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Subjugate the Earth traces the biography of a strange idea: the idea that human beings can subdue nature and rule over it, that humans are outside and above nature. Born in Mesopotamia at the dawn of civilisation, the idea of subjugating the Earth was included in the Bible, reached Europe through Christianity and spread to the entire world through colonialism. The Enlightenment gave a scientific appearance to the ambition of controlling nature but did not change the ambition itself. But every birth presages a death. Only with the climate crisis has it become apparent that the subjugation of nature must be a self-defeating ambition, because it alters and deregulates natural systems which humans depend on for their survival, precisely because they are part of nature. Subjugating the Earth is an idea that is dying around us.
The polycrisis threatening to engulf humanity is inextricably linked to how humans see themselves and their relationship with nature. Based on developments in the natural sciences, a new understanding of this relationship looks not at individual phenomena but at systems, connections and entanglements between humans and other manifestations of nature. Is it possible to build a new understanding of humanity in nature by turning the traditional vision of free, rational individuals on its head and seeing humans as fascinating, irrational and system-dependent beings within the vast system of nature?
Told through historical episodes, individual life stories, works of art, and scientific discoveries, Subjugate the Earth tells the story of the rise and fall of an idea that has shaped our world and weaves a rich tapestry that is as surprising as it is enriching.
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Up into the Air
Prologue: Buy Me a Cloud
I MYTH
The World on a Vase
Gilgamesh the Hero
The View from the Parapet
The Free Market of Offerings
Before the Flood
In Search of Lost Matriarchy
In Search of Presumed Religion
The Dancing God
King of the World, King of Assyria
... and subjugate it
Lost in Translation?
Look on My works!
The Triumph of Light over Darkness
The Map of Misreadings
II LOGOS
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
Why Europe?
Technology and the Burden of Empire
The Justification Industry
The Age of Iron
Monsieur Grat and His Master
'If only I could paint his spirit!'
The Canon and the Antichrist
An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump
The Theology of Fish
Lisbon
A Work of Nature
Virtuous Terror
Carte Blanche
Stuffed and Exhibited
The Silent Death of Saartjie Baartman
Hare Hunting
Modern Times
III COSMOS
Agony
The One-Armed Lumberjack
Liberal Lifelong Lies
The World as Clockwork
Admiration for Cannibals
Entangled Life
A Handful of Earth
Risky Thinking
Notes
Index
Philipp Blom is a historian and writer who lives in Vienna. He is the author of numerous works including Nature's Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present.
"With passion, erudition and insight, Philipp Blom has written a devastating history of the human illusion that we are, as Descartes said, the lords and masters of nature. Blom helps us to understand the climate crisis as the nemesis of this illusion, and he also guides us towards a new understanding of ourselves as creatures of the natural world, vitally dependent on our understanding and respect for nature. A moving and important work."
– Michael Ignatieff, author of On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times
"In this rich, illuminating and thoroughly readable book, Philipp Blom, the German historian, reveals why Western Christian culture, in contrast to most other cultures, became obsessed about controlling nature and the environment. In just 500 years of human history, the West has wrought changes on the world which are unprecedented in their speed and extent. With an impressive range of Western and non-Western sources, Blom takes us on a dizzying journey of progress and destruction, blending philosophy with the history of science in a fast-paced narrative that brings us to the present day – an era that promises great prosperity and great destruction. A tour de force."
– Misha Glenny, author of McMafia
"Without sacrificing any sense of the contingencies that have shaped human history over centuries, this brilliant book tracks how the desire to dominate the Earth came to be an integral part of what European intellectuals later defined as modernity. Blom's lucid and superb skills of exposition will speak powerfully to thinkers in and of the West. They will, additionally, hold up a mirror to the modernizing elites elsewhere who, for generations, have made this desire their own, a desire whose global career has now arguably created an existential crisis for humans. A book of global relevance."
– Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age
