Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.
Posted on 06/10/2006 6:43:49 PM PDT by RWR8189
Caltech—Our ancestors made themselves and us more vulnerable to the vagaries of nature and the weather once they switched from hunting and gathering to farming. So says Brian Fagan, emeritus professor of anthropology from University of California at Santa Barbara, who spoke on the impact of climate change on ancient societies at the Environmental Wars conference of the Skeptics Society last weekend. Fagan's chief claim is that Farming in this case stands for the advent of more complex and interconnected societies. Fagan argues that nimble hunter/gatherers could respond to environmental changes faster than farmers and urbanites who are tied to their land and their cities.
Fagan began his talk by describing his sojourn as a young man in a village of subsistence farmers in the Zambezi Valley in Africa. These farmers lived on the edge. In September and October, the farmers cleared and burnt the land in preparation for planting. Once the land was ready, they waited for the rain and when it came they hurried to plant their crops. The year Fagan lived in that village, the rain failed after the crops were planted and the village granaries emptied and the villagers suffered starvation. He noted in passing that he did not have any trouble getting food. "I have never forgotten what I learned about vulnerability," declared Fagan.
Fagan posits that human societies increased their vulnerability to natural catastrophes over the past 10,000 years (evidently more fully described in his book, The Long Summer: How climate changed civilization). Thus, climate change is responsible for humanity's shift to farming. Farming, according to Fagan, began in the Fertile Crescent after temperatures plunged during a global cold snap known as the Younger Dryas period. People living off abundant forests of pistachio nut trees and other plant foods had actually settled into permanent villages. As temperatures fell, the forest began to disappear and Neolithic people could no longer depend on its bounty. But instead of moving on, people in the area began the deliberate cultivation of wild plants; in other words, they became farmers. Fagan argues that farming led to "radically enhanced vulnerability," even though the new economy "spread like wildfire" and dominated the region by 8000 BC.
Fagan turns next to ancient Egypt where the Pharaonic system was established on the basis of abundant grain harvests. The Pharaohs claimed authority based on their ability to intercede with the gods to supply the annual Nile River floods that nourished Egypt's bountiful grain fields. Fagan notes that a good flood was a mere nine feet. However, a 60 year period of gradual drying began around 2180 BC as an El Nino drought struck the Ethiopian headwaters of the Nile. In fact the river became so dry that people could walk across it. In the face of these grain shortages, Egypt fell apart and local warlords seized control. It took 100 years for Egypt to reunify and later Pharaohs massively invested in irrigation and grain storage in order to avoid the fate of their improvident predecessors.
Fagan then considers the rise and fall of the Moche on the north coast of Peru between 200 and 600 AD. Northern Peru is one of the driest areas on earth, but the Moche thrived by settling in river valleys that laced the region. These irrigation societies were headed by a caste of warrior priests who were treated by their people as infallible gods, according to Fagan. However, around 600 AD a major earthquake wiped out the Moche's irrigation systems. After the earthquake an intense El Nino drought finished off the Moche, and the culture's rigid, inflexible leaders were overthrown.
Fagan's final dolorous example of human vulnerability to climatic events is Europe in the year 1315. Medieval life was set by the passage of seasons and never seemed to change. Ninety percent of Europeans lived from one harvest to the next. The only noises heard in this bucolic world were those made by the wind, birds, and church bells. Then one day it started to rain and rain and rain. The fields turned to mud and marginal soils washed away. By Christmas people were hungry. The stormy period lasted for seven years and by 1321 one and half million Europeans had died of starvation.
Fagan argues that modern human societies are as vulnerable as the earlier ones. But is that so? Let's go back to his account of the invention of agriculture. What happened is that our ancestors exchanged one set of vulnerabilities for another when they switched from gathering wild nuts and berries to farming.
Of course, there are always tradeoffs. Some archaeologists argue that early farmers were in general less healthy than their hunter/gatherer ancestors resulting lower life expectancies. They claim that farmers suffered more epidemic diseases from living in close quarters with others and that their limited grain-based diets fostered malnutrition. However, these claims are disputed, and in any case, even if ancient farmers experienced lower life expectancies than hunter/gatherers, they must have also experienced higher fertility rates because human populations began to grow after the invention of agriculture.
Farming produced storable food surpluses that freed some portion of the population from having to spend every day all day scrounging for their subsistence. True, many of these people wasted a lot of effort on religious mumbo jumbo, but some spent their time inventing pottery, writing, weaving, metal working and so forth. Rather than increasing vulnerability these new arts and technologies helped make people more resilient rather than more vulnerable. On balance, the switch made humanity less vulnerable to the vagaries of nature. Farming increased the security of food supplies, and allowed the creation of larger scale societies in which people could trade surpluses. Dynasties and even cultures pass into history, but farmers and farming remain.
As evidence of our increased modern vulnerability to nature's whims, Fagan cites the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Katrina proves many things—among them, don't trust governments to build levees or organize effective emergency responses—but does it demonstrat increased overall vulnerability? Hardly. Katrina killed more than 1,800 people (there are hundreds more still missing), destroyed billions of dollars of property, and disrupted energy supplies, yet the American economy shrugged off the blow and continued to expand. Our elaborate globe-spanning networks of energy supplies, computers and trade actually buffer us against the effects of natural disasters.
