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Across
Frontiers - 2005 Edition
Energy and the
Rise and Fall of Civilizations
(Excerpt from Rifkin, J (2003)
The Hydrogen Economy. Chapter 3. pp. 37 – 42. Penguin,
New York.)
Frederick Soddy, the British Nobel laureate in chemistry,
once noted that the indivisible currency upon which all of
science is based is energy. 1Each day, the sun’s rays
bathe the Earth with thousands of kilocalories of energy per
square meter. Some of this energy is capture by living things
and converted into forms useful to sustain life, while the
rest ends up as heat and is radiated back into space.
If energy is the alpha and omega of existence,
then “power’ is defined as the “the rate of
flow of useful energy.” All of life requires energy and
sufficient power to maintain the rate of flow. The struggle
for survival, then, both between and within species, is really
a competition to capture useful energy and secure its continued
flow through living systems.
Energizing
Culture
Anthropologist Leslie Q. White observes that, in the evolution
of culture, human beings’ first “power plant”
was their own bodies. For most of human history, homo sapiens
lived a hunter-gatherer existence and captured the energy
stored in wild plants and animals. By acting collectively
and cooperatively on their environments, they could increase
their critical mass and use their human power plants to secure
what they needed to sustain small kinship communities. Later,
as our species made the transition from hunter-gatherers to
pastoralists and farmers, human beings were able to sequester
more energy from their environment. By domesticating animals
and plants, they secured a continuous and reliable supply
and surplus of readily available energy and, by so doing,
increased the amount of energy that could flow through their
bodies and communities. Plant cultivation – aided by
irrigation systems – greatly increased the yield per
unit of human energy or labor expended. Agricultural surpluses
also freed at least some people from toil on the land. Freeing
people from labor created the beginnings of a social hierarchy
and the differentiation of tasks. Priest and warrior classes
slowly emerged, as did an artisan class somewhat later on.
The differentiation and specialization of tasks spawned new,
more complex institutional arrangements, which in turn helped
to facilitate an even great energy flow-through.
The cultivation of cereals some 10,000
years ago in North Africa, the Middle East, China, and India
marked a turning point for human society. The cereals have
called “the great moving power of civilization.”
The food surpluses provided an energy endowment to sustain
growing populations and the establishment of kingdoms, and
later empires. The great civilization of Egypt and Mesopotamia
rose in the wake of cereal cultivation. Large engineering
projects were undertaken, including the establishment of elaborate
hydraulic systems to irrigate fields. Women invented pottery,
providing containers to store surplus grain for inventory
and/or trade. The metallurgical arts aided in the development
of more sophisticated weaponry for conquest and capture of
additional land and sales. Members of the non-producing priestly
class used their time, in part, to track the movements of
the planets and stars, giving them greater ability to predict
spring floods and the best time to lay down seeds. Mathematics
and writing also emerged in hand with cereal civilizations.
Mathematics provided the means to erect great monuments, most
notably the pyramids of Egypt. Writing proved particularly
helpful both in storing the collective knowledge of increasingly
complex and diverse societies and in managing the communication
flow of civilizations spread out over great distances.
The next shift, from agriculture to an
industrial way of living, once again increased the amount
of energy that could be captured, stored, and utilized –
this time in the form of fossil fuels harnessed and processed
by machines. The new machine energy acts as a substitute mechanical
slave, multiplying the amount of energy and power available
per capita and for the society as a whole.
George Grant MacCurdy, in Human Origins,
writes of the human experience as an evolutionary journey
in the increasing use of available energy: “The degree
of civilization of any epoch, people, or group of peoples,
is measured by ability to utilize energy for human advancement
or needs.”
to be continued in the
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