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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Serie: Environmental History
- Sprache: Englisch
Profit — getting more out of something than you put into it — is the original genius of homo sapiens, who learned how to unleash the energy stored in wood, exploit the land, and refashion ecosystems. As civilization developed, we found more and more ways of extracting surplus value from the earth, often deploying brutally effective methods to discipline people to do the work needed.
Historian Mark Stoll explains how capitalism supercharged this process and traces its many environmental consequences. The financial innovations of medieval Italy created trade networks that, with the European discovery of the Americas, made possible vast profits and sweeping cultural changes, to the detriment of millions of slaves and indigenous Americans; the industrial age united the world in trade and led to an energy revolution that changed lives everywhere. But when efficient production left society awash in goods, a new sort of capitalism, predicated on endless individual consumption, took its place.
This story of incredible ingenuity and villainy begins in the Doge’s palace in medieval Venice and ends with Jeff Bezos aboard his own spacecraft. Mark Stoll’s revolutionary account places environmental factors at the heart of capitalism’s progress and reveals the long shadow of its terrible consequences.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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CONTENTS
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Notes
1 How It Started
An ecological odyssey
In the beginning: economy and ecology
Planting and herding: inventing capital and property
Civilizations, trade, and incipient capitalism
Civilization and environment
Money, commodities, and empire
Empire and environment
Notes
2 Trade and Empire
Columbus’s accidental discovery
Genoese, the capitalists of empire
Sugar and slaves
Environmental costs of Italian prosperity
Genoese in Iberian exploration and empire
Technology, the quest for gold, and beginnings of empire
Sugar plantations with racial slavery
Brazil
The mines of Potosí, Zacatecas, and Minas Gerais
Notes
3 The Wonders of Coal and Machines
Moving from the Italian-Iberian center: Dutch capitalism
The English follow close on Dutch heels
Plantation slavery of the northern Europeans: racism, violence, and conservation
Nature and the plantation-factory
Scotland reaches for the fruits of empire
Triangular trade and birth of the steam engine
Scottish religious culture, engineering, and capitalism
A transportation revolution begins
Watt’s steam engine and the textiles industry
The Industrial Revolution abroad
Industrial capitalism, plantation capitalism, and the environment
Trade and industry, water and coal, capitalism and the environment
Notes
4 Age of Steam and Steel
Prosperity and poverty in a globalized economy
Carnegie and the railroad
The astounding telegraph
The telegraph and the environment: copper
The telegraph and the environment: electricity
The telegraph and the environment: insulation
Industrialization and imperialism
The marvelous railroad
Steam and steel
The new Iron Age
Americans start making steel
Railroads push back industrial capitalism’s frontiers
Carnegie steel
Industrial capitalism’s global offspring
Steel and environmental change
Things go better with coke
Recognizing industrial capitalism’s social and environmental price
Notes
5 Conserving Resources
Industrial capitalism and limits to growth
Man and Nature: nature’s ecological limits
The Coal Question: nature’s limits to growth
Two paths to the question of resource limits
Puritan roots of limits of natural resources as a social and moral question
Conservation before Man and Nature and The Coal Question: the soil
Science, conservation, and the agricultural crisis of industrial capitalism
Conservation before Man and Nature and The Coal Question: timber and fuel
Forestry in British India and the United States
Rise of wildlife conservation
Relieving the social and environmental crises of the industrial city
The industrial city and birth of the parks movement
Conservation
The fading of Western industrial capitalism
Notes
6 Buy Now—Pay Later
The 1920s and the rise of the automobile
A brief history of consumption
Concentrating and coordinating consumer capitalism
Funding desire with consumer debt
Powering consumption: energy revolutions
Plastic fantastic consumer capitalism
How to get people to buy what they already own
Creating desire: advertising, consumer capitalism’s propaganda
Landscapes of consumer capitalism
Sating consumer capitalism’s appetite for natural resources
The problem of waste
When consumer capitalism stops
Notes
7 Stepping on the Gas
Consumer capitalism gets into everything
Postwar consumer capitalism before 1970
Propaganda for consumption and capitalism
World energy transitions
Globalization of consumer capitalism
Prosperity’s environmental costs: oil
Prosperity’s environmental costs: land
Prosperity’s environmental costs: waters
Prosperity’s environmental costs: radiation
Consumer paradise lost
Notes
8 Selling Everything
The everything store
Bezos and the new consumer capitalism
The death of the Future and fulfillment, identity, and meaning in consumption
Slowing economic growth and technical innovation
Governmental economic policies and consumer capitalism
Agriculture and the food industry
The computer revolution
The Great Acceleration accelerates the global environmental crisis
Throwaway capitalism
Age of plastic
Landscapes of late consumer capitalism
Energy: coal
Energy: petroleum
Pollution, air, and climate
To infinity, and beyond
Notes
9 The Rise and Globalization of Environmentalism
A movement is born
A fable for tomorrow
Development and environment
Interwar conservation
Postwar environmental thinking
Genesis of a political and cultural movement
The 1970s, the American environmental decade
Rise of the Greens
The internationalization of environmentalism
Failure to address the warming climate
The environmental challenge of corporate agriculture
Corporations and the environment
Capitalism and environmental movements
Notes
Conclusion: Profit—Capitalism and Environment
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1
. The Antimenes Painter, Amphora, 520 B.C. Two men and two youths, likely slaves, …
Chapter 2
Figure 2
. Stefano della Bella, Loading a Galley, from Views of the Port of Livorno, 1654 …
Figure 3
. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Three Caravels in a Rising Squall with Arion on a Dolphin, …
Figure 4
. William Clark, “Holeing a Cane-Piece,” Ten Views of the Island …
Chapter 3
Figure 5
. William Clark, “Interior of a Boiling House,” Ten Views in the Isla…
Chapter 4
Figure 6
. Utagawa Kuniteru, Illustration of a Steam Locomotive Running on the Takanawa Rail…
Figure 7
. Currier & Ives, “The Progress of the Century,” 1876.
Figure 8
. John Vachon, World’s largest open pit mine, Hull-Rust-Mahoning, near Hibbing …
Chapter 6
Figure 9
. Interior view of Marshall Field & Company retail store, located at State and Washington …
Figure 10
. “Would your husband marry you again?”, 1921.
