How Five Grand Transitions Have Shaped the Modern World?

Vaclav Smil 城读 2022-07-13

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How Five Grand Transitions Have Shaped the Modern World?

Humans have remade the Earth — and imperiled its future.

Vaclav Smil, 2021. Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made, Oxford University Press.

Sources:

http://vaclavsmil.com/2021/03/05/grand-transitions-how-the-modern-world-was-made/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/humans-have-rapidly-remade-the-earth--and-imperiled-its-future/2021/03/11/d72163c2-75fb-11eb-948d-19472e683521_story.html

There are two scholars who you must read on how to use data to understand the world. One is the late Swedish scholar Hans Rosling (see CityReads|Remembering Edutainer Hans Rosling,Who Made Data Dance), and the other is the Czech-Canadian scholar Vaclav Smil. Rosling is good at presenting data using dynamic visualization methods, and Smil is good at distilling data and facts from complex phenomena. For example, Smil estimates that "China consumed more cement in the three years between 2011 and 2013, than the United States consumed in the entire 20th century" (for more information, see CityReads│How Many Materials Has China's Urbanization Consumed?).

One more example. How dramatically do humans dominate the Earth? As late as 1800, the total weight of wild mammals was greater than that of all domesticated species. By 1900, with the bison gone and cattle herds roaming the plains of the Americas, cows alone bulked twice as heavy as all remaining wild mammals. A century later, domesticated animals outweighed wildlife by a factor of 20. In the span of over 100 years, the Earth has gone from half-wild to a global farm.

The greatest change by far is in the energy sources that make us the dominant species. To stick with farming a little longer: During the 20th century, harvested cropland expanded about 40 percent worldwide to feed a population that grew almost fourfold. In that time, the energy consumed by farming increased to 90 times its level in 1900, as fertilizer, tractors and factory farms replaced sunshine and muscle with carbon-based fuel. How vital is all that carbon? In "Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made," Vaclav Smil estimates that without the energy-intensive process that produces nitrogen fertilizer, nearly half of today’s population would starve.

If you read Smil’s books, you will have a more accurate understanding about the world.

We live in a world of declining fertilities, abundant food, intensive energy use, globalized economy, high mobility, mass-scale communication, global warming ...What makes the modern world work? In Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made, Smil argues that the creation of the modern world can be seen as a concatenated series of relatively rapid transitions: population, agriculture, energy, economy and environment transitions. The fifth transition will determine the real success or eventual failure of the first four epochal shifts. These transitions have affected all aspects of civilization as they transformed traditional arrangements into modern societies by changing population dynamics; agricultural practices and food production; choice of energy resources and the scale and efficiency of their conversions; the extent and pace of industrial production and, more recently, of the service sector; intensity of trade; distribution of wealth; and the state of the environment. In the book, Smil uses quantitative ways to analyze the specific demographic, nutritional, energetic, economic, and environmental variables, processes, and outcomes.

Demographic transitions

Before the start of the demographic transition, life was short, births were many, growth was slow and the population was young. During the transition, first mortality and then fertility declined, causing population growth rates to accelerate and then to slow again, moving toward low fertility, long life and an old population. Demographic transitions have now accomplished in every major region except for sub-Saharan Africa.

Global population growth rates were less than 0.05% before the year 1000 and that they more than doubled to about 0.1% during the first half of the second millennium of the Common Era. The rate doubled again during the 16th century, rose to about 0.2% during the 18th century, and quadrupled to 0.8% during the 19th century; before it began to fall it reached briefly, during the 1960s, peaks just above 2%, with the 20th-century mean at 1.35%。

Agricultural and dietary transitions

In nearly all premodern societies, overwhelmingly vegetarian diets (commonly more than 80%, and even more than 90%, of all food energy was derived from plants) were dominated by a few staple crops. Consumption of four major grains (wheat, rice, millet, and corn), and also of tubers in the tropics and in the Andean highlands, was supplemented by a variety of pulses (lentils—one of the oldest cultivated species—peas, beans, and soybeans).

