the 9th and 10th centuries, and in northwestern Europe in the late 12th century. Waterwheels emerged at least 2,000 years ago, and in ideal spots could deliver power in quantities otherwise unattainable. But all the wind and water power in use as of 1800 added only very slightly to the total energy harvest, because they were practical technologies for only a few chores, such as sailing and milling grain, and because sufficiently reliable wind and water existed only in select locations [5].

All these energy sources tapped the tiniest share of the incoming flow of solar energy. At every turn, energy was lost: photosynthesis captured very little of the sun’s energy; human and animal metabolisms captured only about 10% of what they ate in the way of plants. The inherent inefficiency in this solar energy regime narrowly constrained human life, ensuring that most of our ancestors had to work long and hard for meager and uncertain returns.

For heat people could turn to stocks as well as flows of energy. Trees represented decades or centuries of accumulated photosynthesis. Wood and charcoal, helpful in heating, cooking, and a few industries such as brewing, metallurgy, or glassmaking were crucial for most human societies. But they added only to the quantity of heat energy, not mechanical energy. For that, there was no substitute for muscle.

Fossil fuels changed that. Peat, coal, oil, and gas represent gigantic stocks of fossilized solar energy, accumulated over geological time. Peat is semi-fossilized plant remains, most of which is 6-20,000 years in the making. It exists in vast amounts, mainly in high latitudes in Canada, Scandinavia, and Siberia. When dried, it makes a satisfactory fuel for some uses (not metallurgy for which its flame is not hot enough). The Dutch are the only people to make it central to their economy, because only in Holland were large quantities of peat, a bulky fuel, available at sea level for easy shipment. During the Dutch Golden Age (c. 1560-1670), peat accounted for about half the energy used in the Netherlands [6]. In an age where many locations in Europe, China, and elsewhere, struggled to maintain supplies of fuelwood, peat provided the Dutch an energy-cost advantage which helped them built internationally successful brewing, sugar-refining, salt-making and other energy-intensive industries.

Peat buoyed the Dutch economy and transformed the Dutch place in the world, but coal transformed the world. Coal represents an energy subsidy from the deep geological past, frozen sunshine collected over millions of years. It carries half again as much energy per ton as does the best fuelwood, and three times as much as peat. The first society to make significant use of coal was the Chinese during the Song Dynasty. Abundant coal in the northwest provinces helped fire an iron industry, substantially devoted to armaments production. As of the late 11th century, its size exceeded the iron industry of all Europe as late as 1700. For reasons that remain uncertain, the Chinese coal and iron industries tailed off after the 12th century [7].

Coal had its limitations. Most of it lay deep beneath the ground, requiring dangerous and costly work to get it out. In many lands, water collected in mineshafts, making miners’ tasks impossible. Moreover, most coal carried various impurities that made iron brittle. Coal was also heavy and therefore costly to transport. All these limitations were overcome in Great Britain between 1700 and 1800, by virtue of technical advances, canal-digging, and the refinement of the steam engine, which could pump water out of mineshafts and thereby prevented the Industrial Revolution from drowning in its infancy [8].

Great Britain lay toward the northwestern end of a carboniferous crescent, the landscape stretching from the Scottish lowlands to Silesia. In 1750 this region produced less than 5 million tons of coal annually (almost all of it in Britain). By 1900 it yielded more than 400 million tons a year, about 60% of it mined in Britain. Coal was now king, supplying the majority of Europe’s energy requirements and half of the world’s. Coal shattered the grinding constraints of the solar energy regime – something peat could never do – opening up new opportunities hitherto not only unimaginable but genuinely unattainable.

Coal was king for the span of two human generations. In 1900 primitive internal combustion engines existed that eventually would create a vast market for petroleum. Oil, liquid sunshine and another massive subsidy from the deep geological past, carries twice the energy per ton as does coal [9], and by virtue of its liquid form can be transported more cheaply, in pipelines and tankers. By 1960 oil accounted for more energy use around the world than did coal.