Chapter 7
Figure 11
. A family gathers around a television set in the 1950s.
Figure 12
. The Torrey Canyon, full of crude oil from the Middle East, breaks up on a reef off …
Chapter 8
Figure 13
. Álvaro Ibáñez, Una visita al gigantesco Centro Logístico de Amazon España …
Figure 14
. Mobile payment terminal, in Fornebu, Norway, operated by near-field communication …
Chapter 9
Figure 15
. Bruna Prado. Brazilians gather in defense of the Amazon and protest against deforestation …
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Begin Reading
Conclusion: Profit—Capitalism and Environment
Index
End User License Agreement
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Environmental History
Adrian Howkins, The Polar Regions
Paul R. Josephson, Chicken
Jon Mathieu, The Alps
PROFIT
An Environmental History
Mark Stoll
polity
Copyright © Mark Stoll 2023
The right of Mark Stoll to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2023 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3325-1
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022938554
The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgments
In writing this book, I have incurred many scholarly and personal debts. First I must mention my gratitude to my editor at Polity, Pascal Porcheron, who invited me to write it and who followed supportively through the entire process as the sausage was being made. Thanks also to the many staff at Polity with whom I worked in the production of the book.
I am grateful to Sverker Sörlin for reading and commenting quite helpfully on the first draft. John R. McNeill also commented with insight at various stages. I also appreciate the responses of several anonymous readers of the proposal and of the first draft.
A fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center of Munich, Germany, under the direction of Christof Mauch, in the fall of 2019 gave me time among supportive colleagues from around the world during which I wrote a portion of the book. Specifically, thanks to the fellows who at a work-in-progress session discussed and commented on an early version of a chapter: Liz DeLoughrey, Kelly Donati, Rachel S. Gross, Robert Gross, Marcus Hall, Sevgi Sirakova Mutlu, Eunice and Rubens Nodari, Anna Pilz, Jayne Regan, Xiaoping Sun, Anna Varga, Monica Vasile, and Kate Wright. The RCC fellowship program was a wonderful opportunity for scholarly creativity and community.
Heartfelt thanks to Verena Winiwarter for the invitation to present a version of the book’s thesis at a Minisymposium at the Center for Environmental History (ZUG) in Vienna, Austria, in 2019. Thanks as well to the audience of the panel at the 2018 meeting of the American Society for Environmental History in Riverside, California, for their questions and comments on my paper on consumer capitalism and the environment. I also presented a version of the book’s thesis to a session organized by Shen Hou and Donald Worster of the Center for Ecological History at the Renmin University of China, which formed part of the ASEH’s Environmental History Week in 2021.
I owe a debt of gratitude to the History Department of Texas Tech University and its chair Sean Cunningham for release from teaching at important moments. The Texas Tech Humanities Center Faculty Fellows program funded a semester’s course release. Thanks to several History Department colleagues, who cheerfully gave me advice and suggestions for readings when I ventured in fields far from my own: Stefano D’Amico, Abigail Swingen, and Barbara Hahn.
Finally, I benefited from correspondence with and advice from many colleagues. My appreciation goes to Karl Appuhn, Bruce Clarke, Craig Colton, Steve Epstein, David Fedman, Maria Margarita Fernandez Mier, Alan Loeb, Greg Maddox, Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud, Jim McCann, Manuel Gonzalez de Molina Navarro, Paul Warde, and John Wing.
Innocent Afuh and Cynthia Henry of the Texas Tech University Library helped me find answers to some difficult research questions. The library’s reference staff often fielded requests for help finding sources. I kept Katie DeVet and the staff of the Interlibrary Loan office very busy. I am grateful to all of them for their cheerful and capable assistance.
While I am grateful to all these people for so much, the interpretations and any errors in the book are mine alone.
Most of all, I owe my wife, Lyn, a debt I cannot repay for her constant support and encouragement during the five years I wrestled with this monster of a book topic. This book is for her.
Introduction
Reach into your pocket or bag and pull out your smartphone. Almost certainly you have one within easy reach. You might even be reading this on it. The palm-sized technological marvel you hold can connect you to billions of people, even in some of the most remote spots on earth. It can tell you where you are and how to get to where you are going. It can play music, videos, and movies. With it, you can find almost any information you want, in many languages, from the history of the Wattasid dynasty of Morocco to Great-Aunt Tilley’s latest pictures of her cat. The consumer products of the world’s factories and artisans are yours with a touch of a “Buy” icon. This little device has wormed its way into daily life so deeply that separation from it provokes anxiety.
The smartphone is ubiquitous because it is cheap—so cheap that service providers give away older models. This miraculous contrivance, though, costs more than advertised. The touchscreen and case conceal a Pandora’s box of environmental evils. The plastic in the case derives from petroleum or natural gas, which a multinational corporation extracted from underground, often with damage to ecosystems and watersheds, and transported by pipeline, supertanker, truck, or railroad with spills, leaks, and clouds of the greenhouse gases methane and carbon dioxide. A low-paid worker in a factory in east or south Asia used dangerous chemicals to make and form the plastic case. Inside the case, metals like rare earths, aluminum, gold, cobalt, tin, and lithium make the phone work. The rare earths come from China, which has 95 percent of the world’s reserves. Mining them uses tremendous amounts of energy and materials and generates radioactive waste, hydrogen fluoride, and acidic wastewater. Ships burning fossil fuels bring the other metals from mines in southeast Asia, Africa, South America, and Pacific islands. Those mines have displaced people, incited violent conflict, destroyed agricultural land, polluted water, and damaged the health of often unprotected miners, who sometimes are child laborers. Energy for manufacturing your phone and charging its batteries (not to mention powering telephone and Internet services and server farms) comes, more often than not, from powerplants that burn coal or gas and produce sulfur and mercury pollution and more greenhouse gases. Companies design smartphones to be replaced about every two years. Most people discard old phones, which end up in landfills, slowly leaching toxic chemicals. Some owners recycle them, but recycling their complex, compact, and integrated components is not easy or clean and requires harmful chemicals that produce hazardous waste.1
How did the environmental crime that is the smartphone end up in the hands of billions of people who have little idea of its environmental costs? The answer is complicated. Most certainly, people want them for convenient communication, social media, entertainment, features like cameras and alarms, and access to the Internet. They may be responding to social pressure or work requirements. Then, too, smartphones have nearly become a necessity in modern life. But looming behind all these factors is a group of huge corporations that sell them for the profit of investors and shareholders. Other corporations provide the content, application programs (“apps”), and social media websites that cleverly keep users’ attention nearly constantly on their phones. Finally, standing almost hidden in their shadows are some of the most important actors, the corporations that lobby governments for favorable laws and regulations and others that provide promotional campaigns to convince people to buy the device or its attendant services and apps. They have been extraordinarily successful at getting people to acquire something that only a short time ago no one knew they wanted. Before 2007, the smartphone barely existed, but in the near future, 70 percent of the world’s population will have one. The smartphone is the very epitome of capitalism in its latest incarnation.
