Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How

Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate by William F. Ruddiman

Book Summary:

Ruddiman, William. Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum. Princeton: Princeton University Press,

The first forty-four pages of Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum by William F. Ruddiman has something to offend everyone. For global warming proponents, Ruddiman focuses not on the evils of industrialism but instead suggests that human activity has been affecting the earth's climate for many thousands of years. For anti-global warming activists, Ruddiman leaves no doubt of the fact that in his estimation that the climate is getting warmer due to human influences, not because of natural forces. Changes occurred in the earth's atmosphere, he argues, with the beginnings of human's cultivation of the land for food. Rice and livestock are as much to blame for global warming as factories and cars.

"Carbon dioxide concentrations began their slow rise 8,000 years ago when humans began to cut and burn forests in China, India, and Europe to make clearings for croplands and pastures. Methane concentrations began a similar rise 5,000 years ago when humans began to irrigate for rice farming and tend livestock in unprecedented numbers" (Ruddiman 5) of course, many environmental activists today blame industrialized agriculture, but Ruddiman suggests that agriculture itself, not factory farming, has caused an increase in carbon dioxide and methane gases. This suggests that correcting the problems caused by human influences upon the environment is far more problematic than altering the last hundred years of human history.

Any time there is a change to the earth's state of homeostasis, a new balance is created. Earth's orbit is fundamentally linked to its climate, and Earth has always undergone cycles of cooling and warming (one of the arguments of anti- global warming activists). Small changes in the earth's tilt can cause radical (from a human's perspective) shifts in climate. Ruddiman admits that yes, the Earth's climate changes, regardless of human activity, are present and inevitable. However, the type and evolution of the particular nature of the climate change experienced by the earth seems clearly due to the impact of human existence. Ruddiman takes a roughly chronological approach, and slowly takes the reader through the history of climatic shifts -- before humans became tillers of the land and afterwards. Major milestones in human history correspond with major anomalies in the earth's climate and atmospheric levels of important gases.