Module 2: Climate Change in History

Introduction

We've already discussed the growing consensus in the past 30 years that human actions are
changing the global climate. This is a relatively new idea. For centuries, humans have been
much more interested in the ways that climate affects, and even shapes or limits, human
societies.

This module focuses on environmental determinism, the idea that climate, and the physical
environment more generally, shapes human culture. We start with the history of
environmental determinism as a concept, and then consider some recent modifications to
this theory that have resulted in a much more nuanced understanding of the relationship
between natural environments and human culture. Then we look at a case study on the
Greenland Norse, and conclude by examining the more contemporary impact of climate
change on Inuit societies, which are on the front line (or far northern line) of
climate change.

Note: This module should take 1 week to complete.

You should start with the commentary for module 2. Once you finish the module
materials, proceed to the weekly readings and discussion forum. You will be directed to
online resources and activities from within the commentary.

Module Objectives

By the end of this module you will:

2.1 Have on understanding of environmental determinism and its limitations

2.2 Explain how culture has shaped past societies’ responses to climate change

2.3 Start considering ways that climate change has different effects in different regions and
among different social groups

Module Readings

 Brian Fagan, The Great Warming (Bloomsbury Press, 2008) , ix-xvii, 155-172.
 Franklyn Griffiths, “Camels in the Arctic? Climate Change as Inuit See It: ‘From the
Inside Out’,” (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. The Walrus,
November 2007: 46-61.
Module Activities

106 Wall:

1: Jared Diamond and the relevance of environment in shaping human history

2: What factors do you think led to the fall of the Greenland Norse

Module Discussion: Explore and discuss historical and more contemporary responses to a
changing climate.

Assignment Reminder: Your first essay assignment will be due in less than two weeks.
Please note, that the module commentary and weekly readings this week will be especially
important for this assignment.
 Part I: Environmental Determinism

2.2 Culture and the Environment

Introduction

It is commonplace among historians writing surveys to start with climate and physical
geography (mountains, rivers, etc.). Climate determines the rhythms of the seasons, the
amount of moisture and sun available for agriculture, and, ultimately, the natural resources on
which human societies depend. Though scientists and historians have long acknowledged
gradual changes in climate over the centuries, the assumption was that climate was
more or less constant over time and played a major role in determining the contours of
history.

But two developments have led historians to rethink this assumption, which is often
called environmental determinism.

First, the historical profession has been influenced by a broader intellectual shift, rooted in
the 1960s, known as the cultural turn. This shift has led to a much greater concern with
the ways that culture interacts with our material environments. Put simply, culture
determines how humans live within and make sense of particular environments. We
might call this “cultural determinism” to contrast it with explanations of human action that
stress material environments.

Second, there is a growing consensus among scientists and historians that humans now
have an unprecedented influence, intentional and unintentional, on the natural
environments in which they live. Now that we recognize this, we also have come to realize
that past societies too had a good deal of influence on their environments, even if much less
than we do today

This module will examine the history of environmental determinism in more depth, and
consider how culture has shaped past societies’ responses to climate change.

Where we are is who we are?

You are probably intuitively familiar with the idea of environmental (or geographical)
determinism. We know that cities have often thrived at the mouth of a river—that blueberries
grow well in the distinctive climate of the Fraser Valley and oranges in sunny Florida. Or
that Vancouver's urban sprawl can extend east, but is bounded by the mountains of the north
shore. But environmental determinism has a long and chequered history, among
philosophers, historians, and geographers.

One of the central contributions of Enlightenment thought was the idea that humans are
products of their environment. Though Enlightenment thinkers tended to focus on one's
moral and intellectual surroundings, some prominent Enlightenment thinkers, such as
Montesquieu, concluded that physical surroundings had an essential influence on humans and
their historical development.
Montesquieu believed that climate and physical geography shaped the character of
peoples. This idea subsequently had a profound influence on historians, and in the nineteenth
century, on the emerging discipline of geography.