Who then is guilty of the environmental crime that is the smartphone? A detective on the case might suggest the Murder-on-the-Orient-Express solution: everybody did it. Under the promptings of a variety of considerations, we thoughtlessly buy and dispose of smartphones without any compulsion whatsoever. Alternatively, an environmental Hercule Poirot might instead name the culprits who most stand to benefit and who hide the smartphone’s environmental costs: the corporations that profit from making and selling the device and its services. The smartphone and its cousins the tablet, laptop, and personal computer are astonishingly profitable. They provide the incomes of what in April 2021 were the world’s six largest private corporations by market value: Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Facebook, and Tencent. Founded since 1975, and four of them since 1994, these gigantic corporations are barely older than the smartphone itself and none is older than the personal computer.2
We have lined up suspects for the crime. What will be the verdict? We have a hung jury. Some jurors call the crime a part of the “Anthropocene” and blame humans collectively. Environmental thinkers like Bill McKibben, E. O. Wilson, and Elizabeth Kolbert blame our personal choices.3 If everyone would simply behave, believe, buy, and ballot more responsibly and more morally, we could save the world. Others, among them Jason W. Moore, Andreas Malm, and Naomi Klein, prefer “Capitalocene” and point the finger of guilt at capitalists and corporations.4 Jurors also disagree over the time of the crime. One party dates it to a Great Acceleration after World War II. Another argues for the beginning of the Industrial Revolution around 1800. Still a third group sees human fingerprints all over the environment much deeper in time, perhaps as long ago as the adoption of agriculture 10,000 years ago.
Frankly, the fault lies both in our stars and with ourselves. It is difficult to identify anything in our modern lives—food, fuel, clothing, housing, transport, work, or leisure—that is not also complicit in similar crimes against the earth. They all present our jurors with the same conflicting evidence. One may argue that the rich, who consume the most, are more culpable than the poor, and that no amount of water can wash guilt from the hands of leaders of industry. True enough. Yet none of us today lives completely free of the web of consumer capitalism. The ongoing pillage of the planet lends length, ease, and quality to the lives of the great majority of us and in truth makes it possible for us to exist at all. The human species flourishes as no biped or quadruped ever has. Neither hunting and gathering nor premodern agrarian practices, as sustainable as they often are, could feed, clothe, and house the world’s population of nearly 8 billion people or give a substantial minority of them previously unimagined abundance, but the global capitalist system does.
Calculations of the total body weight of all humans and land animals through human history show how miraculous this really is. In the late Pleistocene, according to one study, human biomass was vanishingly small, while terrestrial mammals collectively weighed about 175 million metric tons.5 By 1900, after the agricultural and industrial revolutions, as Vaclav Smil has reckoned it, humans weighed in at 70 million metric tons while wild animals had declined to 50 million metric tons. Species under human control living on formerly wild habitat—cattle, horses and donkeys, water buffalo, pigs, sheep, goats, camels, poultry, and more—counted for 175 million metric tons, the total body weight of all wild animals many millennia earlier. In other words, humans had found ways to support an additional 120 million metric tons of body weight out of the same environmental resources.
Then consumer capitalism kicked in and terrestrial biomass made an astounding jump. By 2000, Smil calculates, humans alone made up over 300 million metric tons of biomass, or over two-thirds more animal weight than all animals together before the rise of Homo sapiens. Domesticated animals composed another 600 million metric tons (with a couple million more for dogs, cats, and other pets). The combined biomass of humans and domesticated animals amounts to greater than 500 percent of the Pleistocene total. At the same time, the biomass of wild animals had declined another 50 percent since 1900 to about 25 million metric tons, about a sevenfold decline since their Pleistocene peak. This means that the figure for wild animals equates to about four percent of that for domesticated animals and only 2.7 percent of that for humans and their animals together.6
Perhaps we should be grateful that we have somehow left any resources for them at all. But this marshalling of the earth’s resources for human needs is what makes it possible for nearly 8 billion people to live.
This book tells the story of how this world came to be. The title Profit is ambiguous. In its common current usage, it means financial profit, which today we associate with a system we call capitalism. Profit in its original meaning can also mean any benefit, as when we say we profit by experience. In the financial sense, most of capitalism’s profits accrue to a very small proportion of the world’s population. In the broader sense, considering that capitalism supports so many people, and a large proportion of us very comfortably, we all profit from it. Profit tells the history of capitalism through the stories of a series of individuals who represent either the opening of a significant new stage of capitalism or the development of influential movements to control its environmental impacts. Many (but not all) of the former believed they were profiting society and themselves at the same time. The latter sought to profit the world without profits to themselves.
