Dan Snow's History Hit - How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Humanity

Episode Date: February 20, 2023

We think of our natural environment as a subset of history, like studying the history of warfare or economics. But in truth, climate is the driving force of humanity, and understanding our climate helps us to understand life on earth in an entirely different way. Of all natural disasters, earthquakes are amongst the most impactful and the most destructive. The tragic Turkey–Syria earthquake on the 6th of February, 2023 came with a deadly cost, and will likely change the futures of both nations. With us is Peter Frankopan, Professor of Global History at Oxford University and author of the soon to be published book, The Earth Transformed: An Untold History. Peter will guide us through the main themes of climate history, how it has impacted on the human species, and it's power to change our future.Produced by James Hickmann and mixed by Stuart Beckwith.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download the History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download the History Hit app from the Apple Store.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. The recent shocking earthquake in Turkey and northern Syria

has reminded us of the dynamism of the planet on which we live. In this episode of the podcast, I want to talk to one of the world's greatest historians, the global historian Peter Frankopan, professor of history at Oxford University, about this planet that we're living on. Because he's just written a new book, The Earth Transformed, in which he tries to get to grips with the reality of our life, clinging to this little rock as we hurtle through space. You've all heard of Peter Frankopan.

He wrote The Silk Roads, an international bestseller. And now he's turned his attention to climate, the natural world, how our lives are defined, shaped, and controlled by things all too often that we can't see. Peter Frankopan is one of the freshest, most original thinkers. It's a great pleasure to have him back on the podcast. Enjoy. T-minus 10.

Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Hi, Peter. Thank you very much for coming back on the podcast. Pleasure to be back. It's taken me years to write another book and get the call up. So thank you very much for having me. Well, it's taken you a long time, but I've been wrestling with that book for the last

few days and I can see why it took you so long. This is, well, it's the history of everything, isn't it? Well, I finished a book called The Silk Roads in 2014. So we're now 2023, so nine years later. And I thought when I wrote The Silk Roads, you know, I was covering a big part of the world. But part of the question, I guess, was which parts of the world have I never written about and thought about before?

But also what are the kind of big themes in global history? I'm a professor of global history, and that has its own challenges about what is global history and how should we tie all these parts of the world together? But there are relatively few things that really allow us to think globally. is obviously one of those you know didn't need the pandemic to remind you of that but climate is another one and how we've treated nature in different parts of the world so i spent years down the rabbit hole digging away looking at

some cultures and peoples and periods i knew well about and there are lots that i didn't and so here it is lo and behold it'll take a while to, but I can promise it took a lot longer to write. What's really interesting about your new book is it's too easy to think of climate history like industrial history or military history as a kind of subset, like a little filing cabinet you can open and close. And what you make very clear is that the climate history of this planet is our own history. Human life as we understand it is obviously impossible without a million different strange and almost incomprehensible changes and tweaks to our Earth's crust, its core, its magnetic fields, its weather patterns.

And actually, you've helped me to kind of understand life on Earth in a very different way. That's very kind of you. I mean, that means I've done my job well. I guess it's not just climate, and climate is a trigger word in today's world. People sort of think that what you're talking about challenges the future, which I do, in the conclusion, have a little bit of a think about. But I guess it's the natural world, the natural environment. You know, for example, population distribution around the world stands to reason that most of us want to live in climates and in regions that are stable and allow us to grow crops and have lives, have good qualities of life. And some parts of the world are less hospitable. So England,

despite the rain, or Britain, despite the rain, it's quite a good place to choose. The Sahara Desert, maybe not such a good place. You know, Florida in the summer and winter, probably okay. Antarctica, maybe not so much. So that kind of idea about how are you not necessarily shaped and determined by your geography in the natural world, but how do you interact with those? And not just our own species, but all animals and all species. And I guess there are sort of some very fundamental ways of thinking about how we've reached where we are in the 21st century tracing back not just our own species back in the distant past but like you said the whole of the world and ironically as humans we're the beneficiaries of five great extinctions in the

past and every bit of life on earth today descends from the species animals that evolved from those five different extinctions and i guess that sort of starts you to think in a slightly different way around what are those sets of coincidences that have allowed us to adapt a world that suits us and you know what happens if that environment makes life challenging or difficult in the future too also it strikes me that the big moments in our story are moments in which we learn to kind of hack our environment, or we learn to overcome previously insuperable problems like building up a surplus of food and organising a system in where we can live together in sufficient numbers to start doing the things that we think of as human,

like having dramatic festivals and fighting each other and choosing mates from a wide pool of people. Those are really big moments, aren't they? Well, the interesting thing is, is the first sort of major cities, I guess we'd call them, towns and cities, urban settlements, tended to grow up in regions that were quite plentiful with water for very obvious reasons, for hydration, for crop growing, but also they were ecologically constrained. So that means that you've got a very fertile bit of land, but actually around it, it's not that fantastic.

