Rome collapsed during a cooling period, and droughts did not help, but it was part of the general trend of desertifying that part of the world with deforestation. The first epic written tale, of Gilgamesh, described his war against the forest, and even then, it was known that deforestation led to droughts. Half of the world’s plant biomass has been destroyed since agriculture began, which contributed to the collapses of all early civilizations.
Greek engineers invented the waterwheel, and like so much about Greek culture, the Romans adopted it. Windmills are millennia older, but watermills became the watershed power innovation. At its peak in Europe in the 1800s, before coal power prevailed, there were 500,000 waterwheels and 200,000 windmills, and waterpower was far more reliable than wind power. The watermill was the heart of what has been called the “Medieval Industrial Revolution.” Between 950 and 1250 was the Medieval Warm Period, which was when that revolution happened, in a period of great city-building in northwestern Europe. Also, the “reconquest” of the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors resulted in an academic windfall. While the Catholic Church had eradicated Ancient Greek writings as “pagan,” Islamic culture preserved them, and when the Christian armies captured Toledo and its library in 1085, it became an academic mecca for European scholars, as Greek and other works were introduced to medieval Europe. The rise in humanism thereby began, and the Scientific Revolution was one outcome, which helped lead to the Industrial Revolution.
Those rising economies of Europe were naturally devoted to a great deal of warfare, as technological progress meant a lot of progress in weaponry. The Mongol Hordes are “credited” with bringing gunpowder to Europe, and gunpowder was made in London as early as 1346. Guns were new energy weapons, which soon prevailed over arrows and other projectile weapons. The 1300s were calamitous, with famines (as the Medieval Warm Period ended), endless wars, and the Black Death. In the wake of all that, the Renaissance began, and the 1400s saw the European adoption of the printing press, which, like gunpowder and other key innovations, such as paper, was invented in China. But Europe’s key innovation, which enabled it to conquer the world, was the technical feat of turning Earth’s ocean into a low-energy transportation lane. It was another “precondition,” as without it, Europe could not have conquered the world. The oceangoing sailing ship was the greatest energy technology in world history to its time, as under full sail one generated several hundred horsepower (a watermill only generated a few horsepower).
Portugal was the first out of the gate in what became Europe’s imperial sweepstakes, soon followed by Spain, with the Dutch, English, and French close behind them. With the partial and temporary exceptions of China, Japan, and the Ottoman Empire, Europeans easily conquered all other polities that their ships could sail to, and it was the biggest catastrophe in the human journey. Even imperial apologist Steven Pinker called Europe’s “settling” of the Western Hemisphere history’s greatest crime. Slavery reached gigantic intercontinental levels, as the West pillaged Africa to replace the natives who were worked to death in the Western Hemisphere and who died from Old World diseases, in history’s greatest demographic catastrophe, as a hemisphere was depopulated. It was one of several catastrophes that Europe inflicted on humanity.
The Dutch had the first modern economy, and they burned peat for fuel. The English played catchup, but they had vast coal deposits. The Romans burned British coal, it was revived in England after it was deforested in the Medieval Warm Period, and air pollution became bad around London in the 1200s. London was bathed in clouds of coal smoke until my lifetime.
Stone tools, fire, easy meat, domestic plants and animals, metallurgy, wind and water power, low-energy transportation lanes – these were the energy innovations that propelled the human journey through the Epochs, without which the human journey would not have happened. It took many years of study before that all became clear to me, and it gave my teenage dream significance that I did not suspect at the time.
I have written at great length on my early days of study, when I learned why the media has little interest in the truth and how mass-murdering thieves were presented to me as heroes, saints, and Founding Fathers. It was initially the source of more outrage, but I eventually learned that all societies do that, to one degree or another. Relatively few people really care if they are fed lies, as long as believing them keeps their bellies full. This is how it works, in a world of scarcity and fear, as people just try to survive and temporarily sate their addictions. Few ever raise their eyes beyond the horizons of their immediate self-interest, and it took many dismaying experiences before I finally accepted it. That, far more than any other reason, is why we do not live in the Fifth Epoch today.
In the midst of that global conquest, England began exploiting coal as no other people had previously done, and although they did not see it coming (nobody ever did), it led to the next Epoch, and that comes next.
Sad but true