Nature's Evil

The mastery of fire was the first practical act in which brain was more important than brawn. After a fire, forests were more productive, there was more game and the predators disappeared. A fire in the hearth tamed humankind. Armed with fire, humankind could tame nature. These hunters, whose only weapons consisted of cudgels or sticks, burnt forests to create great swathes of natural golf courses. This is how the American prairies were created, and probably the Eurasian steppes as well. For their physical survival, each human being needs to consume between 2,000 and 4,000 kilocalories per day. The production of a daily portion of the modern, meat-rich diet takes approximately 10,000 kilocalories of solar energy. Human muscles convert food into work, but most of the energy we use comes from elsewhere. In ancient Rome the consumption of non-food energy, most of it through the burning of wood, reached 25,000 kilocalories per person. In the modern world the energy consumption per person is 50,000 kilocalories per day, and in developed countries it is five times higher. 1 In 1943, the anthropologist Leslie White defined culture as the harnessing of energy with the help of technology. 2 Solar energy, which reaches our wicked world straight from the nearest star, is available to human beings in various forms: wind, water currents, firewood, fossil fuel and food. No energy is produced by human beings; it all comes from the sun. The only exception to this rule of thumb is nuclear energy; perhaps that’s why it is difficult for humans to harness it.

We learnt to cut wood and plough the earth once we had acquired the ability to attach a stone tip to a wooden handle. Wood was abundant, but rare flint was needed for the tip. In axes, crude stone was replaced with flint in about 4000 bce . Found all over Europe, flint axes and knives were produced in great quantities – about half a million every year. But there were very few flint mines. Axe heads originating from one flint deposit in the Alps have been found all over Western Europe. Axes from central Poland have been discovered 800 kilometres away. 3 So the earliest human tool, the flint axe, already combined two types of raw material – the easily replaceable stick and the precious flint, which was handed down from one generation to another, travelling huge distances on its way. The owners had to protect the sites where flint was found, and the first property rights developed. Others had to produce something of value to exchange: a flock of sheep, for example, or cured hides. This is how trade began.

For almost all of history, people lived in autonomous groups, communities or tribes. They fed themselves from the land on which they lived. When they had exhausted it they moved on to another plot and again burnt the forest. Fire helped to produce excellent harvests. Mature trees survived forest fires, and cereals or vegetables were sown around them. Field and forest existed side by side, and animals helped people clear the land. Horses and oxen hauled timber, pigs and sheep devoured grass and roots. It required about an acre of cleared forest to support one human being. Any growing population needed to expand the land available for burning and sowing. Like all technological revolutions, fire liberated people and reduced their dependence on nature. But no sooner had he achieved symbiosis with fire than bipedal man fell into the resource trap. In his quest for freedom and happiness, he was constantly destroying the very resource that made him prosper.