Capitalism has transformed many times throughout history. At its most fundamental level, capitalism is an economic system in which (usually) private owners of accumulated wealth or capital invest it for profit in enterprises of extraction and distribution of raw materials or of production and distribution of goods, where (ideally) unrestricted competition with other enterprises in a (more or less) regulated marketplace decides prices. Note the qualifiers in parentheses. They suggest how rare anything like “pure” capitalism has been and help account for significant variations from place to place and era to era. A capitalist system functions more effectively when it has access to easy transportation, abundant energy sources and natural resources, a tractable and disciplined labor force, and dependable communication between extractors, producers, and sellers.7 Its scale runs from the mundane, such as when a tenant farmer sells papayas in a market in a tropical village, to the momentous, as when a wealthy trader sells arcane financial instruments in a global center of capital like New York or London. Between local and global levels are many almost incomprehensibly complex and interconnected layers, always in motion and changing in response to the others. The price farmers get for commodities like papayas affects global capitalism, while tropical farmers feel the impact of international financial machinations.8
Capitalism’s development was anything but preordained. Constant motion and change in the layers and interplay between them have driven capitalism’s historical evolution from incipient to modern stages. Its history is contingent, culturally conditioned, and in constant conversation with environmental possibilities and constraints. Recognizably capitalist systems evolved not just in western Europe but around the world as well. Only in the West, however, did modern capitalism arise, with its hallmarks of separation of business from the household, rational bookkeeping, and rational organization of labor. Neither of two major historical forms of capitalist organization, the slave plantation and the mechanized factory, had any true counterparts outside modern capitalism’s realm. Western capitalism wields unprecedented power to utilize resources intensively to produce wealth. Because industrial and consumer capitalism developed in western Europe and North America and today reaches into every corner of the globe, this history focuses mainly on the paths that led to, through, and out of these regions.9
Capitalism has no single place or time of origin. Every form of capitalism had forerunners centuries earlier. Contemporary consumer capitalism developed mainly in the United States from precursors in the European and American Industrial Revolution. Most elements of English industrial capitalism developed from innovations in the Netherlands a century before. For their part, the Dutch had poached Iberian global empires but ultimately relied on a model of mercantile capitalism that developed in medieval Italian trading empires. Italians had in turn borrowed prototypes devised in the Islamic world and ancient Rome and Greece. From Antiquity the trail leads back into the deep past. The first simple strands of the worldwide web of consumer capitalism that ensnares us today were laid down many millennia ago and can be discerned even among our earliest ancestors. Its threads would be spun, broken, repaired, abandoned, replaced, extended, and multiplied many times, until today they entangle all the earth and its peoples.
Some threads remained constant from the Age of Sharp Stones to the Age of Smartphones. From the time humans first appeared on the planet, they showed a talent for extracting more sustenance from a region’s resources than any other animal and could support greater numbers, greater biomass. They communicated and cooperated better than any other animal. Humans mined minerals and soils for utility and for consumer goods. They sought sources of more energy. They manufactured useful and desirable items. They devised more efficient transportation for goods and for themselves. Humans dominated, exploited, and fought with their neighbors. And they developed the earliest economy with their exchanges of goods, resources, skills, and knowledge.
Capitalism’s story is tightly woven together with the natural world. On the one hand, specific environmental circumstances made modern capitalism possible and shaped its growth. Broader climate changes also played a significant role. On the other hand, economic activity has always degraded environments. With each stage of economic development, people ratcheted up the efficiency of their exploitation of natural resources. Step by step, the process impoverished ecosystems and transformed landscapes. Today, consumer capitalism has magnified human environmental impact to a startling degree, exterminating species, deranging ecosystems, draining wetlands, redirecting and damming rivers, cutting down forests, and degrading soils. It consumes resources and dumps them again with dizzying speed. It broadcasts chemicals to the four winds, the four corners of the globe, and the seven seas. It changes the atmosphere and heats the planet. There’s hardly a place or species on earth unaffected by human deeds and works—even to the bottom of the deepest ocean trenches, where high levels of toxic chemicals poison creatures and plastic bags float like pale ghosts.10
Profit: An Environmental History traces how these developments in technique, technology, transportation, energy, communication, and trade and finance led to modern consumer capitalism. It presents incipient capitalism, mercantile capitalism, plantation capitalism, industrial capitalism, and consumer capitalism as stages in the long human endeavor to use resources more intensively. Each chapter explores a stage in its evolution and its environmental impacts. Chapter 1, “How It Started,” gives an account of precursors and emerging patterns among early hominins. It then explores ancient Greek and Roman merchant capitalism, with its fateful linkage of coinage, slavery, commodity agriculture, trade, empire, and environmental change.
Chapter 2, “Trade and Empire,” tells of the signal advances by medieval Italian city-states in banking, corporate institutions, empire, and commodity agriculture. Italians fashioned the template that Iberians and northwest Europeans followed with their own world trade and plantation empires. The chapter uses the experience of Christopher Columbus to illustrate the transfer of Italian models, as well as the haphazard, opportunistic methods that built European imperial systems and economies. Global exploitation of peoples and nature fueled Europe’s rise.
The next two chapters, “The Wonders of Coal and Machines” and “Age of Steam and Steel,” trace the adolescence and maturity of industrial capitalism, often called the First and Second Industrial Revolutions. This era ushered in tremendous, fateful technological, social, and environmental changes, among them the energy transition from renewable to fossil energy. The careers of James Watt and Andrew Carnegie illustrate important themes, among them the role of science in technological advances, cultural influences on the pace and direction of economic and social change, and the passing of industrial leadership from Europe to the United States. Chapter 5, “Conserving Resources,” considers the emergence of a conservation and parks movement to control industrialization’s environmental problems. American George Perkins Marsh and Englishman William Stanley Jevons perceptively and influentially analyzed industrialization’s destruction of its resources and energy bases.
Three chapters, “Buy Now—Pay Later,” “Stepping on the Gas,” and “Selling Everything,” portray the evolution, mainly in the United States, of twentieth- and twenty-first-century consumer capitalism. This form of capitalism bears more responsibility than anything else for today’s environmental crises. Advances in industrial techniques had pushed production past demand. To boost consumption, corporate management developed new techniques in advertising, financial incentives, and product replacement. Another energy transition, from coal to oil and gas, fueled both production and consumption. Supply and demand chased each other at a rising pace. Our houses filled with stuff. Global wealth rose, too. Nothing exemplifies the age like the automobile industry, as the new consumerist orientation of Alfred Sloan’s General Motors outstripped the older producerist mentality of Henry Ford’s Ford Motor Company. After World War II, Ray Kroc represented a new type of capitalist figure, cut from a different cultural cloth with fewer moral qualms about having money. Kroc masterminded the global rise of the model fast-food restaurant chain, McDonald’s. Finally, Jeff Bezos’s Amazon.com exemplifies the period of consumer capitalism after the 1970s, in which selling things to consumers has become much more profitable than making them. Rising levels of consumption draw producers to make ever more goods, for which they take ever more resources from the environment and generate ever greater quantities of waste and greenhouse gases.