2.3 Race, Nation, and the Environment

Environmental determinism has had a dark side as well, shading into a justification for
national and racial stereotypes. Montesquieu, arguably the father of environmental
determinism, believed that people in hot climates were also hot headed and short on logic,
while people in cold climates had icy personalities and less initiative. Naturally, temperate
climates like that in much of France were most conducive to clear thinking and good
governance.

Environmental determinism reached the height of its influence from the late nineteenth
century to the mid-twentieth century, when it was tied to imperialism, eugenics, and a
range of racist ideologies.

Montesquieu

"In cold countries they have very little sensibility for pleasure; in temperate countries, they
have more; in warm countries, their sensibility is exquisite..."

"Nature, having framed [Indians] of a texture so weak as to fill them with timidity, has
formed them at the same time of an imagination so lively that every object makes the
strongest impression upon them..."

Source: Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu, The Sprit of the Laws, Book XIV, 1752
(London: G. Bell & Sons, Ltd., 1914 edition) online
at http://www.constitution.org/cm/sol_14.htm (Links to an external site.)Links to an external
site..

The idea that climate shapes character became deeply embedded in the field of Geography.
One of the best known proponents of environmental determinism was Yale University
professor Ellsworth Huntington. His ideas were taken up by a number of people and
circulated most effectively in visual form. Look carefully at the Path of Supremacy graph
below. What are its assumptions and conclusions? It's from 1920, but are the ideas it contains
completely passé? Is there still a popular cultural belief in the link between climate an
"civilization" today?

And don't think Canada was immune: here is a 1947 quote from Griffith Taylor, a prominent
Canadian geographer:

"Most geographers adopt the general conclusions of Ellsworth Huntington that the annual
isotherm for 40 degrees Fahrenheit accompanies the best mental work. This runs through the
belt of close settlement which marks the southern border of Canada..."
--Griffith Taylor, Canada: A Study of Cool Continental Environments and Their Effect on
British and French Settlement (Mondon: Methuen, 1947).
 What do you think are some implications of stereotypes like these? How might these early
ideas about environmental determinism have influenced actions towards non-Europeans?

2.4 Backlash against Environmental Determinism

Since the cultural turn and the birth of environmentalism in the 1960s, there has been a
growing consensus among historians and the public at large that humans shape nature as
much as nature shapes us. Environmental determinism was increasingly seen as wrong-
headed, both because of its association with racism and for its seeming failure to account for
the destructive capacity of modern man.

Indeed, the word “environment” itself has changed meaning since the mid-twentieth
century. It used to be something that acted upon humans; now it is something humans act
upon…though the environment can also act upon humans in return.

Since the 1960s, the new discipline of environmental history has focused on man’s intent
and ability to change nature, often for the worse. Examples include studies of pollution,
water control projects, and in general, what might be called the human urge to “control
nature” in the modern era.

But environmental determinism has been making a comeback over the last decade.

2.5 Jared Diamond and Environmental

Determinism
Jared Diamond has played a major role in reviving environmental determinism through
his best-selling book, Guns, Germs, & Steel, first published in 1998.

Diamond is a scientist who teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he
does research in evolutionary biology, physiology, and geography. Most of his field work has
been in Papua New Guinea, where he studies the ecology and evolution of birds.

While he's established an impressive reputation in his fields of expertise, the world knows
him best for his two history books, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) and Collapse (2005).

Diamond’s fundamental question in Guns, Germs, and Steel is why some parts of the world,
namely Eurasia, came to dominate or even exterminate indigenous peoples in the Americas
and Africa. As he puts it:

“In the 13,000 years since the end of the last Ice Age, some parts of the world developed literate
industrial societies with metal tools, other parts developed only non-literate farming societies, and
still others retained societies of hunter-gathers with stone tools…Those historical inequalities have
cast long shadows on the modern world, because the literate societies with metal tools have
conquered or exterminated the other societies.” --Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, 13.

The title of the book provides Diamond’s initial explanations: Eurasians developed key
technologies, like guns and later the machines that allowed industrialization; and just as
important, Eurasians either did not face (or developed immunities to) certain diseases that
would devastate other peoples around the world.

