Do you have a personal eruption plan, if you don’t mind me asking? This is the term used to describe how one intends to get away in the event of a volcano going off. Even if you don’t live near one – such as the underwater Kolumbo volcano near Santorini, which has recently been scanned to reveal a filling magma chamber – really big eruptions can have planetary consequences, through the climatic effects of the ash they pump into the atmosphere. Indeed, though we worry more about asteroids or nuclear winter, volcanoes have probably been responsible for more of the abrupt climatic shifts in our species’ history than anything else. Unfortunately, the historian Peter Frankopan writes, “almost no investment of time, planning or funding has been spent on the potential implications of major volcanic eruptions” in our own time. Whoops.
So runs one urgent message of this rich and fascinating book, which sets out to tell the story of Homo sapiens from the point of view of how we have suffered natural ecological disasters, and engineered our own in turn. Humanity has survived historical swings in climate more severe than global heating presently threatens, including the “megafloods” that occurred during the thawing of the last ice age (ancestral memory of which arguably inspires the Old Testament and other sacred texts); a volcanic eruption that blotted out much of the sun for a few years in the sixth century might have influenced the Norse myths. Genghis Khan could perhaps thank unusually heavy rains in Mongolia for his military success (they increased the amount of pasture for his horses), but his armies also spread the Black Death everywhere they rampaged. Agriculture in turn has transformed the planet, Frankopan shows, as well as the development of global trade in spices, cotton and enslaved people, and even the transplantation of tomatoes and potatoes from the Americas to Europe. Introducing a disquisition on the latter root, Frankopan does not hesitate to write: “The humble potato changed the world.”
