Little Ice Age Lessons: Resilience and Adaptation in Past Climate Changes
The speed and scale of anthropogenic climate change promises to be unprecedented in the history of human civilization. Yet in the past two millennia, Earth’s climate has repeatedly changed by roughly one degree Celsius. In the sixth century CE, catastrophic volcanic eruptions and perhaps a comet impact shrouded much of the Earth in a veil of sunlight-scattering aerosols, sharply average summer temperatures across the northern hemisphere. In the fourteenth century, major volcanic eruptions coincided with a gradual drop in solar radiation, this time lowering global temperatures. A similar but longer-lasting confluence of plunging solar radiation and volcanic eruptions cooled the planet from the late sixteenth through the early eighteenth centuries. In each episode of global cooling, agricultural yields and animal ranges changed more quickly than farmers or hunters could accommodate. Sprawling empires and small hunter-gatherer communities suffered alike, and some ceased to exist. Yet there were societies and communities that thrived amid each climatic crisis.
In this project, I lead a team of historians, archaeologists, and paleoclimatologists investigate the reasons for the unlikely success of these societies.
First, we are discovering how global climate changes manifested at the regional and local levels that mattered for people in these societies. Second, we are exploring the diverse ways in which each society adapted to, and even exploited, climate changes to create wealth, wage war, and make culture. Our work is revealing that people - past, present, or future - are far more than helpless victims in the face of climate change, which is how they are often depicted in environmental literature.
We hope that our completed project will yield complicated histories of societal flexibility to past climate change: histories that may provide essential and timely lessons from the deep past for our own time.
In this project, I lead a team of historians, archaeologists, and paleoclimatologists investigate the reasons for the unlikely success of these societies.
First, we are discovering how global climate changes manifested at the regional and local levels that mattered for people in these societies. Second, we are exploring the diverse ways in which each society adapted to, and even exploited, climate changes to create wealth, wage war, and make culture. Our work is revealing that people - past, present, or future - are far more than helpless victims in the face of climate change, which is how they are often depicted in environmental literature.
We hope that our completed project will yield complicated histories of societal flexibility to past climate change: histories that may provide essential and timely lessons from the deep past for our own time.
Counterintuitive Consequences of Climate Change in the Early Modern Arctic
This research effort uncovers relationships between abrupt climate change and conflict across the seventeenth-century Arctic. In that century, periods of abrupt climatic cooling paradoxically coincided with the dramatic expansion of European exploration, whaling, and fur trading across the Arctic. To begin to explain these relationships, I published three articles that consider how the occasionally counterintuitive local consequences of regional climatic trends led Europeans to uncover new Arctic environments, and encouraged them to think about the far north in different ways.
Researching these articles led me to develop two new articles that each provide different perspectives on relationships between climatic shocks and conflict in the seventeenth-century “Greenland Fishery,” the Arctic whaling industry that centered on the Svalbard archipelago and Jan Mayen Island. The first of these articles reveals that complex relationships between the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and cryosphere around Svalbard and Jan Mayen Island brought sea ice surging into bays that whalers normally used to hunt their prey. When ice kept whalers from using their accustomed bays, whalers from rival countries and companies usually cooperated rather than fought. It was typically only in anomalous warm years during the Little Ice Age that whalers chose to fight with one another in ice-free bays. The second article expands this analysis to consider how the threat of violence and piracy in the Arctic exposed whalers to some of the most dangerous weather of the Little Ice Age. It then reveals that a profound shift in both bowhead whale “culture” and the Arctic climate led whalers to adapt in ways that increasingly brought them into the orbit of European naval wars.
Scholarship that connects preindustrial climate changes to conflict has largely focused on the ways in which cold spells or droughts provoked conflict by ruining harvests. My new articles reveal that local weather events that defy climatic trends could provoke violence as surely as those trends themselves. They also show that climatic cooling could in fact reduce the likelihood of hostilities between agents of early modern companies, and that animal behaviors and perhaps “cultures” could mediate relationships between climate change and conflict. They confirm that the mere threat of violence could increase the vulnerability of mariners to the most challenging weather of the Little Ice Age, and that the local manifestations of climatic trends could powerfully influence the conduct – not just the origins – of violence.
