Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight : Waking up to Personal and Global Transformation

A call to consciousness combining spirituality and ecology that offers hope for the future. As the world's population explodes, cultures and species are wiped out, and we have now reached the halfway point of our supplies of oil, humans the world over are confronting difficult choices about how to create a future that works. Thom Hartmann proposes that the only lasting solution to the crises we face is to re-learn the lessons our ancient ancestors knew -- those which allowed them to live sustainably for hundreds of thousands of years -- but which we've forgotten. Hartmann shows how to find this new yet ancient way of seeing the world and the life on and in it, allowing us to touch that place where the survival of humanity may be found.

THOM HARTMANN is an award-winning author, international lecturer, teacher, and psychotherapist. His books have been written about in <i>Time</i> magazine, he has been on the front page of the <i>Wall Street Journal</i>, and he has been a guest on numerous radio and TV shows, including NPR's "All Things Considered," CNN, and BBC. A former journalist, editor, and occasional woodsplitter, he lives in Vermont with his wife, Louise.

We're Running Out
of Ancient Sunlight
Where our energy came from,
how we're "living beyond our means,"
and what will happen to our
children when we run out
It all starts with sunlight.


Sunlight pours energy on the earth, and the energy gets converted from one form to another, in an endless cycle of life, death, and renewal. Some of the sunlight got stored underground, which has provided us with a tremendous "savings account" of energy on which we can draw. Our civilization has developed a vast thirst for this energy, as we've built billions and billions of machines large and small that all depend on fuel and electricity.
But our savings are running low, which will most likely make for some very hard times.

In Part I of The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight we'll lay out the scope of the situation as a foundation for planning our response. Topics in Part I include:
The history of sunlight in the human story
How can things look okay yet be so bad?

The importance of trees--their three vital roles in a renewable environment, and some alarming statistics on what's happening as we cut them down
The accelerating rate of species extinctions as we alter the world and its climate

Let's start at the beginning, with the fuel source that gave life to this planet millions of years ago: Sunlight
We're Made
Out of Sunlight
The Sun, the hearth of affection and life, pours burning love on the delighted earth.
--Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891)

In a very real sense, we're all made out of sunlight.

Sunlight radiating heat, visible light, and ultraviolet light is the source of virtually all life on Earth. Everything you see alive around you is there because a plant somewhere was able to capture sunlight and store it.

All animals live from these plants, whether directly (as with herbivores) or indirectly (as with carnivores, which eat the herbivores). This is true of mammals, insects, birds, amphibians, reptiles, bacteria...everything living. Every life form on the surface of this planet is here because a plant was able to gather sunlight and store it, and something else was able to eat that plant and take that sunlight-energy into power its body.*
In this way, the abundance or lack of abundance of our human food supply was, until the past few hundred years, largely determined by how much sunlight hit the ground. And for all non-human life forms on the planet, this is still the case--you can see that many of the areas around the equator that are bathed in sunlight are filled with plant and animal life, whereas in the relatively sun-starved polar regions there are far fewer living creatures and less diversity among them.

The plant kingdom's method of sunlight storage is quite straightforward. Our atmosphere has billions of tons of carbon in it, most in the form of the gas carbon dioxide, or CO2. Plants "inhale" this CO2, and use the energy of sunlight to drive a chemical reaction in their leaves called photosynthesis, which breaks the two atoms of oxygen free from the carbon, producing free carbon (C) and oxygen (O2). The carbon is then used by the plant to manufacture carbohydrates like cellulose and virtually all other plant matter--roots, stems, leaves, fruits, and nuts--and the oxygen is "exhaled" as a waste gas by the plant.

Many people I've met believe that plants are made up of soil--that the tree outside your house, for example, is mostly made from the soil in which it grew. That's a common mistake, however--that tree is mostly made up of one of the gasses in our air (carbon dioxide) and water (hydrogen and oxygen). Trees are solidified air and sunlight!

Plant leaves capture sunlight and use that energy to extract carbon as carbon dioxide from the air, combine it with oxygen and hydrogen from water, to form sugars and other complex carbohydrates (carbohydrates are also made of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen) such as the cellulose which makes up most of the roots, leaves, and trunk.

When you burn wood, the "sunlight energy" is released in the form of light and heat (from the fire). Most of the carbon in the wood reverses the photosynthesis.

The small pile of ash you're left with is all the miner als the huge tree had taken from the soil. Everything else was gas from the air: carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen.

Animals, including humans, cannot create tissues directly from sunlight, water, and air, as plants can. Thus the human population of the planet from the beginning of our history was limited by the amount of readily available plant food (and animals-that-eat-plants food). Because of this, from the dawn of humanity (estimated at 200,000 years ago) until about 40,000 years ago, the entire world probably never held more than about five million human inhabitants. That's fewer people worldwide than Detroit has today.

I suspect the reason for this low global census is that people in that time ate only wild-growing food. If sunlight fell on 100 acres of wildlands producing enough food to feed ten people--through edible fruits, vegetables, seeds, and wild animals which ate the plants--then the population density of that forest would stabilize at that level. Studies of all kinds of animal populations show that mammals--including humans--become less fertile, and death rates increase when there is not enough food to sustain a local population. This is nature's population control system for every animal species: population is limited to what the local plant/food supply can feed.

Similarly, people's clothing and shelter back then were made out of plants and animal skins which themselves came to life because of "current sunlight," the sunlight which fell on the ground over the few years of their lives. We used the skins of animals and trees (things that had consumed sunlight in recent years) to construct clothing and housing. All these are made from relatively current sunlight.


From the Hardcover edition.

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Excerpted from The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: Waking up to Personal and Global Transformation by Thom Hartmann
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