In energy terms it was the “Firewood Age”, which did indeed end due to massive deforestation just before the Industrial Revolution, forcing civilization to turn to coal as its fuel source (even though it had been banned in medieval times because of the air pollution it caused).

I suspect that environmentalist anti-nuclearism though is for Malthusian reasons, rather than due to any real problems with nuclear energy. If I had my way, we’d stop man-made global warming by cranking out nuclear reactors the way we cranked out planes and ships and tanks in World War II.

Interestingly, today’s entry from the A Word A Day people is “misoneism”, meaning “A hatred or fear of change or innovation”.

In our case, it could mean technological misoneism.

“The pessimist sees a problem in every solution; the optimist sees a solution in every problem”?

Lucas seems to have taken the first half to heart.

The New Stone Age ended because the supply of readily accessible usable rocks became short in certain regions because of population growth. A substitute was needed, and that was found in arsenic-copper, a naturally occurring alloy.

Even then flint and chert and other stones remained in use. Even by 2500bc — the time of the Great Pyramids — Egypt was still a neolithic society. While Sumer was a bronze age culture.

Of course, with metal came advances in obtaining that metal, working it, transporting it. The last of which meant improvements in transporting other goods and materials. Which in turn meant the ability to travel further faster, which in turn meant merchants and traders could go to more distant lands — from Phoenicia to Britain for example — for trade goods and wealth. All because of small scale local shortages.

The flibbertigibbet crowd keeps forgetting that we are are capable species. We can’t find what we want, we’ll come up with a substitute given the resources we need to do it.

And on the subject…

I’m originally from East Anglia, where one of the biggest attractions is the Norfolk Broads, an area of small lakes, fens, woods and waterways; it’s a popular destination for visitors, who enjoy sailing, fishing, canoeing and bird-watching. Conservationists are eager to keep the area the way it is, limiting the damage done by boats (which can erode riverbanks) and farm chemicals seeping into the water. There’s plenty of wildlife here – kingfishers, bitterns, marsh harriers, swallowtail butterflies, etc.

The Norfolk Broads is also an “unnatural” environment. The shallow lakes that sailors and bird-watchers enjoy visiting were once ugly great holes in the ground, the result of industrial-scale medieval peat-digging. In the 12th century, the population of the area was expanding and wood was becoming scarce, so peat was increasingly being used as fuel; armies of peat-cutters were getting down and dirty, excavating the peat out of the ground and carting it away.

This sounds exactly like the sort of activity environmentalists hate. Humans plundering and degrading nature! And yet without the peat-diggers then, we wouldn’t have the Broads now.

(Incidentally, there’s more to the Broads story. Why did these great holes fill with water? Because sea levels were rising, back in the late 14th century. There’s also evidence that in Roman times, many centuries previously to that, sea levels would have been much higher, depositing seashells where there are now farmers’ fields. There was a “Great Estuary” (named Gariensis) in what is now East Norfolk, which was drained as sea levels receded, creating wetlands and fertile meadows and allowing for plenty of economic development during the early Middle Ages. So yes, we have sea levels rising, falling and then rising again, over the centuries. Presumably with the atmosphere containing pre-industrial levels of carbon dioxide…)