“The Rise and Globalization of Environmentalism” explores the global movements to manage consumer capitalism’s terrible ecological impact. American Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring stands as the single most significant work in the postwar environmental movement. Briton Barbara Ward’s Only One Planet (cowritten with René Dubos) and her tireless work around the world laid out major themes in the globalization of environmentalism. The two books illustrate environmentalism’s major concerns but also its important limitations. Environmentalism remains entangled with consumer capitalism even as it works to counter its ecological impacts. A conclusion offers reflections on how our efficiency in extracting resources from the natural world has far outrun our ability (or willingness) to manage environmental consequences.
Although capitalism has long interested environmental historians, they had never made it the subject of a monograph or the primary actor or theme of a major work. Such foundational books as Donald Worster’s Dust Bowl (1979) and William Cronon’s Changes in the Land (1983) stressed such abstract forces as Worster’s “culture of capitalism” or Cronon’s “commodification” but did not analyze the system itself. The economic crisis of 2008 and the appearance of much-discussed books like Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) and Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History (2014) prompted renewed discussion of capitalism and its impacts. A stream of works has begun to address the subject, prominent among them the works of Naomi Klein, Jason Moore, and Andreas Malm.
Profit: An Environmental History takes a different tack. It is a history of capitalism that seeks to explain both how capitalism changed the natural world and how the environment shaped capitalism. Capitalism grew up with our species and is inescapably everywhere. It has sinuously and stealthily worked its way into and subverted every system human ingenuity has thus far devised to control or destroy it. Profit tells the development of the conundrum that capitalism presents us today: we cannot live with capitalism and cannot live without it. At best, we can work to ameliorate its worst effects.
A book of this length must leave out topics that I would love to address more fully. Perhaps if I had the luxury of writing three volumes, as Fernand Braudel did (although even he kept mainly to capitalism in a few European countries in just the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries), I could devote greater attention, for example, to capitalist systems in China, India, and other civilizations. Also, this book discusses Western environmental thought but gives little explicit attention to economic thought, whether of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Polanyi, Milton Friedman, or any other. Debates among economists over the environment grew so voluminous in the last century that they would fill a book in themselves. Finally, I allude to the experience of worker, subaltern, and indigenous groups but do not focus on them, which again are topics worthy of another book. That still leaves me with plenty to write about.
Notes
1.
Mariana Mazzucato,
The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths
, rev. edn. (New York: PublicAffairs, 2015), 93–120; Elizabeth Jardim,
From Smart to Senseless: The Global Impact of 10 Years of Smartphones
(Washington, D.C.: Greenpeace, 2017); Jason C. K. Lee and Zongguo Wen, “Rare Earths from Mines to Metals: Comparing Environmental Impacts from China’s Main Production Pathways,”
Journal of Industrial Ecology
21(5) (October 2017): 1277–1290; Amnesty International,
“This Is What We Die For”: Human Rights Abuses in the Democratic Republic of the Congo Power the Global Trade in Cobalt
(London: Amnesty International, 2016).
2.
Andrea Murphy, Eliza Haverstock, Antoine Gara, Chris Helman, and Nathan Vardi, “Global 2000: How the World’s Biggest Public Companies Endured the Pandemic,”
Forbes
(May 13, 2021),
https://www-statista-com.lib-e2.lib.ttu.edu/statistics/263264/top-companies-in-the-world-by-market-capitalizatison/
. See Leslie Sklair, “Sleepwalking through the Anthropocene,”
British Journal of Sociology
68(4) (2017): 775–784.
3.
For example, see Bill McKibben,
Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet
(New York: Times Books, 2010); Edward O. Wilson,
Biophilia
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984); Elizabeth Kolbert,
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
(New York: Holt, 2014).
4.
See Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore,
A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet
(Oakland: University of California Press, 2017); Andreas Malm,
Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam-Power and the Roots of Global Warming
(London: Verso, 2016); and Naomi Klein,
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014).
5.
Yinon M. Bar-On, Rob Phillips, and Ron Milo, “The Biomass Distribution on Earth,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
115(25) (June 2018): 6508.
6.
Vaclav Smil, “Harvesting the Biosphere: The Human Impact,”
Population and Development Review
37 (December 2011): 618.
7.
Patel and Moore’s clever
A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things
overlooks the vital roles of communication and transportation in the history of capitalism.
8.
Fernand Braudel proposed the idea of layers in
Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century
, vol. 1,
The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible
, trans. by Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 23–26.
9.
Why industrial capitalism developed in the West and not elsewhere is a question famously raised by Kenneth Pomeranz in
The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Perhaps the most important factors were environmental. In England and nowhere else, waterpower sites, coal and iron deposits, water transportation, and harbors lay very near to each other and to suitable workers.
10.
Damian Carrington, “‘Extraordinary’ levels of pollutants found in 10km deep Mariana trench,”
Guardian
(London), February 13, 2017.
ONEHow It Started
An ecological odyssey
As the 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey opens, humanity’s ape-like ancestors three or four million years ago are struggling to survive. One day, unseen aliens place a large black monolith in their midst. Inspired by its mysterious powers, the hominins learn to use tools. They first wield weapons against prey and predators, ensuring their survival. Soon, however, they murderously turn them on their neighbors, driving them away from territory and resources. The monolith vanishes, but a second one lies buried on the moon, whose purpose is to send a beacon when humans have advanced enough to find it and expose it to the light of the sun. The surviving crewmember of a spaceship sent to follow the direction of the beacon discovers a huge third monolith orbiting Jupiter. This one is a Star Gate, which takes him across the galaxy to a distant planet. There, a fourth monolith transforms him to the Star Child. His evolution complete, he returns to earth to bring peace to warring nations.1
However much humanity could use a little benevolent extraterrestrial guidance these days, we unfortunately have found no alien monolith buried on the moon for uncounted eons to guide us out of a troubled present into a utopian future. On the other hand, in the decades since author Arthur C. Clarke and director Stanley Kubrick wrote the novel and screenplay, we have come to realize there was no need for aliens to have intervened in human history to set humanity on its present track. Observers have watched many ape, monkey, and bird species use tools. Archeologists discovered evidence that pre-Homo hominids also used stone tools and seem to have figured out tool-making on their own. (On the other hand, a utopian future still seems likely to require outside assistance.) Our ancient ancestors also, stone by stone, laid the foundation for the rise of early capitalism, changing the environment as they did so.
