Remodeling Society and the Natural Environment

Jonathan Awoloi

GRW: Energy, Society & Environment Professor Case Due October 6, 2014 Word count: 1194

Awoloi 1 Energy transitions are the major shifts in the forms of energy humans use as well as the methods used to gather energy caused by new understanding of energy and changing uses. Humans had begun as hunter-gatherers and the discovery of fire was merely the preface to an immense, extensive, and ongoing journey to gather energy in all its forms as efficiently as possible, then use to power all kinds of prime movers that have been created and adapted to improve the amount of work that can be done. These energy transitions in the past altered the structure in which humans lived, from smaller units and villages towards larger and larger societies, but also allowed humans to branch out from the cycle of hunting and gathering, that other animals are restricted to, into an increasingly intellectual lifestyle. Although the methods of energy gathering and use greatly advanced, especially over the last century, the natural environment has been greatly damaged due to the need to clear landscapes to amass more energy. The discovery and domestication of fire was a great advancement for hominids, a spark which initiated the fire that was mankind's domination of this planet. Fire had led to cooking, the greatest advantage gained by domesticating fire according to Alfred W. Crosby1. Aside from the great nutritional and food storage benefits that cooking provided, making it an advantage as Crosby stated, it also required cooperation among larger groups of people, increasing the size of communities, compared to hunting and gathering due to the number of jobs necessary. Hominids would gather around fires due to their warmth, increasing interaction between hominids. According to Alfred W. Crosby “ Cooking, like hunting, obliged human hunters, gatherers, fire tenders, and cooks to plan and cooperate...”2. The job of hunting may have brought groups of people with a common goal together but to cook required hunting in addition to the variety of jobs such as wood gatherers, someone to tend the fires therefore resulting in greater cooperation among many people. This cooperation would not have been possible without fire, this energy that hominids decided to approach rather than avoid. Human life has been centered on energy and its forms since the ancestors of humans learned how to use fire. Today it can be

Awoloi 2 seen that people are more densely populated in places containing the most energy. Third world countries such as Ethiopia have a dense population in the capital and urbanization is increasing resulting in a need for more homes to support the influx of people into the relatively energy filled capital compared to most cities in the country. First world countries have many immigrants and they also have far more energy than third world countries. One of the greatest distinctions between humans and other creatures on earth is the range of activities humans do since there is so much free time with the advancements in understanding energy and energy transitions. Humans have had more and more free time from focusing on collecting nourishment allowing the race to advance intellectually. As early as the origins of cooking humans gained more free time for more intellectual lifestyles since, according to Crosby, cooking allowed enough leisure time to exercise our brains gainfully. An example of hominids exercising brains can be seen in art pieces such as Venus of Willendorf, a limestone figure from around 25th million BCE3.This ancient piece of art is an example of how humans gained free time to worry and think about something other than the next meal. The more transitions in energy and new sources of energy used freed more and more time for humans to expand even more and worry less about the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. The transition from using our own muscles as the prime movers to get farm work done to domesticating animals allowed the responsibility of collecting food to be designated to farmers while others work on other aspects of life such as technological advancement and new energy transitions. The transition from coal to oil led to a more efficient way of transporting a form of sun energy since oil is a liquid, a far more energy dense substance, and a much more easily mined source of energy. The negative effect of energy transitions on the natural environment is most evident in todays world although it had sprouted from as early as the transition from hunter-gatherers to villagers. The difference between villagers and hunter-gatherers is that villagers live in and change their environment whereas hunter-gatherers merely move through their environments. Villagers therefore altered the land

Awoloi 3 to suit their needs, for examples farmers. According to Crosby most of he world had dense populations of farmers supporting city dwellers. They cleared out land and altered the landscape to make space for the farming to be done, to mine more sun energy with new prime movers that were domesticated, the animals such as bulls. Crosby stated that the first great advancement, discovery of fire allowed our ancestors to burn off forests for our use4. Britain took altering the landscape to a level so severe that even just centuries ago the pollution that resulted filled the skies, clearly visible. Britain had cut down most of the woods and forestry in a need for more wood as a major source of their energy. All the burning of wood, in peoples fireplaces and all the other forms energy was extracted from the wood had resulted in the dark skies that can be seen up to today and in addition the number of trees were nearly depleted due to the high demand. Britain then had a need for a new source of sun energy resulting in the transition to coal. Today countries around the world are struggling to use renewable sources of energy to help reduce the damage done to the earth and improve the current state although even with renewable sources of energy there is still damage to the environment. Wind power requires a great amount of open space for windmills, nuclear power can cause massive and widespread damage if anything goes wrong. The Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine is a great example of nuclear power gone wrong which left an entire city destroyed and with radiation for nearly 30 years now. The societies that humans live in have revolved around energy and its use. The greater humans understood, and even now continue to understand and grow in knowledge about energy, the greater the efficiency of the use of energy improves and also the range of work possible through applications of energy

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Notes 1. Alfred W. Crosby, Children of the Sun. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006: 8 2. Alfred W. Crosby, Children of the Sun. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006: 14 3. Alfred W. Crosby, Children of the Sun. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006: 19 4. Alfred W. Crosby, Children of the Sun. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006: 8

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Bibliography Crosby, Alfred W. Children of the Sun. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006: 8-19