Review
Books
Climate
Culture
4 min read

The rude guests

The Earth Transformed chronicles what happens when civilisation comes up against environmental change. Hannah Eves reviews Peter Frankopan’s analysis.

Hannah Eves is a policy officer at A Rocha UK, a Christian nature charity working to protect and restore nature in the UK and equip individuals and churches to care for creation. 

The head and torso of a mannequin lie abandoned in undergrowth
Dragon Pan on Unsplash.

In his meditation on nature, The Peace of Wild Things, the agrarian poet Wendell Berry writes: ‘When despair for the world grows in me… I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought.’ The despair Berry describes sounds a lot like climate anxiety, the fear or worry about the environmental doom that more and more people are feeling, because anyone who has understood recent climate and biodiversity trends has been burdened with forethought on behalf of wild things. It’s a forethought that can lead very easily to despair. Only last month, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) issued its most serious warning yet about irreversible levels of global heating and the catastrophic impacts the world is facing without drastic action to address climate breakdown. Secretary-General of the UN António Guterres issued this warning: ‘Humanity is on thin ice – and that ice is melting fast… In short, our world needs climate action on all fronts -- everything, everywhere, all at once.’  

While climate change is often seen as a modern political issue, the question of how to understand or adapt to changes in the natural world, and failures to do so, is not unique to the last century. In fact, it’s foundational to all of history, so argues historian Peter Frankopan in his new book The Earth Transformed. Frankopan charts a path from the dawn of time through development of human civilisation and empire up to the making of the modern world asserting that underpinning everything that has ever happened (ever) is a central relationship of transformation. The natural environment shaped the development of human civilisation and humanity has ‘expanded, colonised, reproduced, created and dominated’, but also ‘destroyed, devastated and exterminated’, the natural landscape.  

Frankopan shows how environmental fluctuations and changes have shaped the course of history. For example, he tells the story of how a ‘mighty civilisation’ folded in on itself in the face of environmental catastrophe. Around 2253 BC Naram-Sin ruled over the Akkadian empire (in Mesopotamia in modern Iraq) during which ‘The Curse of Akkad’ grips the empire. Said to be a divine judgement of Naram-Sin’s rule and ‘insulting behaviour’, the curse was a period of drought and crop failure, leading to price inflation, mass death and political chaos. Climate data shows that what actually happened was an ‘evaporation event’ leading to drought impacting most severely areas that were ecologically sensitive and having such a ripple effect as to prompt what one scholar called a ‘Dark Age’ of ecological collapse and political instability. Frankopan notes, ‘changes in climate had brought about nothing less than the collapse of the Akkadian empire.’ 
The Earth Transformed places human beings within a wider context of all creation, not only transforming the natural world but being shaped and transformed by it. In fact, human beings are like ‘rude guests’ who arrive late, cause havoc and destroy the house to which they have been invited. We are a new and late arrival in the grand scheme of history and yet our impact on the natural world has been substantial and has pushed scientists to the point of questioning the long-term viability of human life.  

However, we are not alone in transforming the world around us; nature is not a passive force but actively ‘involved in the process of change, adaptation and evolution, sometimes with devastating consequences’. And so, Frankopan insightfully illustrates how nature underpins everything that makes our lives possible. It’s not simply that environmental factors are actors in the story of our species, they ‘provide the very stage on which our existence plays out, shaping everything we do, who we are, where and how we live.’ And yet, we are living on the edge of our means and are dependent on ‘everything to go right and with little margin of error for things to go wrong.’  

The book closes with this harrowing warning that ‘it would be nature, rather than human action, that ultimately brings net emissions towards zero’ through ‘catastrophic depopulation, whether through hunger, disease or conflict’. With fewer people on the planet to use up the earth’s resources by burning fuel, cutting forests down or tearing minerals from the ground, the carbon footprint of humanity would plummet, and we would get closer to a ‘lush paradise of our fantasised past’. Frankopan concludes: ‘Perhaps we will find our way back there through peaceful means: a historian would not bet on it.’  

It’s somewhat of a cliche to say that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it and yet Frankopan’s book shows how if we don’t take the capacity of nature and the climate to transform us we are not just doomed to repeat ourselves, but, well, doomed. Published in the same month that the IPCC has issued its final warning on 1.5 degrees, The Earth Transformed presents both a fascinating and essential lens to view history through in such a time as this. 

The Earth Transformed: An Untold History by Peter Frankopan is published by Bloomsbury.  

Review
America
Culture
Film & TV
Politics
5 min read

Trump: from apprentice to master of contempt

The Trump biopic is a morality tale for our times
An 1980s business man looks contemptuously at the camera.
Sebastian Stan as a young Donald Trump.
Scythia Films.

He won. Donald Trump is, once again, the President of the United States. The controversial property tycoon, controversial ‘billionaire’, controversial reality TV star, and highly controversial one-term (or so it seemed) President, has done it again! Sweeping not only the Electoral College but also the popular vote, Trump will have another four years to ‘Make America Great Again’…whatever that means. The question on most pundits’ lips today is: how? The man who was written off from the first moments he descended into his campaign on that golden escalator; the man who was guaranteed to lose his first (let alone his third!) Presidential bid; the man who has been mired in sexual, financial, constitutional, and legal scandal…how could he win again!? 

