3 ms·

I think you might be conflating the current issue of anthropogenic climate change with the historic fact that many different cultures' success or failure has be

by ktizo 14y ago

I think you might be conflating the current issue of anthropogenic climate change with the historic fact that many different cultures' success or failure has been almost entirely subject to the whims of climatic variation.

einhverfr 14y ago
When someone pins climate change as the sole cause of cultures' rise or falls, I tend to wonder what bridge they are selling. Climate places real constraints on cultures but I am not sure that these are ones which necessarily dictate success or failure. If it did, Roald Amudsen should have suffered the same fate as John Franklin.
- ktizo 14y ago
  Not the sole cause of cultures' rise or falls, but one of the main causes of many cultures' fall, often due to those particular cultures becoming deeply interconnected and unprepared for large scale changes. The fates of individual polar explorers is not particularly relevant to the fall of large city building cultures. And anyway Amundsen disappeared while on a rescue mission to find a crashed polar airship, so did suffer a similar fate, just a bit later.
  - einhverfr 14y ago
    I think you hit the nail on the head with this statement "often due to those particular cultures becoming deeply interconnected and unprepared for large scale changes." In other words, the social complexity makes a culture vulnerable, and climate/agriculture pressures can essentially cause failure where none was possible before. That's close to Prof. Tainter's thesis, actually, and he points out that there are very few cases of large-scale cultures addressing these problems by simplifying but when they do they can survive. The example he gives in his lectures is the so-called Byzantine Dark Ages which were a deliberate transformation of the Byzantine Empire in response to the Arab invasions (going from a professional army to peasant militias, etc). But most cultures that I know of aren't even proximally wiped out by climate change. The Persians were conquered by the Romans on the battlefield, as were the Gauls. The Western Roman Empire appears to have collapsed primarily from inward pressures, not outward ones, and the agricultural failures there were the result of factors other than climate change or even man-made environmental damages. Some cultures do fail due primarily to environmental reasons (Greenland and republican Iceland being the best examples), but I don't think they represent the general rule. Iceland never was a particularly fertile place to grow things (vast amounts of environmental damage were the result of grazing animals simply because there's not much else you can do in Iceland), and neither was Greenland even before the Little Ice Age....

by ktizo 14y ago

einhverfr 14y ago

When someone pins climate change as the sole cause of cultures' rise or falls, I tend to wonder what bridge they are selling. Climate places real constraints on cultures but I am not sure that these are ones which necessarily dictate success or failure. If it did, Roald Amudsen should have suffered the same fate as John Franklin.

ktizo 14y ago
Not the sole cause of cultures' rise or falls, but one of the main causes of many cultures' fall, often due to those particular cultures becoming deeply interconnected and unprepared for large scale changes. The fates of individual polar explorers is not particularly relevant to the fall of large city building cultures. And anyway Amundsen disappeared while on a rescue mission to find a crashed polar airship, so did suffer a similar fate, just a bit later.
- einhverfr 14y ago
  I think you hit the nail on the head with this statement "often due to those particular cultures becoming deeply interconnected and unprepared for large scale changes." In other words, the social complexity makes a culture vulnerable, and climate/agriculture pressures can essentially cause failure where none was possible before. That's close to Prof. Tainter's thesis, actually, and he points out that there are very few cases of large-scale cultures addressing these problems by simplifying but when they do they can survive. The example he gives in his lectures is the so-called Byzantine Dark Ages which were a deliberate transformation of the Byzantine Empire in response to the Arab invasions (going from a professional army to peasant militias, etc). But most cultures that I know of aren't even proximally wiped out by climate change. The Persians were conquered by the Romans on the battlefield, as were the Gauls. The Western Roman Empire appears to have collapsed primarily from inward pressures, not outward ones, and the agricultural failures there were the result of factors other than climate change or even man-made environmental damages. Some cultures do fail due primarily to environmental reasons (Greenland and republican Iceland being the best examples), but I don't think they represent the general rule. Iceland never was a particularly fertile place to grow things (vast amounts of environmental damage were the result of grazing animals simply because there's not much else you can do in Iceland), and neither was Greenland even before the Little Ice Age....