From Jevons's Coal to Hubbert's Pimple
In a commercial society like ours it is understandable that money-makers should be the ones who pay the greatest attention to the implications of economics. Historians have been a breed apart, with most of them (until recently) paying little heed to the ways in which economics affects history. Yet surprisingly, a basis for the eventual integration of economics, ecology, and history was laid in the nineteenth century. The Victorian who tackled history from the economic side was William Stanley Jevons (1835-1882). The distinction made in the previous chapter between living in a area and living on it was a paraphrase of what Jevons wrote about the material basis of English prosperity: "The plains of North America and Russia are our cornfields; Chicago and Odessa our granaries; Canada and the Baltic are our timber forests; Australia contains our sheep farms, and in South America are our herds of oxen;.. . the Chinese grow tea for us, and our coffee, sugar, and spice plantations are in all the Indies. Spain and France are our vineyards, and the Mediterranean our fruit-garden.'" A century before the term "ghost acres" was coined, Jevons had clearly in mind the idea behind the term. Half a century before Jevons was born—in fact in the year the Bastille was stormed by French revolutionaries (1789)—an English mineral surveyer by the name of John Williams had asked, in The Limited Quantity of Coal of Britain, what would happen to the blessings of the industrial revolution when England no longer possessed the wherewithal to power the machinery that produced her wealth? Optimism is so deeply engrained a characteristic of busy people that this warning, like most first warnings, was little noted. It remained for Jevons to rouse the British public in 1865 with the publication of his book, The Coal Question. Jevons's life coincided in time with the period when the nature and significance of energy (in its prenuclear formulation) was becoming manifest to physical scientists. Since energy was needed to turn the wheels of industry, and coal was the most readily available source of energy, Jevons reasoned that the continued political dominance of Great Britain was dependent on the bounty of her coal. This naturally led to the double question, How long would English coal and the British Empire last?