Agricultural transitions brought a combination of more intensive inputs and new crops, new agronomic practices, and more productive animal husbandry. Improved cultivars of staple crops benefited from rising rates of agricultural mechanization, from regular application of synthetic fertilizers, from widespread (seasonal or supplementary) irrigation, and from use of pesticides, insecticides, and fungicides that reduced often intolerably high pre-harvest crop losses. This modernization resulted in unprecedented yields (up to an order of magnitude—that is, a tenfold difference—higher than in traditional cultivars), in reliably produced surpluses of dominant food crops and in both specialization and diversification of cropping. This high yield eliminated famines, assured abundant high-quality food supplies, and made it possible to divert rising shares of harvests into animal feeding, resulting in higher levels of per capita meat, eggs, and dairy-animal food supply.

Expansion of agricultural production and its far from globally completed intensification have aggravated some long-standing problems (soil erosion in arid regions, leaching of nitrates) and have caused new environmental concerns ranging from the impacts of large-scale crop monocultures to the risks of soil contamination with heavy metals. Crop and animal farming have been also major sources of biodiversity loss and emissions of greenhouse gases: these impacts will be considered in the chapter on environmental transitions.

The most obvious environmental marker of agricultural transition has been the vast expansion of agricultural land. The world’s agricultural land (arable land and permanent crops) had nearly sextupled in two centuries, from about 260 million ha in 1700 to 1.5 billion ha in the year 2000, with further slow growth afterwards.

The land devoted to croplands and pastures has now reached more than 4.8 billion ha, or nearly 40% of the world’s ice-free surface, only slightly less than the combined area of North America and Africa.

Energy transitions

There are three principal components of energy transitions: the rapid shift from phytomass to fossil fuels and from animate to inanimate prime movers; the electrification of modern societies; and an increasing variety of energy uses. These shifts have been accompanied by impressively improving conversion efficiencies and declining energy intensities—but we still produce too much waste

Reliance on inefficiently used biomass fuels (wood, charcoal, straw, dried dung) as the only sources of heat was the most obvious universal feature of this stagnation. Combustion of these fuels was done in open fires or in inefficient fireplaces and simple stoves, wasting typically more than 90% of energy and creating high levels of indoor air pollution. This pollution keeps on affecting more than two billion people in low-income countries that still rely on such arrangements for cooking.

The sequence of wood-coal-oil-natural gas has been the dominant one. Wood-to-coal transitions can be traced by comparing times elapsed before coal began to supply 5% of a country’s overall energy supply (the share signifying a takeoff point of large-scale coal extraction) and the year when it began to provide more than half of energy. In France it took 75 years (1800–1875), in Sweden 55 (1855–1910), in Russia/USSR about 50 (1885–1935), in the United States 41 years (1843–1884), in Japan just 31 (1870–1901), and in China a mere 14 or 15 years (1950/1951–1965).

Although coal's share in global primary energy supply stopped rising already before World War II the fuel was the dominant source of energy during the first half of the 20th century.

Perhaps the best way to appreciate the magnitude of the transition to the modern high-energy society dependent on fossil fuels is to note how much they had multiplied during the 20th century and what the relative gains were between 2000 and 2020. My calculation of final energy uses shows the following supply multiples between 1900 and 2000: 4.7 for coal, 199 for crude oil, and 538 for natural gas, resulting in a roughly 15-fold rise of fossil-fuel consumption. And the first two decades of the 21st century saw further substantial gains of coal and hydrocarbon use, with gains of just over 70% for coal, about 25% for crude oil, and more than 60% for natural gas. These increments clearly indicate that the transition to fossil fuels has yet to be completed on the global scale.

During the first 18 years of this century, global energy use went up almost 50 percent, with some 85 to 90 percent coming from fossil fuels. Despite ubiquitous calls for decarbonization, Smil writes, "we remain an overwhelmingly fossil-fueled civilization that has been recently running vigorously into carbon rather than moving away from it."

Energy transitions tend to be slow, and slower the more infrastructure is involved — like U.S. highways and oil refineries, worldwide trade webs of products from soybeans to silicon chips, and coal-fired power plants in India. Yes, solar and wind power is getting cheaper, but we still face the technological bottleneck of how to store it: Without a revolution in batteries, highly variable wind and sunshine cannot meet the energy demands of cities, where the world's population is more concentrated every decade. There is no realistic prospect of getting substantial energy waste and fertilizer pollution out of industrial agriculture, which will cover hundreds of millions more acres than today if it is to succeed in feeding billions more people by 2050.