Rather than seek answers in the election coverage of last night I went to an alternative source of information. I popped down to my local cinema to watch The Apprentice, Ali Abbasi’s biopic of Trump’s rise to power and prominence, focusing on his ‘apprenticeship’ under pugnacious, pugilistic, flamboyant, and flamingly foul-mouthed lawyer and mentor Roy Cohn. Whether consciously or not – and believe me, it’s so consciously on the nose as to feel like a punch to the nose – the film draws a ruler-straight line from Trump’s early days as Cohn’s disciple to his electoral success in 2016…and now in 2024. 

How did Trump win, not once but twice…? 

…by selling his soul to the Devil. 

We meet Trump and Cohn in an exclusive New York Members Club. Trump is shy and awkward – none of the bombast we know him for – clumsily trying to impress his date by mentioning how he is the youngest member to ever be admitted. Cohn is holding court with some mob-coded friends. Cohn stares at the handsome, golden-haired ingénue (Trump, not his date) across the room through sunken domes. He invites Trump to join him for dinner. The date has gone to ‘powder my nose’ and seemingly has made a lucky escape through the lavatory window. Trump joins Cohn. Cohn bloviates, always with his hand firmly gripping Trump’s thigh. Trump is enamoured…smitten…in love. Cohn becomes his lawyer and Trump his protégé. 

The film goes on to chronicle how, under Cohn’s tutelage, Trump becomes the man we now know. Cohn is committed to winning – under the guise of being committed to America. He teaches Trump his three rules for success:  

  1. Attack, attack, attack. 
  2. Admit nothing. Deny everything. 
  3. Even in defeat, claim victory.  

There is a nice bit of mirroring in the final scene as we see Trump regurgitate these rules, introduced pithily and wittily in the first 30 minutes of the film, in his final exaggerated and bloviated style to a ghost-writer employed to write The Art of the Deal. This is how Trump wins. Throughout the film we watch Trump evolve from the nervous young man, protective of his alcoholic brother and under-the-thumb of his overbearing father, into a monstrous, ad absurdum form of Cohn…a man who will demand absolute submission to his will. 

The film, I wager, is partly a morality tale. It gives us a (slightly) sympathetic young Faustus, and chronicles his descent into Hell, but without a hint of real redemption or pity.

The film is sickeningly enjoyable. Sebastian Stan gently invites us to root for Trump in his timidity, and transforms with a subtlety which leaves the audience questioning their own culpability. Maria Bakalova brings a good-natured innocence to Ivana Trump (née Zelníčková) which steals the few scenes she’s afforded. Jeremy Strong – always watchable – brings his magnetic charisma to the screen. His Cohn is akin to Pacino’s John Milton in The Devil’s Advocate: delightfully chewing the scenery and ingratiating himself to the viewer while being hateful. The film is just over two hours long but doesn’t feel it. Never dragging, never boring. The soundtrack revels in the period, and the needle-drops are near perfect. It’s a really rather fun watch. 

However. 

The film is not nourishing. It is the cinematic equivalent of the junk food that leads to Trump’s expanding waistline (and the liposuction scene that is so difficult to watch). The film painstakingly draws parallels between Trump’s early success and his later political career. Cohn’s rules, Reagan’s campaigning slogans, the arrogance, the (sexual!) violence…everything we associate with Trump today is found in its nascent form in his 1980s career. Yet, none of it really matters because we have no character we want to attach ourselves to. No one, except perhaps Trump’s mother and his first wife, neither of whom have the chance to make enough of an impact, is likable or redeemable. Cohn is slime personified, until a sudden AIDS related conversion to conscience, and we don’t see nearly enough of the pathetic and put-upon Trump to care about his descent into the demonic realm of absolute self-absorption. The script is razor-sharp, but not incisive. The characters are riotously funny, but nowhere near emotionally engaging enough. 

The film, I wager, is partly a morality tale. It gives us a (slightly) sympathetic young Faustus, and chronicles his descent into Hell, but without a hint of real redemption or pity. Mortality makes Cohn recognise the monster he has been the Dr Frankenstein to, but in about ten minutes. We see a relative innocent made villain, but barely having had the chance to care for him in his infancy. No amount of slick script or genuinely bravura performance (Jeremy Strong deserves an Oscar) can make up for the cold and emotionless lens that the film has. In a sense, this gives us a more realistic explanation of Trump’s victory than the film seeks to muster…disdain. 

Like Trump, I deployed ‘alternative facts’. 

I lied. 

I did watch some of the election coverage in the early hours of the morning. As the Trump victory became inexorable, I watched pundit after pundit – who had been excoriating Trump supporters as either stupid or malign only 24 hours before – earnestly explain that it was a lack of engagement with middle-America which had lost it for the Democrats. Tony Hinchcliffe may have made a predictably unpleasant joke about Puerto Rico being a ‘garbage island’, but it was Biden calling even reluctant Trump voters ‘garbage’ which swung the election. We live in a new polarised age where the genuine concerns of the ordinary man or woman, if they can be associated with someone as aesthetically and morally compromised as Trump, make them functionally fascist.  

The Apprentice, simply by being unable to empathise with anyone not in favour, gives us the secret to Trump’s victory. It wasn’t Cohn’s rules. It was his overactive ability to demonstrate his contempt for everyone, and therefore seem to have contempt for no one. His detractors demonstrated the reverse. In the end Trump hasn’t needed to attack, or deny, or claim illegitimate victory. He simply has had to be himself. 

Saaaad. 

 

**** Stars