Between 1800 and 2000, total worldwide energy use grew by 80-90 fold, the most revolutionary process in human history since domestication. Fossil fuels accounted for almost all the growth, and today make up about 77% of all energy use. The modern age is the age of fossil fuels [10].

Population and Urbanization as Ecological Trends

The age of fossil fuels coincided with an age of unprecedented population growth. In the millennium between Caesar and Saladin global population grew at a rate of about 0.01% per year. The raw data on growth rates, according to the figures of Angus Maddison, are as follows:

Table 1
Annual Rates of Global Population Growth since AD 1000

Source: Maddison, The World Economy: Historical Statistics, Paris, OECD, 2003, p. 257.

And on global population size:

Table 2
Global Population since AD 1000 (millions)

Source: Maddison, The World Economy: Historical Statistics, Paris, OECD, 2003, p. 256.

For reasons much debated, global population began to edge upwards in the second millennium, and to gather pace in the 18th century. Slightly lower death rates took hold, perhaps a result of ecological adjustment to some infectious diseases, perhaps a matter of improved nutrition and famine reduction. Then, in the course of the 19th century, population growth rates accelerated, despite difficult times in China and India. That acceleration nearly stalled in the years 1913-50, presumably a consequence of epidemics (the 1918 influenza pandemic may have killed to million by itself), wars and economic depressions, which sharply curtailed birth rates. But after 1950, politics, public health and perhaps other factors combined to create a crescendo of demographic growth, briefly topping 2% per annum in the 1960s and 1970s. Human numbers more than doubled between 1950 and 2000. In no other period of 50 years, in no other century, did human numbers ever double. (Nor will they again). These modern growth rates are 50 to 200 times as fast as those that prevailed for most of our species’ history. No other primate, probably no other mammal, has ever done anything like this in the history of life on earth.

At the same time, our species has changed its characteristic habitat from countryside to city. The first cities appeared 6,000-7,000 years ago, contained a few thousand people at most and were local in importance. Not until 8th century Baghdad did any city reach a million, and that achievement did not last. According to Tertius Chandler’s estimates, as late as 1500 no city exceeded 700,000 (the seven largest were in Asia or Egypt). By 1800, Beijing alone had topped 1 million [11]. Only about 3% of humankind lived in cities. There were good reasons for this: supplying a concentrated population with enough food and fuel was a difficult technical and economic problem. Cities in temperate latitudes (northern Europe or China) needed forest areas 50 to 200 times their size as to meet their fuelwood needs [12]. This put a fairly firm limit on urbanization. So did stubborn constraints upon agricultural productivity [13]. After 1800, however, the development of fossil fuels reduced the requirements for fuelwood and, with technical improvements in engines and transport, allowed cities to extend their footprint, or catchment, over greater distances. By 1900 about 14% of people lived in cities, and by 2000 very close to 50%. Thus the proportion of urban-dwellers among our species quadrupled in the 19th century and tripled in the 20th. In raw numbers, the urban population in 1800 was about 30 million, in 1900 some 225 million, and in 2000 perhaps 3 billion. This comes to a 100-fold expansion in 200 years, roughly the same as the expansion in energy use. Nothing like this ever happened in human history, nor can it again.

Until a century ago, cities were lethal environments. Their infectious diseases killed people faster than others were born, so that cities survived only on the basis of continuing in-migration from rural regions. London around 1750, for example, killed off half of the population increase of the rest of England [14]. Yet villages produced enough migrants that London survived, and even grew, intermittently and slowly. But between 1850 and 1930 sanitation improvements revolutionized urban demography, so that after 7,000 years as black holes for humanity, cities by the early 20th century actually contributed to population growth rather than pruning it. Rural landscapes continued to send their legions of young migrants to the world’s cities, more of them than ever before survived and reproduced; hence the emergence of megalopolis (cities with more than 10 million) and the urbanization of our species [15].

For our first few hundred thousand years on earth, our characteristic habitat was savanna grasslands and parklands. For a brief span, maybe 5000BC to AD 2000, the farming village formed the standard human habitat. But now, for the first time, the typical human animal has become a city dweller.

