Yet all of these innovations, both social and technological, were limited by their dependence on nature: the location and number of mills was determined by the availability of water and wind, while animals and humans were often unreliable and themselves dificult to maintain. While, by the early Renaissance, major advances were observable in fields such as printing, astronomy and navigation, methods of transport – as well as means of artificial light and heat – remained much the same as a thousand years earlier. While sixteenth-century Florence – the cradle of the European Renaissance – is upheld in the popular imagination as the embodiment of cultural refinement, when Niccolò Machiavelli wrote his Discorsi on the histories of Livy the world he inhabited difered surprisingly little to that of his first-century hero.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century this changed dramatically. The arrival of Watt’s steam engine quickly provided an abundant supply of eficient, reliable power, in turn giving rise to novel industrial practices and patterns of consumption. While much is made of this being a technological and economic transformation – and it was – it also represented a rupture in energy. From now on, industrialising economies would depend on fossil fuels.
While most of the consequences unleashed by all of this in culture, science and politics were apparent to anyone who lived through it, perhaps the most important after-efect would remain hidden for another two centuries. Industrial capitalism, whose immense powers were made possible by the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, would change the Earth’s ecosystems. For the first time in billions of years, the activity of a single species would become the leading factor in our planet’s ability to sustain life.
Limitless Power
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