So Mesopotamia is one example, the Nile is another, the Ildes Valley, the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers in what's now China. And those all provide sort of cradles that force people together, but you can't expand beyond its footprint because it's too difficult to get water out of deserts, mountains, etc, etc, to grow things the same way you do. So when people are forced together in the past, that's enabled people to work out how to cooperate. And then things that follow from being constrained, which is you tend to develop hierarchies. You know, some people's houses in a better place than others. You develop social inequalities because you need property ownership. And so what happens

5,000 years ago if you die? Should your kids inherit and take over your land? Should you divide it between them all equally or just between the sons or which sons? All those kinds of questions all flow from the fact that there's a finite amount of assets. And what past histories teach you is that when you overspill beyond your capability, because there are too many of you, or you're unable to adapt, or climates change, which does happen in the past, massive volcanic eruptions in one part of the world can lead to the annual land flood failing, then suddenly you can be very exposed and the size of your population, which has allowed you to build cities and city walls, suddenly becomes an Achilles heel. My natural state is to think about the history that I was taught and heard about at my grandma's knee is great, often men. You know,

the reason that Tang China thrives is just a good bunch of emperors. You know, the reason that the Ottomans spread over such a vast empire is just that they had a great run of leaders and you've written about them beautifully. But do you now see the environmental context as important, more important? When you're looking at these empires that, well, we don't admire them, but we've come to sort of regard them as golden ages, perhaps. Do you now see actually their environmental underpinnings more than anything that us humans were doing to build them? Well, okay, so I'm an economic historian as well. So I mean, I suppose what I would say is that everything flows from control over labour

forces, right? So you find city walls in Mesopotamia, those walls are there for a reason, and they're way beyond the capability of anybody being able to attack you, because the technologies don't exist. Probably there's a combination of big walls being built to project the authority of a ruler, but above all is to keep the labour force inside the walls. So you've got people who can work for you. And what empires do in any period in history, British Empire notwithstanding, is to find labourers, coerced, slaves, or paid for, indenture or otherwise, prisoners of war, to do the hard work for you to generate profits. And what empires do is that they bring resource to the centre. All empires do the

same thing. And typically those who are closest to the centre of power get the maximum amount of rewards. So I suppose it is absolutely right that great leaders, men and women though, great women leaders too, in history, as history followers know very well, that the quality of decision making is really important. But it's ultimately based on fundamentals around what resources can you control, what competition is there, and what are the ways in which mercantile interests in the early modern period, the English and the British, are very, very good at people who are making money to translate that wealth into greater rights. They're not interested in greater rights for most men and women, you know, for voting for democracy, But they're good at stopping the king making stupid decisions.

They're good at having parliament that meets and constrains military spending, that stops kings getting involved in really stupid wars in Europe that bad European rulers do all the time because they think it's prestigious and they have to spend a lot of money on equipping men and troops in the field. And what happens then is that those resources shift. So, for example, something that becomes very important in the 1700s and 1800s is saltpeter and guano, which are both extremely useful for nitrates and for explosives. And as technologies improve and armies get bigger, you know, it used to be in the 1600s and 1700s, firefights would last 20 minutes and would involve a few hundred or maybe a few thousand dead. That suddenly escalates to the Napoleonic era where you have hundreds of thousands of men

under arms. And in turn, what that means means is the state becomes stronger because you need to gather more resources and you need to make more risky decisions and I guess that kind of pattern of empire is a familiar one whether you're looking at the Akkadian empire 4,000 years ago to Putin's Russia to Facebook you know all these kind of imperial systems where you're trying to control labour and you're trying to funnel decision makingmaking to the centre. And when that happens, you have fragility. And what about those empires? You talk about China, you talk about the control of rice, of the ability to move it around on canals. The Mughals had this giant system of granaries that you could try and combat the vicissitudes of nature. So as the climate does change,

you chart many occasions on which humans have put up pretty good fights and sometimes even managed to survive during pretty extreme environmental hostility. And is that what helps, do you think, shape the modern state? It's civil servants basically trying to feed everyone and keep everyone from rising up and smashing up the system. Well, other things go wrong. I guess the starting point is you are more or less exposed depending where you live. And that's not just in terms of fragility and exposure

