A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: by Raj Patel Jason W. Moore

Author:Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Inc.

CHAPTER SIX

Cheap Energy

Here would be a good site for a town or fort, by reason of the good port, good water, good land and an abundance of fuel.

Journal of Christopher Columbus, Tuesday,

November 27, 1492

Before Columbus reached the New World, the sugar industry that had schooled him burned Madeira. The trees of Madeira (Portuguese for “wood”) were transformed from shipbuilding material to fuel to ashes. This wood became a source of energy not just through some innate property but through specific human relations. Just as the graphite in a pencil might instead become stuff for a hearth or peat transforms from a fertilizer to a combustible for the fireplace or cow dung moves from being a soil amendment to being a cooking fuel, wood was transformed by the relations around it. The configuration of capitalism’s ecology has shaped humans’ interaction with trees.

Fire has been part of the earth ever since there were things on dry land to burn.1 Before humans, fire had its rhythms, feeding on several seasons of accumulated kindling and fanned by propitious climate oscillations. Humans have, in their turn, set fire to a wide range of things. It’s through cooking that Homo erectus became Homo sapiens.2 Grasses were the first fuel, but buffalo dung endures as a rich source of heat. Herodotus observed that fatted animal bones were a fuel in Scythia.3 Charred mammoth bones suggest the long history of humans’ relationship with flames. The Maori colonization of Aotearoa (New Zealand) led to the loss of half its forest.4 But humans have also recognized the need to stint. Stint is usually translated as “forgo”—to perform an act of sacrifice against present consumption—but it’s more accurate to understand it as an indelible part of present consumption. You can find such a decision in the Chow dynasty (1122–256 BCE), which engaged in early attempts at forest management, including the establishment of a Police of Forest Foothills.5 The empire stinted to maintain an energy source.6

Capitalism’s ecology has a distinctive pyrogeography, one that is part of the fossil record. Indigenous People had thoroughly modified New World landscapes through fire. In eastern North America, they coproduced the “mosaic quality” of forest, savannah, and meadow that Europeans took for pristine nature.7 Between Columbus’s arrival and around 1650, disease and colonial violence reduced Indigenous populations in the Americas by 95 percent. With fewer humans burning and cutting them down, forests recovered so vigorously that the New World became a planetary carbon sink. Forest growth cooled the planet so much that the Indigenous holocaust contributed to the Little Ice Age’s severity.8 By the middle of the seventeenth century, some of the early modern era’s worst winters were being recorded across Eurasia and the Americas. Not coincidentally, it was an era of bitter war and political unrest, from Beijing to Paris.9 To reprise an idea from the introduction, it would be wrong to characterize this episode of genocide and reforestation as anthropogenic. The colonial exterminations of Indigenous Peoples were the work not of all humans, but of conquerors and capitalists.

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