But Diamond’s goal is to find the ultimate causes of these developments—this is the
historian’s instinct in him—not just to describe a phenomenon, but to explain why it
occurred. He summarizes his conclusions in a single sentence:

“History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’
environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.” (Guns, Germs,
and Steel, 25)

Central to Diamond’s agenda was to detach environmental determinism from racial or

biological explanations for economic and political dominance.

Diamond's most significant ultimate causes have to do with the spread of domesticated plants
and animals (agriculture). Though agriculture developed independently in several parts of
the globe, it spread most easily in parts of Europe and Asia.

Diamond argues that this was because of large geographical factors, namely the East-West,
as opposed to North-South orientation of the continents. East-West orientation meant that
there were large swaths of territory with similar climate, allowing food production
techniques to move more smoothly across lines of latitude. So domesticated plants and
animals of the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East spread most easily along relatively
similar climatic zones that spread across southern and central Europe.

But climate in central and southern Africa was dramatically different—not to mention cut off
by desserts—and thus not suitable for the middle eastern crops—so settled agriculture arrived
much later in these zones.

The story was similar in North America: domesticated species in Central America did not
easily spread into temperate regions farther north—both because they faced a natural dessert
barrier to their spread and because they were not well adapted to grow in more northerly
climates.

Diamond goes on to show how settled agriculture formed the foundation for increases in
population, the emergence of literacy and new technologies, the development of immunity
to certain diseases, and ultimately to politics and centralized states.

Critics of Diamond see his explanations as putting too much emphasis on environmental
causes—ignoring human ingenuity, cultural specificity, and just plain luck.

But Diamond doesn’t discount human agency, or so he claims. Instead, he considers these
things “proximate factors,” emerging within the context of large environmental structures,
like climate and landscape. So for the really big picture, we can call him an environmental
determinist. But, as he might say, what people do within their environments is up to them.

A few questions here are of particular relevance as we think about climate change:

o First, if Diamond is right that a society’s success or failure depends on environmental

circumstances, could climate change produce a new set of winners and losers,
 measured by economic and technological power? Or is this kind of analysis still
relevant in an industrial or post-industrial age, where humans have an
unprecedented ability to change or compensate for variations in natural
environments? In the developed world, we have air conditioning, central heating,
jet propulsion, instant communication, etc. To what extent are we constrained by
environmental factors, if at all?
o That leads to the second big question we might draw from Diamond: did humans in
the twentieth century fundamentally shift the balance between the influence of
environmental factors and human agency in history? Indeed, is it any longer
possible to separate the environment as a causative agent from human influence?

106 Wall Activity

What do you think Diamond's views and the role of the environment in shaping human
affairs? In your response, please keep in mind the set of questions listed above.

Click here to access blog wall: 106 Wall 2.1

Note: To participate in this activity, click on the blue title (106 Wall 2.1) and enter your CWL
information. Once you are in the 106 Wall activity page, click on the Reply button to post your
response(s).

These questions form the backdrop for our next topic, which will focus on how different
societies have adapted or failed to adapt to changes in climate in the past, and the
present. We’ll look more closely at the ways culture and society have interacted with natural
environments and environmental change.
 Part II: Case Study: The Greenland Norse

Our primary case takes us to a land that we already know of as fragile and highly susceptible
to variations in climate—Greenland, a 2.2-million-square-kilometre mass of ice, with a
very few green fjords that support most of the island's 57,000 inhabitants.

But we're not going to talk about the Greenland of today and its shrinking ice cover.

Instead, we're going to go back 1,000 years to the middle ages, when a group of exiled
Vikings led by Eric the Red found Greenland's fertile fjords a congenial place to settle. The
Viking settlements began around 982 CE, flourished for several centuries, and then came
to an apparently rapid and inglorious end in the 1400s.

2.7 Collapse
American geographer Jared Diamond takes up the case of the vanishing Vikings in his
2005 book, Collapse. In it, he examines several examples of societies that faced
environmental change and either collapsed or adapted and survived. Societal collapse, he
concludes, is not simply predestined by environmental circumstances. Rather, the fate of
human societies depends on how they relate to their environment and how they react to
environmental change.

