Book: EARTH SHAPERS: HOW HUMANS MASTERED GEOGRAPHY AND REMADE THE WORLD
Author: Maxim Samson
Published by: Profile
Price: Rs 999
Remember those little shortcuts you took across a grassy field instead of taking the normal pathway around it just to shave off a few seconds? Now imagine them on national and continental scales; congratulations, you have shaped the Earth! Or at least that’s what Maxim Samson opines in this book. From the American-spearheaded project digging through miles of heavily-forested land in Central America to connect the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans to the global initiative to plant a wall of trees across the southern fringes of the Sahara to arrest desertification, Samson takes a closer look at eight such human stratagems to reshape geographical surroundings to further our interests — whether selfish, pecuniary ones like Mozambique’s railway network or visionary, self-confessedly exalted, egalitarian aims like that of THE LINE being built currently by Saudi Arabia.
Any reasonably well-informed reader will understand that “earth shaping is never apolitical, and its impacts are often far-reaching”. Civilisations have risen and fallen along geographical lines. Countries have owed their continued prosperity to natural barriers; the Himalayas, protecting India from icy Arctic winds and funnelling rain-heavy winds along the northern plains, are a case in point. Samson presents some compelling evidence to further this argument. In eight chapters, he looks at eight different perspectives through which human efforts to mould the natural environment can be viewed. The Qhapaq Nan, for instance, represents ‘Order’ and served as “an instrument of control” for the Inca empire, allowing it to send messengers and military forces to far-reaching provinces at lightning speed and enabling the empire’s officials to traverse the land to keep an eye on things. Mozambique’s railways are a symbol of ‘Extraction’, proof that colonialism never had any civilising motives, only exploitation: the railways did not connect the former Portuguese colony’s major population centres as the priority was “to bring natural resources from the interior to the coast as efficiently as possible”. Further chapters discuss the Baltic Way as a symbol of ‘Resistance’ and the Panama Canal as a business venture of ‘Convenience’ which “helped the United States to readily expand its economic and political power beyond its own borders”.
By using approachable prose and pragmatically framing his arguments within the recognised paradigms of global geopolitics, Samson creates a narrative that flows easily through the readers’ mind and asks them to rethink stereotypical connotations of geographical connectivity. A tad unimaginative perhaps is his rigid subdivision of chapters: “Co-option” is the name he gives to the early colonial practice of “settling and organising Indigenous lands” but can the usage of the Incan roadways by the Spanish conquistadors to invade and pillage Incan cities not be tarred with the same brush? Was the Mozambique railway network not a system of ‘convenient’ exploitation for the Portuguese? Overall, however, Earth Shapers is a captivating series of case studies explaining how humans can be pioneers of geography instead of being its prisoners.