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By now you're probably used to those scenes of bleak devastation you've seen on television — not the ones that Saddam Hussein or the Taliban made or we are making, but the landscape created thousands of years ago by civilizations that are now piles of hardened mud and artifacts currently being looted to decorate apartments and mansions in today's imperial cities. Those Mesopotamian cities rose upon the surplus energy made possible by irrigated agriculture which, in turn, made possible division of labor, hierarchies, writing, accounting, leisure time, sciences, the arts, architecture.....and, of course, warfare in order for the elites of those cities to get still more energy. At its simplest, warfare is a vast expenditure of energy needed to get more energy with which to fight more wars....and so on.
Much of that energy consists of the labor of humans and animals fueled by carbohydrates, and that means topsoil. But throughout most of history, it was also wood; the quest for forests for fuel and building material has been one of the chief stimuli to expansion and conquest. The fates of forests, soils, and cities are intimately entangled throughout history in ways that often only the wisest understood. Plato knew that Greece had once been covered with forests which had nourished rivers and springs, but that in his own time the land looked like the body of an emaciated person wasted by disease because the forests had been felled and Greece consequently impoverished. He was looking at the consequences of an unremitting quest for energy; by that time, the Fertile Crescent was no longer very fertile; it was well on its way to becoming the salty desert that we see now because of the demands made upon it by Babylon, Ninevah, and other fabled cities. Imperial Rome, in its turn, would be literally buried by about 20 feet of soil washed off the deforested Appenines; its appetite would waste North Africa, Spain, and everywhere else around the Mediterranean called upon to send it tribute.
And yet, we did get something in return for all that energy extracted from the earth and from the sun and concentrated in a few great cities. The lights went on. We created art, and we created knowledge. And we stored it, as we stored energy in granaries. Humans created libraries. But those libraries were not for most of us; they were for them. The elites who built and ran the cities and their empires knew that knowledge was power, and they kept it to themselves. For us, they concocted belief systems that sent us to war to get more energy for themselves. They created some of the most cockamamie religions you can imagine to motivate millions of little people to build temples and palaces and tombs for themselves, and to go to war to get more energy with which to build and accumulate more. "Enough" is a word these people have never added to their vocabularies.
Nonetheless, they built some wonderful places. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Venice is a more beautiful and ingenious place than, say, Phoenix, or even Las Vegas. It became that way because, in 1204, Venice's rulers diverted the Fourth Crusade from the Holy Land to besiege and sack the ancient city of Constantinople — a Christian city like Venice. Venice took much of the loot and 3/8 of the Byzantine Empire to begin making its own empire. God, of course, was on its side. To this day, there are people in Istanbul who hate Venice for what it did to their city 800 years ago. Much of what was the Venetian Empire is a desert today because of the energy that it took. Memories are long in that part of the world; we forget that at our peril.It happens over and over again. God is forever on the side of the victor, or the losers did something bad to merit His disfavor. History became a litany of wars fought in His name, masking the constant quest for more energy.
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