Ecological Changes

To feed, shelter, warm, and clothe the burgeoning human population after 1800 required intensified mobilization of the earth’s resources. New patterns emerged, mainly a consequence of industrialization, fossil-fuel powered transport, and population growth.

Best known among these new patterns is the giant plow up of the world’s grasslands. Between 1800 and 1950, about 17 million km2 (an area equivalent to today’s Russia) of the world’s grasslands were converted to other uses, mainly crops. Another 9 million km2 (equivalent to China) followed after 1950 [16]. The prairies of North America, the Argentine pampas, the Russian and Ukrainian steppe, big chunks of northern China, southeastern Australia, the West African Sahel, and much grassland elsewhere was turned to cultivation, sometimes permanently, sometimes only briefly. The last big push in this global frontier process came in 1955-63 with the Soviet Virgin Lands scheme, in which wheat replaced steppe grasses over an area the size of Japan (or Sweden) [17].

The process from the outset was intimately linked with the trends in fossil fuels and demography: Growing populations required the grain that these former grasslands gave; railroads and steamships allowed the grain to get to markets cheaply enough to allow poor people to eat it; and, beginning in 1920 or so, oil-powered farm machinery (e.g. tractors) made it much more economical to plow up the densely rooted grasslands and to harvest the resulting grains.

The second new pattern was an enormous expansion of the world’s tropical and subtropical plantations. Plantations – large-scale agricultural enterprises geared toward the market and usually worked by coerced labor gangs if not outright slaves – had existed for millennia, and in the 16th-18th centuries had become the standard means by which to produce sugar and sundry other crops [18]. Steam-powered machinery could transform cotton into clothes very cheaply after 1840 (as water-powered mills had done in the decades prior to 1840). This ratcheted up the demand for raw cotton, inspiring a cotton frontier at the expense of forest in the American south, and new efforts to raise cotton in India, Egypt, the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, French Polynesia, and scattered locations in Southeast Asia and Latin America.

But cotton was only part of a new plantation complex. Tea, coffee, tobacco, jute, palm oil, copra, and various other stimulants, lubricants, foods, and fibers made the industrial revolution hum as smoothly as it did. Most of these new plantations were carved out of former forest lands, often as a form of shifting cultivation, because the crops and production methods wore out soils quickly. Tobacco, cotton, and coffee, in particular, depleted soil nutrients rapidly, and absent expensive conservation measures required new soils, enriched by the ash of freshly burned forests, in order to be profitable. Keeping the growing populations of the new industrial cities fed, clothed, and caffeinated thus led armies of slaves in Virginia, Cuba, and Brazil, and legions of laborers elsewhere, to burn off millions of hectares of old-growth forest [19]. Chinese cities helped drive parallel changes in Southeast Asia; in Thailand a traveler in 1822 noted plantations of cotton, indigo, sugar, tobacco among other crops, all of which were built with Chinese labor, organized by Chinese entrepreneurs, and geared to Chinese markets [20]. This, I hasten to point out, had nothing to do with fossil fuels, at least not until steamships took over long-distance trade in Southeast Asian waters. In any case, the scale of reorganization of land use occasioned by Chinese demand probably remained modest compared to the effects of European and North American cities in the years between 1800 and 1950 [21].

Food and fiber frontiers formed only a part of the impact on the land in the age of fossil fuels. Cheap transport – railways and steamships – made mining ores in remote locations more practical, and the industrial cities could buy all the copper, tin, iron, bauxite and other ores that Chile, Malaysia, Australia, Siberia, and Jamaica could yield. Industrial methods, such as steam-powered hydraulic hoses, made mining worthwhile in alluvia that otherwise would have been left untouched in the 19th century. These methods debuted in the gold strikes around the Pacific basin that began in the Californian Sierra in 1849 and shifted to Australia, New Zealand, and the Klondike [22]. Hardrock mining, whether for South African gold and diamonds or Chilean copper, also required fossil-fuel powered machinery and transport. It inevitably pockmarked landscapes and occasionally, through surface collapses, altered topography. Late in the 20th century, huge oil-powered machines chewed their way through mountains and valleys, extracting coal in West Virginia or gold in Western Australia. These environmental changes could not have happened without cheap energy: no amount of slaves with pickaxes could have done the work economically.