In the beginning: economy and ecology
When the earliest species of the genus Homo evolved about 2.6 million years ago, something happened almost as dramatic as a timely hint from benevolent aliens. Developments having no equal in earthly evolution set our ancestors on the long, meandering course that has led us to today’s global consumer capitalism and global environmental crisis. The first steps were small but fateful. Superior powers of communication made possible greater cooperation. Our omnivorous ancestors now gathered and used resources for their survival more effectively. They passed accumulated cultural and technical knowledge to others and to future generations. Greater manual dexterity allowed them to improve the basic spears and stone tools of chimpanzees and Australopithecus. Talking and working together, hominins could now bring to the table animals as large or larger than they. Defending their kills against scavengers and thieves, they took their place among top predators. A meatier diet with considerably more protein made them larger and perhaps more intelligent.
Early humans also fatefully made the first energy transition and learned to get more out of available natural resources. They tamed a vital source of energy to supplement muscle power when they learned to liberate the heat energy stored in plants. Humans mastered fire possibly 1.9 million years ago, probably by 790,000 years ago, and certainly by 300,000–200,000 years ago. Fires burned undergrowth and made forests more open. Game species thrived, and with them, humans. For the first time in the history of life, a species deliberately refashioned whole ecological systems to support more of its kind from the same physical resources. Cooking food gave hominins access to a wider selection of food sources and, it has been suggested, allowed energy saved in digesting raw foods to feed the voracious energy appetite of larger brains.2 Fire kept humans warm as climates cooled after they spread into temperate latitudes during warm interglacial periods.3 Humans gave vent to creative impulses with fired clay figures at some early date, followed by pottery and, about 10,000 years ago in the early Holocene, by copper, all gifts of the stored energy of burning wood.
While the durability of stone implements lent the name “Stone Age” to the era, early humans developed all sorts of technology and simple machines. Bones made excellent material for such tools as awls and needles. No doubt early humans used perishable body parts like sinews as well. About 70,000 years ago, cooling climates in once-warm latitudes into which hominins wandered inspired leather-working technology for clothes, bags, and other objects.4 At some time before the onset of the Holocene about 11,700 years ago, humans developed bows and arrows, fishhooks, and throwing-sticks for hurling darts, spears, and harpoons. Seaworthy boats, probably built for fishing the ocean, carried people across fifty miles of open water to Australia 65,000 years ago.5 People wove dyed fibers into textiles for stylish colorful clothes no later than 30,000 years ago.6 Basket-weaving provided storage until fired clay pots offered all-purpose waterproof and vermin-proof containers as early as 20,000 years ago.7
So it was that the earliest human species developed technology and simple machines and harnessed stored energy—the tiny mustard seeds of the Industrial Revolution. Technology and energy are, however, not sufficient in themselves. The extraordinarily long infancy and childhood of humans gives time for teaching and training at a unique scale. Humans organized themselves to kill large prey, cook, and share food, perform ceremonies, and much more. They developed techniques to produce dangerous weapons, hunt, form pots, and kindle fires. Far beyond that, they also had techniques for binding wounds, treating illness, and using magic and ritual to attempt to control for human benefit the mysterious forces that rule the world.8
The environmentally destructive mining that brings us the components of our cell phones is an ancient practice writ large. Humans are a mining species. The nearest rock was likely not the best rock for human purposes. Early humans dug shallow open-pit mines to get to unweathered flint, which flaked better. Mining always leaves scars upon the land, a boon for archeologists. Evidence survives of a 1.3-million-year-old flint quarry in Morocco.9 In Swaziland at least 43,000 and perhaps 80,000 years ago, miners extracted tons of specularite (a source of red ocher). By 35,000 years ago, people in Poland and Hungary had dug pits and sometimes subterranean mines for colored ores, while in Paleolithic Egypt, Australia, France, Spain, Belgium, Poland, and (later) in Texas, they dug up flint.10
Groups that controlled mines found themselves in economically valuable positions, direct ancestor of today’s mining, manufacturing, and trading enterprises. Archeologists have found obsidian and red ocher far from the nearest outcrop and inferred development of kinship, social, and trade networks.11 Groups mined and manufactured tools and exchanged them for articles they did not have to hunt or make themselves, presumably at an advantage to themselves (the first profits). The market for red ocher represents the earliest known demand for consumer goods, which had no practical use. Scattered surviving evidence of beadwork, pigment from red ocher, and other artifacts suggests the development by 300,000 years ago of status markers, symbolic thought, and perhaps religion. By late prehistoric times, desirably distinctive stone spread along trade routes hundreds of miles from the mines it came from.12
When Homo sapiens first appeared, between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago, they prospered, went forth, and multiplied. Population grew very rapidly—it leaped tenfold in just the transition from H. neanderthalensis to H. sapiens in Europe around 40,000 years ago. In multiplying so rapidly, they repeatedly overdrew the fund of resources landscapes offered to foragers. Some of them would have to move elsewhere, pulled by greener pastures and pushed by stronger competitors. Between 120,000 and 90,000 years ago, wet and cool conditions enticed sapiens into the Levant and Arabia. When the climate dried 65,000 years ago, Homo sapiens rolled across the world in a global blitzkrieg.13 They soon reached Australia. No later than 15,000 to 12,000 years ago humans stepped on American soil. No other vertebrate has managed to thrive in virtually every ecosystem from tropics to tundra (and now ventures up into space and down to the bottom of the sea).14
