Orphan Paragraphs

Humans have used exosomatic (non-body) energy supplies since it used a fire to stay warm and cook food. Horses and aurocs have been used for millennia as sources of energy, and sometimes the fields they plowed were turned to desert. So civilizations have collapsed from the overuse of exosomatic energy, but even if the supply of this energy altered local climates, Earth's major climate systems were never destabilized. Wars have been waged for millennia, using horses, elephants, flint, bronze, iron and steel weapons, people have migrated to new continents, under the power of animals and wind, empires have been built and collapsed, but there were never enough people, eating enough food and using enough forest, or consuming any energy not recently stored in the fiber of wood or grain, to literally re-quantify global climate parameters. The amount of energy available to do work sets limits on the number of people.

The records of history (Scheidel, 2017) tell us that only when disaster - war, disease, famine, flood - destroys the wealth of the wealthy are civilizations reset and class differences discarded. By then, though, war, disease, or natural disaster has destroyed lives, peoples and cultures. Necessarily, ecosystems and the creatures that live in them, will have suffered and died, too.