06/03/2023
Best-selling author of The Silk Roads, Peter Frankopan, introduces his topical and revelatory account of how the natural world has shaped human history and sheds fascinating new light on both today’s climate crisis and the epochal shifts of the past.
Monday 6th March, 8-9pm, University Arms.
In The Earth Transformed Peter Frankopan reconnects us with our ancestors who, like us, worshipped, exploited and conserved the natural environment – and draws salutary conclusions about what the future may bring. He shows that engagement with the natural world and with climatic change and their effects on us are not new: exploring the development of religion and language and their relationships with the environment; tracing how growing demands for harvests resulted in the increased shipment of enslaved peoples; scrutinising how the desire to centralise agricultural surplus formed the origins of the bureaucratic state; and seeing how efforts to understand and manipulate the weather have a long and deep history.
Taking us from the beginning of recorded history to the present day, The Earth Transformed forces us to reckon with our continuing efforts to make sense of the natural world.
Tickets can be purchased at www.cambridgeliteraryfestival.com