Whenever we might date the onset of the Anthropocene, anthropos changed environments and left a mark on the fossil record wherever they went. Escaped cooking fires and deliberately set fires announced the ability of this new-and-improved ape to alter ecosystems, sometimes radically.15 No later than two million years ago, competition from these new top predators caused the rich diversity of large African predator species to decline for the first time.16 Hominins also suppressed the diversity of African species of large mammals.17 When Homo sapiens charged across the world’s continents, they simplified (or, really, impoverished) ecosystems as they went. The Pleistocene had fostered an unusually abundant and diverse array of extremely large mammals on every ice-free continent: mammoths, giant ground sloths, saber-toothed cats, hippopotamus-sized wombats (Diprotodon), and many more. Climate change exacerbated the stress animals were under, of course, but never had climate pressure alone selectively eliminated only large animals. But now, as humans arrived conversing, cooperating, making weapons, setting fires, and reproducing abundantly, megafauna went extinct everywhere.18
Hominins simplified ecosystems by removing species but also rearranged ecosystems by introducing alien species, a propensity that today has altered nearly every ecosystem on earth. Evidence in southeast Asia shows that prehistoric foragers translocated plants and animals far from their ordinary habitats. No later than 45,000 years ago, yams appeared on both sides of Wallace’s Line dividing the flora and fauna of Asia and Australia. Humans translocated animals and plants as they migrated and surely also traded species as they exchanged information and goods with others. They seem also to have encouraged the growth of food trees near their settlements, possibly by planting nuts and seeds. Transplantation and cultivation long pre-dated the Agricultural Revolution in the Near East.19
At the same time, like the primitive hominins in 2001, humans also turned their aggressive capacity for communication and cooperation against competitors of their own genus. Practices that evolved into war and slavery began at a very early date. Several species of hominins had always coexisted at any time. Now, however, when Homo sapiens moved into the neighborhood, neither man nor beast was safe. Neanderthals, Denisovans, Floresians, and all other species of Homo died out when cousin H. sapiens arrived. The inclination for violence strengthened through time as numbers increased and weapons grew deadlier.20 The slaughter of people on a huge variety of pretexts suggests the power of human tribalism and hostility to difference. Evidence from more recent times repeatedly shows that groups that controlled important resources attracted conflict with envious others, particularly during climate stress and other crises.
People very early in human history must have faced the question of what to do with captives. If the practices of pre-Columbian Americans are any guide, societies treated captives variously: adoption into the tribe, servitude including slavery, or death by torture or sacrifice. The recent discovery that small amounts of DNA from other species of Homo survive in our bodies suggests that bands of Homo sapiens likewise captured vanquished foes and incorporated some of them into their groups, by either adoption or enslavement.21
By the end of the Ice Ages, a once meek denizen of field and forest had inherited the earth. Homo altered ecosystems and reduced diversity and body size of other species. By the time humans had crossed the oceans to Madagascar and the islands of the Pacific, transforming ecosystems and extinguishing species as they went, humanity, who were once merely bad neighbors, had become bad landlords. Just as importantly, humans had carried fundamental elements of modern capitalism—technology, machines, use of concentrated energy, efficient exploitation of resources, mining and manufacturing for use and consumption, trade, competition, conflict, domination, ecological disruption—to the ends of the inhabitable earth.
Planting and herding: inventing capital and property
Humans began to practice true pastoralism and agriculture with the onset of the Holocene. They now passed irrevocably through a gate that opened onto momentous changes in society, economics, and the planet. Agriculture created surpluses that led to towns and cities. Literacy and literature developed. Power and wealth accumulated. Trade increased. Towns and then empires warred with each other. Inequality and slavery grew dramatically. Both herding and farming radically simplified ecosystems for human benefit. Moreover, they altered the climate.
Why did Homo sapiens around the world wait until the Holocene to develop agriculture independently in many places? The earliest agriculture known to us were the yam fields of the tropical Borneo highlands 30,000 years ago. Grinding stones and hearths from Kebaran settlements 19,000 years ago on the shores of Lake Galilee, and from the bread-baking Natufian culture throughout the Levant between 14,000 and 11,000 years ago, attest to preparation of nuts and wild cereals that could not be consumed unprocessed.22 These were notable exceptions. Perhaps climate instability during the late Pleistocene discouraged successful agriculture elsewhere. Conditions swung back and forth from warm to cold and wet to dry, often very suddenly. The onset of the Holocene inaugurated an unusually stable climate that apparently encouraged agriculture.
Agricultural life did not charm foragers out of the woods—resource dearth pushed them. Eating bread in the sweat of one’s face, as Genesis puts it, had little appeal if land provided sufficient food for the relatively low investment of effort of hunting and gathering. Clearing, planting, harvesting, and grinding is hard work.23 In the more stable Holocene climate, human population grew more quickly. Extinction of large mammals took a lot of protein off the menu. Hunted more intensively, surviving game grew scarcer. Herding, horticulture, and agriculture provided more food for more people from the same resource base by reducing the biodiversity of an ecosystem to a smaller number of species of edible or useful animals or plants.
If space was available, herding ensured a reliable food supply with less labor than full-time farming. Alfred Crosby has pointed out how herds turn grass, stalks, and chaff, which humans could not eat or use, into steaks, chops, milk, and leather.24 Early in the Holocene, humans domesticated cattle in upper Mesopotamia. Later, Egyptians domesticated donkeys and Indians zebu cattle.25 Milk and milk products like yogurt or cheese provided protein without destroying the animal. Pastoralism, though, transformed social and power relations. Herds allowed people to accumulate wealth. (The English words capital, chattel, and cattle share a Latin root.) Groups moved toward privatization of resources. Like the biblical patriarchs, herders reckoned their wealth in livestock, slaves, and offspring. Job, for example, counted “7000 sheep, and 3000 camels, and 500 yoke of oxen, 500 she asses, and a very great household,” with seven sons and three daughters (Job 1: 2–3). Where herders went, greed, envy, theft, and violence followed. Private property is made to be stolen. Tales of cattle theft abound across pastoral cultures, such as Indra’s rescue of cattle from the Panis, Herakles’ labor of stealing the cattle of Geryon, Queen Medb’s raid to capture the bull of Cualnge, or David’s sneak attack to slaughter Philistines and plunder livestock (1 Samuel 27: 9).