Researching these articles led me to develop two new articles that each provide different perspectives on relationships between climatic shocks and conflict in the seventeenth-century “Greenland Fishery,” the Arctic whaling industry that centered on the Svalbard archipelago and Jan Mayen Island. The first of these articles reveals that complex relationships between the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and cryosphere around Svalbard and Jan Mayen Island brought sea ice surging into bays that whalers normally used to hunt their prey. When ice kept whalers from using their accustomed bays, whalers from rival countries and companies usually cooperated rather than fought. It was typically only in anomalous warm years during the Little Ice Age that whalers chose to fight with one another in ice-free bays. The second article expands this analysis to consider how the threat of violence and piracy in the Arctic exposed whalers to some of the most dangerous weather of the Little Ice Age. It then reveals that a profound shift in both bowhead whale “culture” and the Arctic climate led whalers to adapt in ways that increasingly brought them into the orbit of European naval wars.
Scholarship that connects preindustrial climate changes to conflict has largely focused on the ways in which cold spells or droughts provoked conflict by ruining harvests. My new articles reveal that local weather events that defy climatic trends could provoke violence as surely as those trends themselves. They also show that climatic cooling could in fact reduce the likelihood of hostilities between agents of early modern companies, and that animal behaviors and perhaps “cultures” could mediate relationships between climate change and conflict. They confirm that the mere threat of violence could increase the vulnerability of mariners to the most challenging weather of the Little Ice Age, and that the local manifestations of climatic trends could powerfully influence the conduct – not just the origins – of violence.
Human and Animal Cultures of the Arctic (HACA)
As industrial and military activity intensifies in today’s warming Arctic, traditional relationships between animals and people are changing profoundly. In the Human and Animal Cultures of the Arctic (HACA) project, principal investigators Bathsheba Demuth, George Hambrecht, and myself create a transdisciplinary team of scholars to unearth the deep context for these changes.
Our intent is to explore how human and animal cultures have co-evolved across the Arctic over the past millennium. Cutting-edge scholarship in both the natural and social sciences is expanding the number of species that display key attributes of culture beyond the human, finding evidence of learned abilities passed between generations in a growing number of animal species. HACA draws on this work to investigate key Arctic species - canids, cetaceans, polar bears, cervids - for evidence of changing animal cultural behaviors in Beringia and the European North Atlantic.
It begins by synthesizing and, where necessary, contributes to recent, high-resolution reconstructions of the Arctic environment, which have revealed that animals in the region have long responded to profound natural and anthropogenic environmental changes. It continues with a biogeographical survey that uses textual and archaeological methods and sources to detect shifting patterns of movement and behavior that suggest the presence of changing animal cultures over the past millennium. It prioritizes patterns according to the amount and quality of available data, and then investigates them further using intensive analyses by historical, archaeological, biological and environmental science specialists.
By combining historical, paleoclimatological, ecological, and archaeological sources and methods, HACA explores how human and animal cultures have been mutually constitutive within the dynamic environment of the Arctic.
Our intent is to explore how human and animal cultures have co-evolved across the Arctic over the past millennium. Cutting-edge scholarship in both the natural and social sciences is expanding the number of species that display key attributes of culture beyond the human, finding evidence of learned abilities passed between generations in a growing number of animal species. HACA draws on this work to investigate key Arctic species - canids, cetaceans, polar bears, cervids - for evidence of changing animal cultural behaviors in Beringia and the European North Atlantic.
It begins by synthesizing and, where necessary, contributes to recent, high-resolution reconstructions of the Arctic environment, which have revealed that animals in the region have long responded to profound natural and anthropogenic environmental changes. It continues with a biogeographical survey that uses textual and archaeological methods and sources to detect shifting patterns of movement and behavior that suggest the presence of changing animal cultures over the past millennium. It prioritizes patterns according to the amount and quality of available data, and then investigates them further using intensive analyses by historical, archaeological, biological and environmental science specialists.
By combining historical, paleoclimatological, ecological, and archaeological sources and methods, HACA explores how human and animal cultures have been mutually constitutive within the dynamic environment of the Arctic.