Simplicity and Essentialism ( Cont .)
that earth-shaking year of 1776 , the year in which the American Declaration of Independence was signed , the year in which the Scottish economist Adam Smith published his Wealth of Nations , and the year James Cook embarked on his third and last voyage , James Watt demonstrated his new steam engine at a coal mine outside Birmingham . Muscle power was replaced by steam power , which profoundly changed our relationship with our planet . This , with many other innovations ( stock companies to organise business endeavours , patents to encourage innovation , fertiliser in agriculture and the diffusion of scientific knowledge through educational institutions ), kickstarted an extraordinary increase in human wealth per capita . By 1776 , social development had clawed its way up by only about 50 % since our Ice Age hunter-gatherer forefathers prowled the earth in search of a meal .
The transformation over the next quarter of a millennium beggared belief : a 50-fold increase in wealth . It was nothing short of a miracle .
Our prosperity was , however , tightly coupled with taking resources from the earth . As we became more numerous and prosperous , we took more : fossil fuels , land , water , minerals . We used extraordinarily powerful tools and , sadly , we plundered , polluted and befouled the earth . We imposed ourselves on nature .
Perhaps the most clear-cut way to see this is to look at changes in biomass ( the total worldwide weight ) of mammals . As recently as two thousand years ago , at the time of Christ , all humans on earth weighed only about two-thirds as much as all the bison in North America , and less than one-eighth of the combined weight of elephants in Africa . But due to our population explosion and , more significantly , our killing of bison and elephant on a nightmarishly industrial scale , the balance shifted . At present , we humans weigh more than 350 times as much as all bison and elephant put together . In fact , we weigh more than ten times as much all the earth ’ s wild mammals combined . And if we add in all the animals we ’ ve domesticated ( like dogs , cattle , sheep and horses ), the comparison becomes ridiculous : we and our tamed animals now represent 97 % of the earth ’ s mammalian biomass .
The numerical and technological success of homo sapiens wiped out thousands
32