to disease and famine first and then disease and the things that come along that can kill hundreds of thousands, in fact, millions in many cases in the past. But it also affects your ability to produce. So economists have worked on latitudes and how, as you get further away from the tropics, GDPs tend to go up, rights tend to be more devolved in northern climes and in farther southern climes. So something depends on where you're living or what you're dealing with. And above all, it's access to water. So in places like Britain, where water tends to be plentiful, although we just had a summer just passed where we reached 40 degrees for the first time in recorded history in the last 10,000 years. But in places where water is more constrained or more difficult,

then suddenly there's exposure when you're there. So you can try to mitigate problems. But one of the things that links the Abbasids, for example, in the Middle East to the Mughal emperors through to the Bengal famine of the 1940s is that what happens when there's food shortages is that people who have access to any food supplies sit on it because the price starts to soar. It's the sort of common interest of the marketplace. If there's demand

that is greater than supply, prices go up. So if you're sitting on granaries, you want to keep them locked as far as possible so that the prices start to shoot up. So in many of these cases, in fact, it's human disaster. And Amartya Sen, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics, is the kind of master of this, is that often you can't compete against Mother Nature and, you know, you are doomed. But most of the time it's human error. And those human errors go from bats in wet markets in Wuhan through to poor decisions get made. So Al-Hakim, one of the great rulers of Fatimid Egypt in 1007, puts it very well. He says, if I find anyone who's hoarding grain, I'm going to bring them in front of me and personally decapitate them. Because the hoarding process of trying to get rich quick

is something that drives marketplaces. And that's kind of one of the dark sides of empire, of mercantile interests, of trying to see how you can profit from the misery of others. And that has been something that our common ancestors have known for thousands of years. I'm talking to Peter Frankopat about this turbulent planet on which we live and what it means for us. More coming up. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny,

you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Why were medieval priests so worried that women were going to seduce men with fish that they'd kept in their pants? Who was the first gay activist? And what on earth does the expression sneezing in the cabbage mean? I'll tell you, it's not a cookery technique, that's for sure. Join me, Kate Lister, on Betwixt

the Sheets, the history of sex, scandal and society. A podcast where we will be bed-hopping throughout time and civilisation to bring you the quirkiest and kinkiest stories from history. As promised, there will be sex. Anne has said that Henry is not

skilful in copulating with a woman and has neither vigour nor potency. Anne Scandal. Everybody just descends onto this crime scene and it's being

pulled apart by members of the public sort of as quickly as they can excavate the bodies. And moments which shaped society. Pointy boobs

then became a thing and were still a thing into the 1950s. What more could you possibly want? Listen to Betwixt the Sheets today wherever it is that you get your podcasts. A podcast by History Hit. We're talking now during the shocking aftermath

of the earthquake in southern Turkey, northern Syria. You don't just talk about the environment as in the kind of weather. You also talk about the nature of life on this crazy little spinning blob of molten rock in this dark and frozen universe. And I'm so struck when you see the pictures of people in Turkey. This is a part of the world that is a place of great antiquity, a cradle of incredibly rich and impressive civilizations and empires. And yet it's also one of seismic activity and danger and threat. But the two are linked, aren't they? And that's what you say so powerfully. And there's a reason that you don't get loads of great empires originating out of East Anglia. It's to do with geology and tectonics. I mean, one of the most densely populated places on Earth

is the northern part of India, which is a bad place to live if you're worried about earthquakes, because the Indian subcontinent is formed from a plate smashing into what created the Himalayas, not even that long ago in sort of the lifetime of our planet. And what that did is it created the crumples that produced Mount Everest and K2 and all the rest of it and places that I know you've climbed or going to climb having seen you on the telly do that sort of thing but I think that what then happens is that you produce floodplains that are flat underneath that in the good times produce water runoffs from the mountains that is great the snow melts that tends to have the flatness that comes with the compression of land that pushes upwards and that's the same sort of profile in northeastern China too and other

major zones of seismic activities is that people are drawn there not because they're stupid it's because they're calculating the risk that on balance you have more good times than you have bad the problem is those bad times if you live in high-rise buildings that have regulations that have taken away or non-existent from the government like has been clearly the case in turkey and syria then suddenly you're creating mass tombs for people where the greed of property developers people living in 20-story houses that aren't properly pinned. But you know, most places on earth have worked out that there are geological risks, but money always, like water, finds the shortest course to action. So it's not a completely illogical place to live. It's how do you build if you live there? What kind of risks should you prepare for? And you know, seismic activity is

