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On 12/25/11 3:04 PM, ehr...@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu wrote:
If anything, Wolff and Resnick are too much into Marx and overlook one basic weakness of Marx. Marx did not realize how much the Industrial Revolution was sustained by what Heinberg calls the fossil fuel bonanza. For instance Marx studied the railroad boom and the formation of joint stock companies necessary to amass enough capital for building railroads, but he overlooked the simple fact that without coal England's forests would have been cut down to the last stump before a fraction of the rail network necessary for a modern transportation system could have been laid. Look at E A Wrigley's book *Energy and the English Industrial Revolution*, Cambridge University Press 2010.
The British Isles are an illustrative microcosm of what Europe eventually did to the world. The British Isles have been the scene of successive invasions. The Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal people lived there during the last ice age, and when that ice age ended about 12,000 years ago, the British Isles became islands, separated from mainland Europe. Iberian people settled the British Isles by 3000 BC and farmed the land. The Picts migrated to Scotland in about 1000 BC, and to Ireland in 200 AD. During the first millennium BC, the Celtic people overran Western Europe and also invaded the British Isles, displacing/absorbing the Iberian and Pictish peoples. The Picts battled the Romans, who invaded and conquered England in 54 BC. Hadrian’s Wall began construction in 122 AD, to keep the Picts of Scotland out of England. When the Western Roman Empire collapsed, the Germanic Anglo-Saxon peoples next invaded the British Isles. Beginning around 800 AD, the Vikings began invading the British Isles and northern continental Europe. The Vikings drove the Irish from the seas, and the Irish were never again a seafaring people.[15] They also settled in northern France and became the Normans (from “Norsemen”). The Normans invaded the British Isles in 1066, setting up the rule of Norman kings in England. Those events led to the Hundred Years’ War, and nearly continual war with France for centuries.
The British Isles were steeped in invasion and warfare. Also, all non-human competitors for energy were driven from the scene, beginning with competing predators. By 900 AD, the brown bear was nearly extinct in the British Isles. In 1486, the last wolf was sighted in England. The wolf was last sighted in Wales in 1576, and the last one in Scotland in 1743. With competing predators exterminated, attention turned to competitors for crops. In 1533, the English Parliament passed a law requiring churches to have nets to catch crows and other birds. In 1566, churches were authorized to pay a bounty on a wide array of birds and mammals. In 1668, John Worlidge’s calendar demonstrated the English attitude toward animals that were “harmful” to agriculture. In February, killing all snails, frogs and tadpoles was the task. In June, it was destroying ants, and in July it was killing wasps and flies.[16] The crane became extinct in Britain during the 1500s, as did the beaver. There were walruses on the Thames as late as 1456. The great auk, which once blanketed North Atlantic Islands, and was the Northern Hemisphere’s version of the penguin, began being hunted in the 1500s for food, and was rendered extinct in 1844. The global whale rush also began in the 1500s, nearly rendering extinct what is possibly earth’s only other sentient species.
England was largely deforested by the 1500s, and then Elizabethan England needed ships to join the global empire game that Europe was beginning to play. England’s solution was to invade Ireland and chop down its forests to build its navy. Ireland has yet to recover its forest. All these activities can be seen as involved with gaining/preserving energy by using trees for fuel and structure, using that newly denuded land to raise crops, killing off all animal competitors for that crop energy, and consuming energy by eating all those animals.
The Carboniferous Period likely laid down great coal deposits in what became Northern and Central Europe, North America, and eastern Asia. Europeans began mining that great source of energy during the 13th century. Coal provided household heat, fuel for blacksmiths, and eventually powered the Industrial Revolution. Coal is a rocklike substance, and burning coal not only produced carbon dioxide and water, but coal also contained sulfur and other elements.
Before the British Isles were completely deforested, coal began replacing wood as fuel. Coal smoke from the local vicinity drove Queen Eleanor from Nottingham Castle in 1257. By 1307, coal burning was banned in London, but the edict was ignored.[17] The human world’s first great air pollution came from burning coal, and by the 1600s, residents of London, with its perpetual cloud of coal smoke, had more respiratory disease than the rest of the world combined. Today, China is the great coal-burning nation (as well as the greatest tobacco smoking nation), so, as might be expected, China has more respiratory problems than any other nation. Air pollution is still a great killer of children worldwide, nearly all caused by energy-producing activities.
full: http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy.htm#europe ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