Furthermore, cheap energy created transportation networks that made intercontinental migrations on the part of tens of millions feasible. Between 1830 and 1913, some 60 million Europeans crossed oceans in search of better lives, and many of them ended up staffing the farms and mines of the Americas and Antipodes (and a few million more in Siberia). Another 20 or 40 million Indians and Chinese migrated to the world’s economic peripheries, to the mines and plantations of oceanic islands such as Fiji, Trinidad, and Mauritius; and those of Malaya, Thailand, Burma, Guyana, Natal, and Queensland. Without these millions of strong backs and skilled hands, far less forest could have been cleared, far less slurry dumped, far less soil eroded, and far less prairie plowed.

Fossil fuels, population growth, and urbanization worked their transformative magic not only in the world’s far-flung grain frontiers, plantation zones, and mining camps, but also in and around the cities themselves. Early in the age of fossil fuels, the most conspicuous changes arose where industrial cities sprang up from former villages or small towns, as at Manchester, Berlin, or Chicago [23]. Shanghai, which amounted to little before 1800, might be a similar case (and Japan must have its analogues, although I do not know what they are). These were the ‘shock cities’ of the industrial revolution, the places where water power or coal came together with uprooted peasantries and raw cotton or iron ore in a particularly profitable mix. In parts of the carboniferous crescent, such as the Ruhr or Silesia, former farming landscapes almost overnight sprouted iron mills and coal mines, metallurgical plants and railroad yards, in, around, and between cities.

These cityscapes and industrial belts became the most polluted and unhealthy habitats of the 19th century. Their rivers and canals hosted all manner of industrial chemicals and biological wastes. A British royal commission found that one murky English river made a ‘tolerably good ink,’ and demonstrated the point by writing part of its 1866 report in Calder river water [24]. Rivers and lakes acquired a frothy foam cover and often became toxic to almost all aquatic life. Some rivers and canals frequently caught fire. Meanwhile chimneys spewed out ash, dust, smoke, soot, sulfur dioxide and all manner of hydrocarbon compounds, blanketing homes, gardens, streets, pastures and fields – and filling lungs – with toxins. Environmental battles took shape within and around the cities, as victims of these ‘nuisances’ tried to stop, or win compensation, for the harm done them. For many decades they lost more than they won [25].

As industrialization and urbanization spread, so did intense pollution of water and air. Cities dependent on high-sulfur coal and those situated so as to experience frequent temperature inversions (trapping the air of the lower atmosphere) developed especially dangerous local environments. Tens of millions of lives were shortened by urban air pollution after 1800, maybe more than a hundred million. Veteran newspaper editors in Britain knew to leave extra space for obituaries when winds died down or fog settled on their city. The air in cities of north China today gives some idea of likely conditions a hundred years ago in Glasgow or St. Louis [26].

After 1950, urban air and water pollution got worse and then got better. With the arrival of the motor car (1920s in the US, 1950s in Western Europe) as a routine middle-class possession, urban air acquired a new source of pollution. Tailpipes joined with smokestacks and chimneys in fouling the air, and introduced photochemical smog as a new ingredient in the toxic stew. Where strong sunshine and millions of cars combined, as in Los Angeles, smog occasionally fooled residents into thinking they were under attack with chemical weapons. Meanwhile the rise of petrochemical industries added a new tang to the brew of polluted waters, and the rise of organic chemicals – often persistent in the environment for years or decades – further raised the risks to health and life in those landscapes within reach of industrial processes.

Environmentalisms

Intense pollution and its attendant human health risks helped to crystallize the modern environmental movement, a cultural and political phenomenon that has begun to affect ecology in modest ways. Environmentalism has a tangled and deep root structure, involving British imperial administrators, American diplomats, Brazilian slave owners, German forest managers, Himalayan peasants, Chinese literati, ancient philosophers and kings – and many others of whom historians have yet to find evidence [27]. Their concerns ranged from soil erosion and wildlife extermination to shortages of naval timber and unruly floodwaters. State efforts to restrict deforestation go back at least 600 years, and anti-pollution laws at least 700. It was normally difficult to enforce such rules as existed even when emperors or legislatures fervently wished to protect environments. The power of the state to regulate the conduct of its subjects or citizens with respect to the environment was sorely limited in premodern times, but the rise in the last two centuries of more effective regulatory states allowed a more consequential regulatory environmentalism.

