LONDON — Roland Ennos, a visiting professor of biological sciences at the University of Hull, traces humanity’s rise in his latest book through mastery of energy, from stone tools and fire to modern fossil fuels. ‘The Powerful Primate’ celebrates how these advances boosted population from 8 million to 8 billion over 10,000 years, enabled denser settlements and dwarfed wild animals with domesticated ones at a 15-to-1 ratio.

Ennos credits hotter furnaces and superior steel for unleashing engines that revolutionized agriculture, transport and public lighting, slashing crime rates. Natural gas supplanted firewood and coal, warming homes more cleanly. Since 1950, global energy output has surged sixfold as economic production leaped 15-fold, according to the book.

The narrative shifts to alarm in modern chapters. Ennos laments humanity’s ‘plunder’ of nature, vast land grabs for food and profligate energy habits that he says threaten existence with global catastrophe. He urges ditching meat for plant-based diets to ease agricultural strain and warns of exhausting Earth’s finite resources.

A pointed Wall Street Journal review by an unnamed critic calls this view extreme. Pollution beyond greenhouse gases has dropped across the West, the review states. U.S. emissions peaked in 2007 and fell since, no matter the administration. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecasts global greenhouse gases peaking within five to 10 years, then declining as solar, nuclear and natural gas take over.

Beijing’s air pollution halved over the past decade. Mexico City’s smog has cleared dramatically. University of Oxford researcher Hannah Ritchie, author of ‘Not the End of the World’ published this year, points out China deploys clean energy faster than anywhere else.

The review faults Ennos for a simplistic take on nature as a static entity humans damage. Nature evolves dynamically, it argues, and humans represent its pinnacle—perhaps destined to seed life across the cosmos through advancing knowledge. Elon Musk recently invoked the Kardashev scale, devised by Soviet astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev in 1964, to frame civilization by energy command: Type I for planetary control, Type II stellar, Type III galactic. A 2023 Nature journal study pegs humanity at 0.7276, heading to 0.7449.

Musk insists solar will dominate, with a small patch of Texas or New Mexico powering all U.S. electricity. Space-based collectors could tap the sun’s vast output for millennia, the review suggests. Trends already bend toward renewables, higher efficiency and less waste in mining and factories.

Ennos peers 10,000 years back but barely decades ahead, per the critique. Fossil fuels and minerals won’t last forever, yet cleaner transitions promise to resolve his chief worries. Even if wilderness shrinks, the tradeoff yields richer human lives and expanded complex life, the review posits. A brief geologic overindulgence might propel humanity to galactic resources and infinite habitats, ultimately benefiting nature.

Ennos built his reputation with accessible works like a history of wood and a chronicle of spinning machines from steam engines to turbines. ‘The Powerful Primate’ fits that mold until its stark conclusion, which the WSJ review reframes through data on emissions declines and tech horizons.