How they react depends on several factors, including what we might call culture. Diamond
synthesized a great deal of archeological, scientific, and historical research on the Viking
settlements, so we’ll draw on him for much of the account that follows.

2.8 The Little Ice Age

The Little Ice Age had a profound impact on northern and western Europe, above all on
agriculture. It shortened the growing season in lots of places; at its coldest, the season in
England was reduced by one or two months.

In many places, cooling was accompanied by more precipitation. The wetter climate made
crops more susceptible to disease. Wheat developed a fungus called ergot. When people
ingested a certain quantity of ergot, they had hallucinations, a disease known at the time as St
Anthony’s Fire.

In general, the Little Ice Age affected vegetation across Europe and North America. In Part I,
we saw how global warming is shifting the boundaries of the earth’s biomes. The same
thing happened during the Little Ice Age.

For example, composition of European forests changed. Beech trees, which predominated
during the Medieval Warm Period, gave way to oak, and then pine. Forests also grew more
slowly in the cold, with wood becoming denser.
Among other things, the lower temperatures meant decreased crop yields. People had less
food to eat and therefore it became more expensive. The Little Ice Age was a time of poor
nutrition and even outright famine in some cases. We can see the result in skeletal remains.
At beginning of the Greenland colony, the average Norse person was 5’ 7” tall, but by its end
the people we know as Vikings averaged less than 5’. Malnutrition also made people more
susceptible to disease.

The colder weather affected the economy. Agriculture suffered, as did fisheries. Cod in
Scottish waters migrated to warmer waters further south; and on the Faeroe Islands, the cod
fishery failed completely over a 30-year period from 1675 to 1704.

The economic impacts were not all bad: English fishermen benefited from the southern
migration of the herring from Norway; and in Norway the Little Ice Age gave rise to a whole
new industry. As farming became less viable, Norwegians turned their energies to ship
building and soon built up a lucrative merchant shipping trade.

There is no consensus on the causes of either the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice
Age. Some theories include changes in energy output of the sun and levels of volcanic
activity. Though human activities such as agriculture and forestry could affect climate
locally, it seems unlikely that anthropogenic factors had anything to do with either the
Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age.

Even so, humans very much had to reckon with changes in climate.

2.9 Rise of the Greenland Norse

It's very likely that the warming of the ninth and tenth centuries opened up the possibility
of Viking settlement in Greenland. When Eric the Red arrived in the 980s, many fjords of
southwestern Greenland were free of ice; although temperatures were chilly, the land held
the possibility of supporting livestock.

Two major settlements followed, reaching populations of 1,000 and 4,000 respectively. In
other words, these became thriving Norse-speaking colonies. The Norse Greenlanders
imported cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, and horses in an attempt to reproduce the agricultural
system of meat and dairy farming that had worked in Norway and Iceland.

Pigs didn't thrive in Greenland, but the Vikings were able to maintain their cattle by grazing
them during the short summers and giving them hay and seaweed over the long winters.
Cattle became a primary food source, above all from their dairy production, and sometimes
as meat. Goats did even better due to their ability to forage through snow. Vikings did not
like to eat their meat, but goat milk and cheese became staples.

In order for this precarious system to survive, the Norse had to harvest an enormous amount
of hay and be very careful where and how long they grazed the hayfields in the summer.
Despite the challenges, overall they adapted well to their environment.

Unlike in Norway or Iceland, Greenland's climate proved inhospitable to almost all food
crops. To make up for this, the Greenland Norse hunted caribou and seals, which were
abundant during the first few centuries after the Vikings' arrival. Caribou came down from
the mountains in the fall, during which time the Vikings sent out hunting parties to stock up
on meat for the winter. The seals were hunted when they came up onto outer coast beaches to
mate in the spring. This was fortunate timing, because the Norse often ran out of caribou
meat by then.