Look back at Fagan's experience living in a village in the Zambezi Valley, where the anthropologist actually missed the lesson he should have learned. Recall that Fagan said that he never lacked for food. Didn't he ask himself: Why are the villagers starving while I'm not? Unlike the Zambezi villagers, Fagan had access to the outside modern world that could supply him Nestle chocolate, canned Spam, rolled oatmeal, powdered milk and whatever else he needed. He was less vulnerable to starvation because he did not depend on the rains falling at a specific time in a specific place.
The good news is that when the rains fail in southern Africa today, the villagers have greater access food and other supplies from across the globe—much as Fagan had five decades ago. For example, four years ago, when famine threatened (due to drought and unbelievably stupid government policies) grain was rushed to Zambia and Zimbabwe and starvation mostly averted. It is very unlikely that droughts or floods will devastate every agricultural region across the globe all at once. Mother Nature can still be a bitch, but Fagan is simply wrong when he claims that modern societies are more and more vulnerable to her caprices. Our interconnected and globalized world provides more and more of humanity with radically enhanced security rather than increased vulnerability. Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.
I think urban civilization is very fragile. Take away the food in a city like LA for a week and it becomes a Snake Pliskin movie in a hurry.
ping
... civilization is a flimsy cloak, and just outside are hunger, thirst, and cold... waiting. Louis L'Amour
In order for nimble hunter/gatherers to survive climate change, most must die off periodically to maintain the balance. Farming prevented this kill off. We can return to be hunter/gatherers if we will accept high infant mortality, short life spans, and the loss of ten thousand years of accumulated knowledge.
An upcoming show with Sigourney Weaver returning to Africa to visit the Gorillas in the Mists should tell us alot about our curioisty.
And the deaths of about 5 billion+ people. Not a happy thought.
the only survivors in a hunter-gatherer culture were successful conservatives....(Ann Coulter,Ted Nugent types),
then the farming culture produced a need for sharing, spawning the fragile communist mindset of the leftist liberals....(Cindy Sheehan/Al Gore types)
so do the math .....which set of culture types is more likely to survive harsh circumstances
The most apparent contradiction is that if Fagan were correct, most human societies today would still be hunter-gatherer. But they are not.
The point the author doesn't notice is that 'hunter-gatherer' and 'farming' refers to societies, not individuals: a subsistence farmer in drought conditions may be more vulnerable than a given member of a hunter-gatherer society to drought, since the latter can just move without abandoning an expensive investment in cleared land, irrigation works, and livestock. But those investments mean the farming society recovers more quickly and (above all) is more powerful when fighting hunter-gatherers who can simply be swamped by greater numbers.
Frankly, nonsense.
Modern civilization is a robust and complex interconnected system with a wide variety of redundant and fault tolerant paths. When a natural disaster strikes, other regions can transport help, markets send price signals about scarcity and need.
We can use technologies that past societies would consider precognition to be able to predict the paths of storms, the onset of flooding, to watch lightning and tornados. We can predict and prepare and we have economic systems that insulate individuals, groups, and the rest of society from risks that become issues.
Billions of minds can collaborate, even without contact, solving problems like the development of vaccines, creation of chemicals to produce sanitation, development of light and strong materials to create structures that are resistant to heat, cold, shock and many other dangers.
We have withstood plagues, natural disasters and wars that would have been so massive as to be incomprehensible to past civilizations. Where the death of a key crop might have destroyed a more limited civilization, we simply substitute.
People like the author are afraid of interdependencies, but interdepedencies are what makes our civilization resilient. Imagine living in a small group of hundreds - what could you accomplish, how many problems could you solve? One thing is for sure - not even close to those we can solve in our exciting, complex, turbuklent society.
To hell with the doomsaers!
Sorry, not the author, but the article the author was citing was nonsense.
(sigh)
"In order for nimble hunter/gatherers to survive climate change, most must die off periodically to maintain the balance. Farming prevented this kill off. We can return to be hunter/gatherers if we will accept high infant mortality, short life spans, and the loss of ten thousand years of accumulated knowledge."
True. Along the same lines. We have these great immune systems. Where did they come from? From natural selection, which is to say, massive and continual death. What effect do you think modern medicine is having on our immune systems? They will quickly atrophy, like any system not needed.
I am a UCSB grad and have had to put up with Fagan and his ilk for a long time. Bollocks! Diversity and redundancy of sources (food, water, etc.) make the modern world robust, not fragile.
I would point out that hunters/gatherers are much more dependent on weather than farmers. Hunters/gathers do not have the ability to store food against tomorrow. Farmers do it all the time. That food storage makes farming superior.
Consider a city in a third world hell hole. One rotten local government guy, and the city would be destroyed. Look at Zimbabwe, as a particular example.
How many disasters would have to occur to have a city in the US fall to that level. Even New Orleans, after a disasterously corrupt state government for over 50 years, after a disasterously corrupt city government for 50 years, even when it is 30 feet below sea level, and then taking a hurricane:
New Orleans is still there!
US cities are like government programs: they hardly ever die.
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
Don't forget modern firearms which encourage even those without ethics to at least act like they have them.
"Blunderbuss: A short weapon with a wide mouth or bell, capable of discharging multiple balls or slugs, now superceded in civilized countries by more advanced weaponry.:
Oxford English Dictionary, 1932.
WE'RE DOOMED!
Just finished reading "Collapse" by Jared Diamond...I find this type of history fascinating...thanks for the post.
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