At Home - Bill Bryson [243]
Remarkably, what brought those animals to this part of the world was a climate just 3 degrees Celsius or so warmer than today. There are people alive now who will live in a Britain that warm again. Whether it will be a parched Serengeti or a verdant paradise of homegrown wines and year-round fruit is beyond the scope of this book to guess. What is certain is that it will be a very different place, and one to which future humans will have to adjust at something much faster than a geological pace.
One of the things not visible from our rooftop is how much energy and other inputs we require now to provide us with the ease and convenience that we have all come to expect in our lives. It’s a lot—a shocking amount. Of the total energy produced on Earth since the Industrial Revolution began, half has been consumed in just the last twenty years. Disproportionately, it was consumed by us in the rich world; we are an exceedingly privileged fraction.
Today it takes the average citizen of Tanzania almost a year to produce the same volume of carbon emissions as is effortlessly generated every two and a half days by a European, or every twenty-eight hours by an American. We are, in short, able to live as we do because we use resources at hundreds of times the rate of most of the planet’s other citizens. One day—and don’t expect it to be a distant day—many of those six billion or so less well-off people are bound to demand to have what we have, and to get it as effortlessly as we got it, and that will require more resources than this planet can easily, or even conceivably, yield.
The greatest possible irony would be if in our endless quest to fill our lives with comfort and happiness we created a world that had neither. But that of course would be another book.
* A hundred years later when the significance of the find was finally realized, a geological period was named the Hoxnian after the village where Frere made his discovery.
* Pitt Rivers’s eldest son, Alexander, seems to have inherited his father’s affection for tormenting tenants. One, a man of previously mild character, was so driven to despair by young Alexander that he wrote “BLACKGUARD LANDLORD” with weed killer in large letters across the Rushmore lawn. Alexander sued for libel and was awarded token damages of one shilling, but rejoiced in the fact that the trial costs had reduced the tenant to destitution. Pitt Rivers’s other eight children seem mostly to have been pretty decent. George—the one banished from the estate and thus the inadvertent cause of his sister’s beating—became a successful inventor with a particular interest in electric lighting. He demonstrated an incandescent bulb at the Paris Exhibition of 1881 that was deemed the equal of anything produced by Edison or Swan.
* The name “bank holiday” was an odd one, and Lubbock never really explained why he elected to call it that instead of “national holiday” or “workers’ holiday” or something similarly descriptive. It is sometimes suggested that he meant the holiday only for bank workers, but that is not so. It was always intended for all.
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS •
As ever, I am much indebted to many people for expert help and guidance in the preparation of this book, in particular the following.
In England: Professors Tim Burt, Maurice Tucker, and Mark White of Durham University; the Reverend Nicholas Holtam of St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church, London; the Very Reverend Michael Sadgrove of Durham Cathedral; Keith Blackmore of the Times; Beth McHattie and Philip Davies of English Heritage; Aosaf Afzal, Dominic Reid, and Keith Moore of the Royal Society; and the staff of the London Library and Durham University Library.
In the United States: Elizabeth Chew, Bob Self, Susan Stein, Richard Gilder, and Bill Beiswanger of Monticello; Dennis Pogue of Mount Vernon; Jan Dempsey of the Wenham Public Library in Massachusetts;