People without extensive grasslands or in dense populations adopted farming instead. The human relationship with nature changed. Nature worked constantly against artificially simplified ecosystems. Where people hoed, bare and broken ground brought forth thorns and thistles and in sorrow the sons and daughters of Adam ate from it. Fields planted with a single species presented a banquet to insects, birds, rodents, and plant diseases. Farmers battled constantly to subdue nature and have dominion over it. The egalitarian hunter-gatherer-universe of humans, animals, and spirits departed. Capricious sky and nature gods filled farmers’ cosmos. Rituals for fertility (both sexual and agricultural) proliferated.
Early farmers diversified to expand and enrich their diets and hedge against epizootics and bad harvests. They kept herds. During the Chalcolithic Age, which began about 8,500 years ago, Near Eastern farmers planted the first orchards, usually olives. The complete Eurasian agricultural system with grains and livestock which has now diffused worldwide soon evolved roughly simultaneously in southwest Asia (the Near East), central Asia, and south Asia.26
Agricultural populations grew. Babies arrived more often than among hunter-gatherers. To feed everyone, farmers needed another source of energy. Humans could only hoe so much ground, plant so many seeds, and harvest so much grain. Slaves provided extra energy but added mouths to feed. Animals that ate grass, which needed no cultivation, offered a better solution to energy needs. Before 7,000 years ago, some innovative person first yoked oxen to pull a pointed stick across the ground—the first scratch plow. In following centuries, as cities and populations grew and needs increased, people harnessed the energy of draft animals for such hard, tedious jobs as milling, grinding, pressing, pulling heavy-laden carts, or lifting irrigation water (just as we still “harness” rivers, waterfalls, natural forces, or atomic energy for power).27
The muscle energy of animals presented a mixed blessing. When people tightly integrated plant and animal production and used animals to plow, haul, thresh, manure, and provide milk and meat, they made farming more efficient, productive, and healthier. Draft animals sped many processes and provided power to cultivate more fields. Their manure fertilized the land they worked and fed on. However, a pair of oxen plowed six to nine times as much as humans could hoe but gave humans six to nine times as much grain to weed and harvest. Labor saved in the field was frequently invested in caring for and feeding animals. Some arable land must be sacrificed for pasture. Fodder must be laid up for the winter. Space in barns, stalls, stables, or homes must be made for animals. Finally, sometimes farmers and their animals traded diseases and parasites, and passed them to their neighbors and which traders carried to distant lands.28
Independently across six continents, humans domesticated a huge array of plants and animals, from wheat to pineapples and from dogs to ducks. Few of these crops and animals stayed long in their native regions. As Jared Diamond and others have noted, Eurasia enjoyed an advantage over all other continents with its very long east–west axis that stayed mainly between the Tropic of Cancer and the Arctic Circle.29 This vast temperate zone encompassed the most important cradles of agriculture, from New Guinea to Europe. The north–south axes of Africa and the Americas crossed climate zones and lacked easy routes of passage, while long east–west coastlines stretched from southeast Asia, to India, the Near East, Africa, and the Mediterranean basin and encouraged men to sail boats between most one civilization and another. The earliest civilizations were in communication. Trading ships plied the waters between Harappa, Sumer, and probably Africa.
Generally, plants and animals that thrived in one region also grew well in another. Traders and seagoing colonists spread new domesticates. Colonists took their plants and animals with them into Anatolia and the Balkans and around the Mediterranean basin, where natives often adopted them and sometimes domesticated local species as well. Imported animals replaced endemic island fauna, an early rehearsal of European “ecological imperialism” in America, Australia, and around the globe.30 Innovations also quickly spread, which may explain the rapid expansion of domestication of draft animals throughout the Old World but not the New.
By 3,000 years ago, hunting and gathering had given way to farming and herding across the earth wherever agriculture and pastoralism would take root, completing the initial stages of anthropogenic environmental change.31 Agriculture and pastoralism changed the earth and its climate far more than anything Homo sapiens had done before. Herders set fire to forests to make pasture. Other forests fell before polished stone axes and then more-effective metal ones. Exposed soils blew and washed away. Irrigated fields grew salty and barren. Herds overgrazed hillsides and exposed soil eroded. Thinner forest cover affected climate, beginning 8,000 years ago, as carbon in tree trunks escaped to the atmosphere as the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. Increasing herds of cattle produced methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas, as William F. Ruddiman has noticed. Then 5,000 years ago East Asians began planting rice in diked and flooded fields. Weeds and rice straw rotting under water produced lots of methane. Methane from the spreading culture of rice derailed the natural climate cycle that would have turned colder and taken the world into another Ice Age. This mild global warming worked out well for humanity. Methane heating stabilized the climate, kept the earth warm and mostly ice-free, and fostered the rise of world civilizations.32
Civilizations, trade, and incipient capitalism
Agriculture grew more than food. Farming also raised population, cities, trade networks, and empires. Egyptians, Mesopotamians, and Harappans relied on annual floods to water and fertilize fields. To exploit the soil more fully, Mesopotamians and Egyptians expanded local irrigation systems into regional networks, which required administrative oversight—framework for a government. Harappans used only small-scale irrigation but exploited the monsoon seasons to grow two crops a year.33
Meanwhile, 7,000 years ago in present-day Bulgaria, far from these early civilizations, craftsmen made a fateful discovery. Using kilns designed for ceramics, they found that heating certain rocks from the Balkan and Strandzhe mountains yielded copper and gold.34 Copper made superior tools and weapons that were easier to sharpen than flint. Gold never tarnished and gleamed and glittered delightfully, although too soft for most practical uses. Demand for these metals grew rapidly from farmers, craftsmen, warriors, and the wealthy looking for status markers. Metalworkers far and wide learned to smelt other metals and experimented with alloys. Bronze did not take long to appear, then iron and lead. Demand for metal products accelerated between 4,000 and 3,000 years ago and continued to rise until the fall of the Roman Empire.