According to some remarkable research on the bones from Viking remains, we know that
early Viking settlers had a diet of around 20% seal and 80% other things, including caribou,
beef, and dairy. By the fourteenth century, this ratio was reversed, with 80% of their
sustenance coming from seals. This suggests that something went wrong with Viking
livestock and dairy production—a crisis that we'll come to in a moment.

Remarkably, in spite of the apparent abundance of fish like cod and char, the Greenland
Norse did not eat fish. No one is quite sure why since Inuit settlements elsewhere in
Greenland consumed large amounts of fish.

Jared Diamond's theory is that the Vikings developed a taboo against fish eating. While this
might seem far-fetched, think of all the taboos Euro-Americans have surrounding certain
meats, like horse, dog, or beetles. In other words, like us, the Vikings could well have
developed a cultural aversion to certain foods. We may never know if or why this happened,
but as Diamond suggests, it could have resulted from something as simple as Eric the Red
getting food poisoning from eating fish.

And this brings us to the question of culture. Although culture is one of those words that has
a wide range of meanings. Let's try to define it.

Defining Culture
Please provide a short response to the question. Your response will not be graded, but will
hopefully be useful in helping you prepare for Assignment # 1.

2.10 The Culture of the Greenland Norse

For our purposes, culture is a system of symbols and practices that define a community. It
includes patterns of governance, consumption, and social relations. Culture has a unifying
function: as a shared set of symbols and practices, it helps to create a sense of common
purpose, but it also defines boundaries of communities.

Let's look concretely at the culture of the Greenland Norse.

Socially, it was a community that by necessity stressed cooperation and conformity.

Without cooperation on individual farms and between villages, the settlements would fail.
Different villages had different natural advantages and disadvantages, for example proximity
to caribou or seal. An intricately arranged system of supply and trade was necessary to
keep people from starving. Therefore, there was nowhere for non-conformists to go. If
they went off on their own, they would die.
The Viking settlements were also highly stratified. There were wealthy chieftains with
diets high in beef and poorer hay farmers who ate mostly seal. And after the arrival of
Christianity around 1000 CE, the Christian Church and its representatives had very high
status. Many resources went into maintaining a bishop and several stone churches. To
finance the import of ceremonial objects, the Greenlanders devoted a good deal of effort to
hunting walrus and polar bears, whose tusks and hides were primarily for export to Europe.

The Greenland Norse dressed according to European fashions. This is an example of

culture being totally extraneous to environmental factors. Greenland's climatic conditions
would suggest the wearing of hides, not linen.

The Greenland Norse were quite conservative, meaning that they held tightly to their
economic, social, and political traditions. This makes sense given how precarious and finely
tuned their existence was in Greenland—we can guess that they learned a particular set of
practices from their early adaptation to the Greenland environment. Since these practices
worked for hundreds of years, the Greenland Norse likely did not account for changes.

On the whole, it seems that the Vikings had successfully adapted to the difficult climate of
Greenland. So why is it that their settlements failed in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, after 400 years of existence? What changed?

2.11 The Fall of the Greenland Norse

Jared Diamond identifies three major long-term changes that threatened the survival of the
Greenland Norse.

 First was a large-scale change in the environment: the onset in the fourteenth century of
the Little Ice Age. In other words, climate change. Average temperatures in the North
Atlantic began to drop in the 1300s, leading to a shorter hay growing season and an increase
in sea ice around southwest Greenland. This made trade with Europe more difficult,
partially cutting off the Greenland Norse from their supplies of iron and timber. It also
made seal hunting more difficult. Although climate change was gradual and its effects
compounded slowly, it made life for the Vikings much harder.

 The second environmental change was a more localized, caused by the Norse themselves.
The Vikings used up most of the trees in the Greenland fjords. Many of their customs and
their diet required fire. At first, they used wood. When the wood ran out, they had to use
turf, which cut back the amount of land available to graze their cattle and grow hay. Tree
and turf removal also led over time to soil erosion, further threatening grass and hay
supplies; soil regenerates very slowly in Greenland. Finally, the shortage of fuel sharply
reduced their ability to make iron tools and weapons.

