ABSTRACT
During the period from 12,000 to 200 BP, the world, including its human economies, was largely solar powered. As always, the natural ecosystems fixed the radiant energy of the sun and cascaded it through a series of organisms. Some of these organisms ate plants, others animals, some subsisted on dead organic material; a few might utilize all of these, like the chimpanzee. The systems modified by humans for their purposes were also solar powered: no matter how the flows of energy and matter were diverted in the creation of nearnatural, seminatural or cultural ecosystems, the incidence of solar energy was the limiting factor. Such confines were only broken when all these systems could be subsidized by an extra flow of energy which came from the fossil hydrocarbons (in effect stores of photosynthesis from earlier geological eras), which is the ecological basis of the Industrial Revolution irreversibly launched and well into the fairway by AD 1800 (Sieferle 1990).