While environmentalism has multiple variants and countless parents, nothing did more to make it politically prominent than the urban air and water pollution of the mid-20th century, which galvanized effective coalitions into forming. Urban populations normally made their voices heard in the corridors of power more effectively than could peasantries; the issues surrounding urban pollution were on the one hand easily tangible, visible, and smellable, and on the other demonstrably threatening to human health. Moreover the threats were not easily confined to the politically disenfranchised urban slum dwellers. Dangerous air and water sometimes menaced the rich and powerful in the cities too. For all these reasons, between 1960 and 1980 a new environmentalism took root around the world, from the cities of Japan, Europe, and North America to the forests and floodplains of India and Brazil. It flourished in open societies suffering from conspicuous environmental problems, such as Sweden. It served as one of the few tolerated forms of public dissent in parts of the old Soviet bloc, such as Hungary, and does so today in China. It became a routine feature of politics in some places, such as the Netherlands and Canada, and an ideology of insurgency in others, such as Peru. It has become a capacious and incoherent global movement, loosely uniting peasants concerned with access to forest resources, urbanites worried about air quality, and everyone vexed by climate change or overpopulation. It has been adopted as a priority, rarely a high one, by hundreds if not thousands of government bodies and corporations, and forms part of the education of almost every schoolchild around the world. To date, however, states and societies retain their traditional priorities of military security and economic growth, tempered only somewhat by environmentalism. Barring a cultural transformation on the scale of a new great religion that successfully converts billions to the faith, or a galvanizing ecological threat that is clear to all (or nearly all), this will remain the case.

The chief candidate for this role is climate change. Lately it has emerged as a deep concern to a few million around the world, and a modest concern for perhaps billions. But to date it seems an insufficient threat to provoke serious alterations in any society’s ecological behavior. Its unwelcome consequences, however frightening, seem to most people and governments too far in the future to warrant real action just yet; and real action still seems too inconvenient or costly. Moreover, competing worries with shorter time horizons remain in copious supply.

Environmentalism took root when it did because the ecological disruption of the modern world had reached an unprecedented scale and pace, and a ready audience. The environmental turbulence of the years 1800-1950, when coal was king and industrial demand and long-distance migration remade the world’s frontiers, was unsettling to hundreds of millions and lethal to tens of millions. But most of them had no way of uniting with others as aggrieved as themselves, no way of becoming a coherent political and cultural voice. After 1950, with pell-mell urbanization, ever-cheaper transport and communication, not to mention higher literacy and (on balance) less censorship and political oppression, an audience for environmentalism formed just as the oil age added new environmental concerns on top of the old. The post-1950 environmental tumult, with its local and regional anxieties about accelerated deforestation, overfishing, soil erosion and urban pollution, its global concerns about population growth and the ozone hole, had something to worry almost everyone.

Conclusion

By way of attempting to sketch a broad canvas, I have offered three generalizations about global environmental history in the two centuries after 1800. To review, the first was that the era since 1800 has been, and remains, first and foremost, the age of fossil fuels. The huge expansion in energy availability and use served as the most important catalyst for environmental changes of many sorts. The second generalization was that these centuries were also characterized by unprecedented rates and scale of population growth and urbanization, which also had remarkable environmental effects. These two macro-trends reinforced one another: more energy use helped bring about more people, and more people meant more demand for energy. The third generalization was that within these two centuries, the period after about 1950 appears to have a grander scale and scope, a higher speed, than that which went before. Thus these two centuries deserve recognition as a new era in the history of the earth and the history of life: the Anthropocene [28]. It has been, and remains, the most tumultuous time in the last 70,000 years of relations between humankind and the rest of the biosphere [29].

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