not necessarily that dangerous in every single circumstance a lot is to do with human error like i said and so places like common in iran which was devastated by earthquakes multiple times in the last 200 years these are the same places that we know about they come back again and again and again but the reasons why people are living there is because of the fertility of the soil the water that's available and the fact that for most of the time they are attractive places to live it's's just the 1% which, when it gets you, can kill, you know, probably, in the case of Turkey, will end up in the hundreds of thousands, which is astonishingly cruel of a trick that nature plays by not understanding how to mitigate disaster and risk. And as you say, there's fertility, there's tectonic

activity that you get seams of things like copper being thrust towards the surface and easy to be mined. And as you say in the book, you talk about the volcanic ash that's also very fertile. And I'm thinking about Southern Italy around Vesuvius, there's people now still developing farms right up towards the summit of Vesuvius. And yet we know that will erupt. Yeah, and you know, there goes San Francisco and California and the San Andreas Fault. I mean, you almost couldn't think of a place that would be more dangerous to invest your life savings or to build businesses. But you know, we see that in fact, in the modern United States, so in a kind of belt, more or less of the southern third of the United States, by 2053, according to some projections at current rates of carbon burn, the bottom third of the United

States will be uninhabitable, because it will be temperatures of above 50 degrees centigrade in the summer months. And currently about 100 million people live there. And so you would probably think that if you heard that, you'd be thinking about maybe moving to Vermont or Maine or Canada or somewhere else. In fact, people are migrating into that area. And it's the same thing with floodplains in Florida, there are more people moving into floodplains in Florida than are moving out, even though, in fact, the last few days, we've had the chief executive of Lloyd's Insurance saying that Florida is almost at the point of being uninsurable now because of sea level rises and the risk and the costs of the big hurricanes that come through every year. So people's decision making is not necessarily always logical. And it's partly

because they don't understand what the risks are, partly because you think there's something about, I don't know whether it's faith, or whether it's blind judgment to think that you can beat the odds, but you're gambling that the upside is going to be better than the downside. But probably that's not the right equation to try to match. And despite the southern US states and Florida not being particularly famous at the moment for places where the state itself is regarded very highly, I wonder whether reading a book, I was so struck by how the state itself evolves, doesn't it? Because we try and build something to keep us safe from this crazy bloody planet that we're living on.

And because I love the 18th century, you always used to talk about the fiscal military state developing. Oh, the states have developed in order to wage war in Europe. Effectively, they can tax and then they can build effective professional armies and navies. And then that's where we get bureaucracy and then we get states. But actually, when I read your book, I'm thinking it's not the fiscal military at all. It's the fiscal environmental state or something. It's this thing that we create to try and keep the floodwaters away, to try and protect us from hurricanes or whatever it might be.

Yeah, well, I think that's right. And it's also to do with elites. And, you know, I use the word sort of both loosely, but also slightly guardedly, you know, in today's world where we're slightly sort of uncomfortable talking about those kinds of things. Clearly, what warfare centralisation does is it privileges those who are decision makers and get the highest levels of reward. And one of the questions one thinks about in a book like this, where I go through all of history and look at lots of different states is when we think about things like societal collapse, it's the kind of word that is quite popular with some historians, you know, collapse is bad if you sit in a palace or if other people are doing the

work for you. But it's not completely clear if you're working in a field, whether the fact that, you know, temples aren't being built or maintained, or the city walls start to fall down, you know, in what way is actually worse for the majority of the population? You know, does it really matter? But I think that that kind of idea about how states start to centralise and professionalise in the 17th, 18th century has all sorts of downsides. I mean, there are losers in that equation who vastly outnumber the winners. So for every sort of country house that gets built off the proceeds of transatlantic slavery, of cotton, of sugar, of globalisation, even in the post-slave world, those benefits aren't equally shared out. And, you know, you see things in the modern world, the amount of investment that goes into clean energy in Africa, for example, it's about 1%

of global investment, even though Africa could solve most of our energy needs altogether if we got our acts together and worked out how to put solar panels in the Sahara Desert. So I think that that kind of idea about inequality is a fundamental part of any state of centralization and of any kind of military elite, which of course is all a male world where it's men fighting each other and rewarding bravery and putting up statues of fallen generals. And you know, obviously, that's an important part of how we look at history for obvious and important reasons. I'm not saying that to belittle it. But I do think that that way in which you try to think what is it that people are actually fighting over, and who's doing the fighting, and what are the resources that are at stake poses a whole different set of questions.

