itnessing the horrendous horrors of devastating floods in Pakistan in 2023, UN chief Antonio Guterres stated that Pakistan was responsible for less than one per cent of greenhouse emissions, but its people were 15 times more likely to die from climate-related disasters. He called Pakistan floods “litmus test for climate justice” and called for redressing issues of yawning global asymmetries in climate change affecting Third World economies particularly.

The Earth has been subjected to transformation due to multiple factors throughout its history. It was a story of heating and cooling, convergence and divergence, vegetation and droughts, abundance and scarcity and adaptation of humans on the Earth during their interaction with this only habitable planet. This interaction, for much of the time, remained of dependence on the Earth but without the process of extraction when human beings were hunter-gatherers and foragers. Most of this period is now cast into oblivion by calling it ‘pre-history.’

Human beings started extraction from the Earth when they domesticated plants and animals. Plants provided food as a means of settlement by domesticating humans, in turn, too. Animals provided additional muscle power to transform land for agricultural purposes and extract more resources than Earth could provide. This makes 12,000-15,000 years of agriculture. The last few centuries after the start of industrialisation established human beings as complete masters of the planet.

Generally, the process is termed human ‘progress,’ making the homo-sapiens the most ‘intelligent’ and ‘powerful’ creatures on Earth. But, this mastery increasingly became ruthlessness with sophistication, multiplication and expansion of industries, resulting in unprecedented degradation of the environment. The planet has been pushed into an era called as ‘anthropocence’ in which humans are poised to annihilate the only inhabitable planet known to them. Being viewed, understood and interpreted through the lens of the environmental perspective of history, the traditional understanding of terms like ‘progress’ and ‘modernisation’ has been rendered questionable.

The presence of sapience on Earth has always been viewed in a linear fashion, depicting progress starting from the earliest domestication of fire, plants and animals; inventions of writing, paper and gunfire; a revolution in agriculture, science and industry and the consequent rapid rate of accumulation of surplus or the maximisation of capitalistic appropriation. All this resulted in making humans the most powerful species on Earth, which reduced the other living beings to insignificant. This is one side of the coin.

Viewed from the environmental perspective, these developments are degradations, because Earth has been reduced to a disordered house, filthy to the full and becoming increasingly uninhabitable for all living beings, including humans.

Peter Frankopan’s recent book The Earth Transformed: An Untold History (2023) is a mega narrative written from the environmental perspective of history. The only life-sustaining planet, Earth is at the threshold of total collapse due to unprecedented extraction of resources and population growth greater than the carrying capacity of this small planet. He argues that “our planet, our enclosed garden (the literal meaning of the word paradise), has changed since the beginning of time, sometimes as a result of human endeavours, calculation and miscalculation, but also thanks to a host of other actors, factors, influences and impulses that have shaped the world we live in—often in ways we do not think about or understand.”

Frankopan did not conceive that the end of the Cold War would lead to an age in which ecologies would be under immense pressure and greater stress and that “increased global economic co-operation would result in massive rises in levels of carbon emissions and warming world.” It was thought, then, that horrors are only associated with war and that peace and co-operation was bound to bring about prosperity and harmony.

Peace and harmony were thought to be the solutions to the problems related to war, but the same co-operation geared up the massive exploitation and extraction from nature, which has started to disturb the fragile balance among the ecological mechanisms and systems. Now, world leaders ranging from the UN to apex office holders in various countries have blown the trumpet for telling the truth that world is facing an unprecedented environmental crisis the kind of which Earth has not experienced before.

Analysts believe that climate change is going to be the theme that will dominate the 21^st Century, sparking water shortages, famines, large-scale migrations, military conflicts and mass extinction. Understanding what the future holds should be essential not just for politicians, scientists and activists, but for everyone.

Frankopan opines that, being a historian, he knows that the best way to address complex problems is to look back in time and understand the context and perspective for solving current and future challenges. History can teach us lessons to help formulate questions and sometimes propose answers to problems. History carries evidence of natural phenomena that can help us understand the phases in environmental changes taking place over many millennia.

Climate and temperature also shape biodiversity because the number of species decreases phenomenally from the equator to the poles, with some estimating that tropical forests contain more than half of the global species. Nonetheless, it is now believed that tropical forests are astonishing in the range of animals and flora and fauna, yet it is the result of a gradual process of change spanning centuries and millennia: actually, new species come into existence faster in environments that are cold, dry, unstable and extreme. Thus, one of the challenges posed by climate science is that new evidence from some areas is not accurate in other areas and vice versa.

It is now an established fact, however, that the current and major changes to the climate are almost all because of human impact on the environment. The anthropogenic impacts began to have radical effects in the second half of the Eighteenth Century. The invention of the steam engine and the energy and industrial revolution transformed the processes of production and societies and started an oppositional relationship between man and the environment. The result is that according to the UNICEF, one billion children, nearly half of the children of the world, are at extreme risk of the impact of climate change.

The fate of the climate is being seen to have been already sealed. Everyone, in individual and institutional capacity, should contribute to saving it.

The writer heads the History Department at University of Sargodha. He has worked as a research fellow at Royal Holloway College, University of London. He can be reached at abrar.zahoor@hotmail.com His X handle: @AbrarZahoor1