 The third major change and challenge for the Vikings was the arrival of Inuit in northwest
Greenland around 1200 CE. Having survived in the far north for thousands of years, the
Inuit were very well adapted to the climate and resources of Arctic regions. In the winter,
the Inuit lived in igloos made of ice, rather than trying to use scarce wood or sod. For heat
and fire, they burned whale and seal blubber. For travel and ocean hunting, they made
kayaks of sealskins rather than wooden rowboats. Over the centuries, the Inuit had
developed ingenious methods of hunting seals, whales, sea birds, and fish.
What did the Inuit have to do with the decline of the Norse colonies? There are a very few
records of violence between the two groups. The latest one, from 1379, notes that Inuit killed
18 Norse either in or near their settlements. This suggests that the Inuit had a substantial
advantage in weaponry, probably because the Norse had little iron left.

There is no evidence that the Vikings traded with or in any way learned anything from the
more successful Inuit. The Norse did not try to make kayaks, they didn't trade with the Inuit
for winter seals, and they didn't try to eat fish like the Inuit did. This in spite of the fact that
the Norse were starving. This seems to have been a significant fall of the Greenland Norse.

Overall, it appears that the persistence of core Norse cultural values and habits prevented
them from adapting.

The Vikings did relatively well in Greenland for 400 years by sticking to their European
social and cultural system. This system allowed them to maintain the semblance of a
European lifestyle within a Christian framework and through a modified Nordic diet.

When environmental conditions changed, the Norse could not fathom fundamentally
changing the system that had worked for them. They were Christian dairy farmers, and
that was that. The Norse considered the Inuit to be heathens and apparently would not
trade with them or learn hunting methods from them.

In the end, the Norse starved to death. Archeological evidence suggests that they gradually
ran out of cattle, which they ate when their seal hunts failed. Then they ate their
dogs. Though most Europeans had taboos against eating dogs, apparently the last of the
Greenland Vikings were more willing to eat dog than fish.

106 Wall Activity

Why do you think the Norse failed to adapt to changes in their environment and
climate? Why did they fail to adopt any of the Inuit techniques for getting so much out
of the un-forgiving arctic environment?

Click here to access blog wall: 106 Wall 2.2

Note: To participate in this activity, click on the blue title (106 Wall 2.2) and enter your CWL
information. Once you are in the 106 Wall activity page, click on the Reply button to post your
response(s).
2.12 Adapting in North America
Before we come to some conclusions about the Greenland Norse, we’ll look at some
evidence of how the Little Ice Age affected North America. In general, the Little Ice Age
saw not only cooler average temperatures, but also a wider-than-average variability in
weather.

A University of Alberta historian, Liza Piper, has researched the local effects of these
climate swings in New Brunswick in the early nineteenth century.

Local farmers noted earlier frosts and shorter growing seasons for much of the first two
decades of the 1800s. After a decade of severe weather, 1816 proved to be the worst of all
and was known as the “year without summer.” This intensely cool year was the result of an
ash plume from the Indonesian volcano Mount Tambora, which erupted in 1815. In many
parts of New Brunswick and New England, as well as much of Europe, crops failed entirely
that year.

This proved a final warning to many farmers that they needed to shift their production to
more cold-resistant crops and animals. Responding to a decline in hay growth, farmers began
shifting from cows and dairy to sheep and wool production. And many farmers began to
spend more time harvesting timber than food crops, beginning a gradual shift in the
agricultural economy of northeast North America from food crops to timber. This period of
crop failures also led to more migration, both from Europe to North America and from the
northeast of North America to the fertile lands of the Great Plains.

We don’t have the space to go into more detail here, but there are a few conclusions relevant
to our discussion of climate change:

 First, here is a case where short-term changes in climate contributed to a major shift in
agricultural production—an example of adaptation to changes in the environment.
 Second, we have evidence here of climate-induced migration—perhaps a hint of things to
come in areas most affected by current climate change.
 Third, short-term climate variability can disrupt markets and economic habits quite
quickly. In other words, it’s not just climate change that may cause economic dislocation
in the future—rather a period of erratic weather caused by climate change could be the
most disruptive.