Well, we're sort of hoping that the state will protect us as the state was able to redistribute grain in some of the empires you talk about in times of famine? Aren't we sort of all desperately hoping that the state is going to take moon dust and inject it into the atmosphere and all of the solar energy will bounce off the moon dust? Aren't we hoping that the state's going to start getting carbon out of the air? We all need the state to protect us, don't we? We can't rely on Elon Musk. I think we can't rely on Elon Musk, even though I'm sure he's a regular subscriber to the podcast. I'd come on and have a chat with you and him if he is. Elon, let us know. But I think that is how we have taught history to think about the states as protective, fighting defensive wars that save

us from the horrors of Nazism and so on, and obviously very good reasons for that. Actually, states are predators, you know, and you can look at the Soviet Union for that, you can look at Nazi Germany for that, you can look at the slave-owning world of Britain for that. And it's relatively recent, the idea that states are benign and make good decisions that support everyone. I mean, look at the communist world of China under Mao, look at how elites tend to never privilege other people. When you say we look for the communist world of China and Mao. Look at how elites tend to never privilege other people. When you say we look for the state to save us, you know, 100 years ago,

women in Uzbekistan were allowed to vote before they were in Britain. At my own university in Oxford, women had only been allowed to get a degree for the last 100 years. So when one talks about the state saving people, it's never saving everybody, it's saving some people.

And, you know, that Republican model of how the state should be smaller and smaller and do less and less and less is at this moment the existential question in the United States? Should the state be invisible and not doing anything? Or should it be protecting you? And you only need to look at military expenditure to see how our demands are out of sync with what we want to put into the pot ourselves. So here in the UK, we're having lots of discussions around lower taxes at the moment. But we've got a defence budget that is woefully short of what it needs to be for a

dangerous, troubling, difficult world of Russia, potentially China, North Korea, non-state actors, etc. And so it depends what it is that we want. But I think that that discussion that we've had in the democratic world, we're coming towards the end of the Fukuyama version of the end of history, liberal democracy triumphs, because we're very aware that if a state did its job well, we wouldn't have to be worrying about levelling up. You know, we wouldn't be tearing our hair out to come out of the European Union, or we wouldn't be trying to stop the Russians bombing maternity hospitals and blowing up civilian infrastructure in Ukraine. But states behave typically very badly. And to think that states are always enlightened requires quite a

few leaps of faith. I think if you study history like I do, one tends to think in terms of inequalities and who is feathering their nest best. And it's never people at the bottom of society. So it's trying to marry that, I think, into therefore, how does that sit alongside resources, the big climatic changes in the Little Ice Age, for example, the rise of the military states, and the way in which history itself starts to get written in different kinds of ways as the state becomes more powerful and stronger. It's no coincidence that the school of history that looks at individual men becomes stronger, more pronounced and more determined from that point onwards. Peter, tell us some other ways. You point out whether it's pandemics. There are many examples in your book of things that we compartmentalise,

like the Black Death, which actually are entirely because of climactic and environmental change around us. You know, so for example, the Black Death. I mean, what's difficult about conversations like this? I promise you, dear listeners, that, you know, we're talking very general terms and the book is very strong on the specific and on details. But, you know, for example, on the Black Death, the trigger on how that actually works is probably around volcanic eruptions about 60 years before the Black Death kicks off in Europe. So in about the 1260s, 1270s, it looks like there are geophysical changes along the steps and along the disease environment, particularly of the marmots. What Black Death and pathogens or plague needs, it needs transmitters to be able to connect people together. And the great connectors in this period in history are the Mongols, who despite how we think about them,

are free trade liberals. They're very keen to reduce trade barriers, goods flow backwards and forwards, and so too do the diseases and the pathogens that follow them. And when the Black Death gets into Europe, kills probably 40% of the population, Middle East about the same. Really interesting research being done

by some of my colleagues in West Africa and in China suggests that we've got mortality going on, maybe on the same kind of scale there too, in ways that we've never sort of looked at or understood. But some of the changes that happen to societies as a result are profound. So in Europe, there's a baby boom. People have what one of my colleagues calls a nuptial frenzy. People are so pleased to survive Black Death that they start getting married all the time. There's a change in the way that Jews perceive themselves because people believe that Jews, rightly or wrongly, suffer from plague at lower levels of mortality than otherwise. And that changes how Jews write about disease and about how they write about medicine and how they write about hygiene.

