How Earth Made Us - A Review

How Earth Made Us is a television series devoted to how the physical geography of the planet has shaped the rise and fall of civilisations. As someone who’s played a lot of games of Civilization IV, I can tell you that success primarily rests on the terrain around your cities and the availability of resources, so for me this seems like a fascinating subject for a TV series.

And to be fair to it, it is. The programmes continually throw up stuff I didn’t know about, and it is genuinely fascinating material. The first four programmes of the series are based loosely around the four “classical” elements:

• Deep Earth, which focused on fault lines and how they’ve brought minerals and groundwater to the surface to allow cities to develop near them;

• Water, which focused on… well, fresh water and our drive to be near it and to control it;

• Wind, which focused on how patterns of winds both form the world’s desert and fertile regions, and dictate the directions of trade routes; and

• Fire, which focused on those great fuel sources of civilisation down the ages, wood, coal and oil, and the way that they drove some powers to imperial heights and others to backwater mediocrity.

It’s really interesting stuff. You see why Britain became the powerhouse of the industrial revolution while China, despite huge coal supplies, couldn’t get proper access to them until the late twentieth century. On the other hand, you see why China is brilliant for farming, while Australia is so terrible for it that the Aborigines became the only major human culture not to bother with it. You find out about great civilisations that you’d barely even heard of (those poor, poor Minoans) and, most importantly, you get to find out where all the wonders in Civ 4 come from (oh so that’s what Angkor Wat is).

But that’s only half the story and unfortunately, it’s the better half. While the substance of the programmes is great, the presentation leaves a lot to be desired.

It’s not really the presenter’s fault, per se. Professor Iain Stewart is an okay enough presenter, even if his name is annoyingly like that of the mathematician Professor Ian Stewart. His Scots accent is fairly engaging. But my goodness, but does he have a roundabout way of getting to the point.

Here’s how a typical section of the program goes. Stewart will start by introducing a particular topic. Maybe it’s a problem that needs a solution, maybe it’s a city that for some reason got abandoned, something along those lines. He’ll build up the topic for a while, but just before you think he’s going to explain it, he’ll go “In order to find out, we’re going to have to go to a twenty second establishing shot of people doing peopley things. And then I’ll climb a sand dune, while wheezing about how hard it is to climb a sand dune, or I’ll have a minute long sequence where I get dressed up in enough protective clothing to go through the heart of a fire. And then I’ll show a computer graphic, or talk to someone, or…”. At this point, if you already think you know the answer, you’ll be screaming it at the television. If you don’t know the answer, you’ll just be screaming.

Granted when he finally stops messing about and tells you, it’s fascinating stuff. But the roundabout way he goes about it is just a frustrating tease. You end up thinking that if he just got straight to the point, he’d be able to cram twice as much interesting material into each hour-long programme.

Professor Stewart frequently gives lectures to sell-out crowds, and these lectures are reported as “amazing”. Perhaps they are. Perhaps it’s the content of the lectures that’s so amazing. Or perhaps it’s just that Stewart, when confined to a lecture theatre, doesn’t have access to all the clever gimmicks that a TV show provides, and so he’s forced to stick to the point and actually stick to what he’s good at, which is telling us incredible things we didn’t know.

I ended up skipping the fifth and presumably final programme of the series, since it appeared to be “How Us Made Earth” rather than “How Earth Made Us”: in other words, the ways in which we’ve affected the planet. For one, it’s going against the concept of the series, and what makes it so unique and interesting in the first place. For two, there are already enough programmes on that subject, and they tend to beat about the bush less.

The fact that I gave up so readily when it came to watching the finale sums it up. This programme is presented in a fashion that is annoying and long-winded, yet the material is so fascinating that I couldn’t stop watching. But as soon as the topic changed to something less unique, I couldn’t watch any more.