We're proceeding based on historian Alexander Etkind's "Nature's Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources" this time and its rather unorthodox heroes of peat and hemp, sugar and iron, cod and oil. In other words, we'll be talking about natural resources, which are part of nature but also of the economy and culture. We'll also touch on resource dependency and its effects.

The value of natural wealth tends to fluctuate. While silver shortages may hurt the rich, the lack of grain can squeeze the poor, with everyone suffering from a deficit of air. Different economies mean that natural resources have different political traits.

History teaches us that the birth of empires, revolutions or global warming cannot be understood if one ignores evil. The latter is expressed in both domestic and international violence, lack of freedoms and economic inequality. It is characteristic of the modern era how political evil often coincides with ecological evil. The four axes of history – politics, economy, ecology and morality – meld into one.

Etkind takes a look at human history through use of various natural resources. Energy makes for a central topic as the basis for everything. For the most part, energy is not man-made and comes from the sun, wind, water, fuel or food. If wood produces three times the energy it takes to collect, this grows to between ten and a hundred times for coal, while oil yields up to one thousand times the energy it took to source. Wood made for the first major source of energy, while its use quickly outstripped its rate of recovery.

Even after metal came to replace wood in many products, the demand for the latter remained considerable. It also took colossal amounts of wood to produce metal. The development of cities spelled disaster for the woods as every resident of Paris went through two tons of firewood every winter.

Wood was also highly taxable. Grain was also a good thing to tax, which is why taxes were still collected in the form of wheat, maize, rice or barley even after potatoes appeared. As technologies developed, grain soon morphed from a product of the land, sun and labor into one of oil as it took barrels of the black stuff to produce a ton of grain. Agriculture turned into petroculture.

The main bottleneck in food production this century is air rather than land use. While producing milk and meat yields 18 percent of the world's calories, it also emits 60 percent of its emissions.

Proposed solutions include dialing back cattle breeding in the global north, promoting vegetarianism and taxing dairy and meat on par with tobacco and alcohol. The latter are addictive substances, but so is sugar. While our bodies know how much salt we need, the overconsumption of sugar happens because of its addictive properties. Etkind suggests that if grain created the peasantry and textile the proletariat, sweetened tea was what led to the rise of the bourgeoisie.

Gold makes for another story, not being something the sun has created. Due to their scarcity and chemical inertia, gold and silver have always been used to store wealth. The way gold is hoarded nowadays is slightly different. While Russia's dependence on raw material exports, its excessive military spending and the deterioration of its human capital are well-known, there has been less talk of gold.

Russia is trying to put more of its assets in gold. Official information suggests that the country has 2,000 tons of gold worth around $77 billion. And it has been buying more. Russia was the biggest purchaser of gold last decade. We are seeing a resurgence of natural resource empires policy. By the way, China also started buying up gold last year. But concentrating too hard on hoarding gold could spell disaster.

Nations that create value through work on which taxes are paid and then look after people's well-being so they would work and pay more taxes tend to be more successful. For a state that parasitizes on raw materials, having a population is excessive. The elite depends on the price of raw materials as opposed to the value created by the work of residents. Such states tend to protect resources, monopolize trade, promote consumption and expand mining.

The historical lesson here is that a country based on resource revenue cannot bring about a welfare state. Wealth comes from nature, while development comes from the state. Resource-centric states cannot make money in other ways, while they're plenty good at spending it.

There is also clear class division in such countries. The ultra-wealthy cover 1-2 percent of the population, the so-called petromachos active in the oil and gas sector. Next come 4-5 percent in charge of security, budgeting and administration, plus the lawyers that keep all of them in business.

Their shared interest is not to create capital but to protect it from their enemies and the people. In other words, there is a privileged minority and then there's everyone else. While inequality is characteristic of other countries, it can only go so far in states that depend on their residents' work. But in a resource economy, inequality will keep growing indefinitely. If the state is not dependent on the people, the people depend on the state, which generates and distributes revenue from mineral deposits.

Instead of manufacturing, development happens in the security and bureaucracy apparatuses in charge of distributing material benefits. People get used to subsidies, while the parasitizing elite is convinced of its right to benefit at the expense of both nature and the people.

Let us close with a look at the big picture. In our century, political economics blends into socioeconomics, and people will have to radically change their behavior. To survive, countries will be competing in emissions reduction as opposed to growth of GDP.

The first generation not living better than the one before it is reaching middle age today, while the generations that follow will have to live in the conditions of a climate catastrophe. Society will no longer be isolated from nature or the economy from ecological consequences. Problems are always caused by the self-interest of some and the stupidity of others. They cause mankind to grow like a malignant tumor that works to exhaust and poison nature.

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