There are changes in the fact that because there are more cows available and fewer mouths to feed, there's a kind of protein boost for people around the point of Black Death. There are more wagons and more horses available for people to be able to use. And so the Black Death has a galvanising effect on lots of ways in which different parts of the world are linked to each other and how they come out the other side. And sometimes disasters breed success, but it takes a very, very long time. So the population of Italy doesn't recover for more than 200 years. And those kinds of things are a huge staging post, therefore,'s buying who's able to produce things why do people travel and what is your position when you're short of manpower when other countries potentially your

competitors start to develop global empires and so those kinds of questions i think around how does the natural and disease environment fit with climatic changes and with the resources you're able to get hold for yourself? And how does that therefore create the world that we're living in in 2023? So I think what good history can do is like looking back at your footsteps in the sand, can't show you where you're going, but it shows where you come from. And I think doing that in a different kind of way of not just through the battles and the kings that people were familiar with, or even the regions and places that we're

not familiar with, but in a way that connects us all together, is hopefully what the book will show those who are able and willing to give it a chance. Listen, while I've got you, give me one more example. Give me a volcano example. Talking about an event that binds everyone together, our lives have been, and our ancestors' lives have been, fundamentally changed by events that have taken place literally on the other side of the world. Well, there was a volcano that erupted in Tonga last year that has injected so much water. It was an underwater volcano.

So much moisture into the air that it has a measurable effect on how much the planet has warmed since. So we all saw those videos and thought, thank God not that many people died, that the tsunami effects weren't too bad. Tonga was badly affected, but it could have been a lot worse.

And thank God it was underwater. And, you know, our volcano is quite fun. And probably have a film with Daniel Craig or Piers Brosnan in them quite soon. I love those films. But volcanoes are the kind of secret way in which we're most at risk, I think, globally in the coming decades. We're overdue a really big volcanic eruption. And some of these ones are many hundreds, if not thousands of times,

greater magnitude than the Hiroshima nuclear bomb. So those kinds of things make our climate change discussions potentially irrelevant. And there are many, many, many magnitudes of probability greater than an asteroid strike, or probably even than Putin launching his nuclear bombs. we are super fragile from the natural world, it's important. In fact, the US Geological Survey that's keeping an eye on the biggest volcano in Hawaii has warned that if we're not ready with our volcano response plans and how to understand the consequences, then we're paving our own path to disaster. So volcanic eruptions in the past have been hugely significant, particularly kind of machine gun effects that have always been involved in big pandemics, the pandemic of Justinian, as it's known in the sixth century, all directly connected to a series of volcanic eruptions all going off around about the same time. The volcano in Laki in Iceland causes a solidification of Egypt that helps stultify political elites and stop any form of democratisation or sharing of power that lasted

for 250 years. So these things are really important to pay attention to. And I think we're too busy watching what it is that Boris Johnson might do next, or Liz Truss, or whoever the most recent last Prime Minister was. We should be paying attention to that natural world that is shifting very, very quickly and very dramatically around us. And, you know, at the start of the book, I'd give some of the materials written by our scientist colleagues writing about what is actually going on with bird life, with amphibian life, with marine life, and the ways in which territorial taxa and land plants and animals are moving away from a global warming world. You know, it's enough to chill the blood. And we should be paying more attention than just to the people who are gluing themselves to paintings in art galleries, because

the stuff that we're facing is not just existential, we're baked in. I mean, it's too late. We should be working through what are the consequences in the next 5, 10, 20, 30 years. Our children are going to have to face all of that. And studying history is quite an important way of opening the door to realising what some of those things that people have gone before us have had to deal with, because they're going to deal with something similar, but much worse. Peter Frankopan, I can't decide whether to enjoy your scholarship for its brilliance or whether to just put the whole thing down. to enjoy your scholarship for its brilliance, or whether to just put the whole thing down. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone,

including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Go out in my garden, watch the sun go down, hug my wife and kids close, just drink a beer. I'll join you if you've got a spare beer or wherever you are i'll come and find you and i'll share that with you nothing beats a cold beer and i do think you know my wife is very careful and clear to always say we need to be

optimistic and brave rather than throw our hands up in the air but there's nothing wrong with being pragmatic as long as you're realistic and if the study of history teaches you anything it's not to romanticize the past and not to catastrophize the present and the future it's to face up to what's in front of you and get on with it. I hope some politicians listen to that. Thank you very much, Peter Frank Pan. The monumental new book is called... The Earth Transformed, An Untold History. Go and get it, everybody.