Economic transitions

Traditional economies, circumscribed by uncertain harvests and inadequate energy supply, experienced minimal rates of growth, with recurrent periods of decline (brought by often protracted violent conflicts and by devastating bacterial or viral epidemics or pandemics) alternating with spells of stagnation or marginal gains. Best reconstructions put average annual growth rate of the global economic product at just 0.01% during the first millennium of the Common Era.

Consequently, per capita incomes and averages of accumulated household wealth remained low, and often remarkably unchanged, for centuries as economies were dominated by subsistence food production with more than 80% or even 90% of the population living in villages and engaged in farming, producing only small surpluses to support (few exceptions aside) cities of limited size.

Economic transitions transformed the contribution of major sectors. These shifts were driven by demographic, agricultural, and energy transitions, with the key advances in cropping, fuel, and electricity use based on innovations arising from new scientific inquiries based on systematic experiments and on investigation of prevailing practices, material properties, and operational modalities.

Traditional economies employed more than 80% of their populations in food production; now the shares in all affluent economies are less than 5% (World Bank 2019). Consequently, there can be no doubt that that particular transition has been accomplished in the United Kingdom and Germany (where agriculture now employs just 1% of the labor force) as well as in the United States, Sweden, and the Netherlands (where the 2017 share was 2%), or France and Japan (at 3%); that it is quite advanced in China (18% in 2017) and still has a long way to go in India (43%); and that it is in its early stages in Uganda (69%) or Rwanda (66%).

Between 1980 and 2019 the production of cement had increased nearly 28 times (accounting for 54% of the global production). During the same four decades China's plate-glass production rose 38 times (to nearly 70% of the global total) and output of raw steel rose more than 27 times (to 53% of the global total).

Environmental transitions

Population, energy, and economic transitions have necessitated greater exploitation of the Earth’s resources, including minerals (fossil fuels, ores, construction materials that include sand and stone), phytomass (food, feed and industrial crops, wood for timber and pulp), and ocean zoomass (marine species ranging from tiny crustaceans to massive whales). These exploitations also entailed large-scale degradation of natural ecosystems and reduction of indispensable environmental services, be it due to deforestation; soil erosion; air, water, and soil pollution; or the loss of biodiversity.

Many pre-transition environments were deforested or their mineral resources were substantially exhausted, with impacts limited to local or regional scales. In contrast, the combination of agricultural, energy, and economic transitions has resulted in widespread environmental deterioration and in the emergence of two sets of global problems.

The first one refers to the ubiquity of anthropogenic degradation, such as soil erosion, desertification, deforestation, and loss of biodiversity to excessive water withdrawals from aquifers, particulate and gaseous air pollution, and land contamination with heavy metals. The second one refers to the existence of truly global impacts when anthropogenic compounds introduced into the environment become eventually distributed worldwide. This distribution creates an unprecedented challenge because the effective management of the impacts requires concerted global actions and the likelihood of such steps is further diminished by existing, even increasing, economic disparities. Global climate change attributable to anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases is by far the most important outcome of environmental transitions.

Nearly all changes affecting land cover and land use involve environmental degradations (deforestation reduces biodiversity, intensive farming accelerates soil erosion, impermeable surfaces help to create urban heat islands).

The grand total of land affected by human action is about 9 billion ha, or 67% of all non-glaciated land. Two-thirds of ice-free land has now been affected, with various intensities, by human activity: we have become an unrivaled terraforming species.

These five grand transitions have created the modern world with all of its admirable advances and improvements as well as with its worrisome socioeconomic divides and environmental concerns. Accomplishments of the modern civilization inspire hope and instill confidence in our problem solving abilities—but the recitals of advances should not ignore many fundamental limits and undesirable trends whose combined effects will make future grand transitions extraordinarily difficult. After all, we are still animals in the Earth's biosphere. If soil fertility collapses, or freshwater supply, ocean life, pollinators or climate stability, then we fall down, too.

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