News from a Changing Planet -- #9
Travel with me, if you will, to Scotland in 1695. An appealing January vacation, I know, but from this particular vantage point, I will lead you towards a unified theory of climate change and environmental history. We will cover the Unification of England and Scotland in 1707, Brexit, manifest destiny, the Ludlow Massacre, the passenger pigeon, the Arab Spring and more so please stick with me here!
(PICTURE ALLIANCE/ZUMAPRESS)
Alright, Scotland, 1695. Already, much of the Northern Hemisphere was shivering its way through the Little Ice Age, which lasted from about 1450 to 1850. It wasn't really an ice age in the geological sense, and many of its effects -- widespread agricultural crisis, the defeat of the Spanish Armada because of an Arctic Hurricane, regular freezing of the Thames in London -- are more widely agreed upon than its causes.
Much of the evidence suggests it was caused by volcanic eruptions, beginning in the 15th century: sulfur dioxide from the explosion converts to sulfuric acid in the stratosphere, which condenses into fine sulfate aerosols. These aerosols reflect more of the sun's radiation back into space, often leading to widespread cooling. But there’s also some evidence that, at that time, the sun was at its farthest distance from earth, so generally not as warm. And a study last year suggested that the dramatic population decline in the Americas because of/following the arrival of Europeans in the late 15th century-- about 56 million people -- meant that a lot of previously cultivated land was reforested, therefore sucking more carbon out of the atmosphere, and reducing the greenhouse effect, thereby also having a cooling effect. For more on the Little Ice Age, check out this New Yorker article or the “1816: The Year Without a Summer” episode of BBC Radio’s ‘In Our Time’ (possibly the world’s greatest radio show).)
Thames "Frost Fair" when the river froze solid, Museum of London
But the decade from 1695-1705 was the coldest one of all, and Scotland’s coldest decade in the last 800 years (1612-1711 is the coldest century on record; 1911-2010 is the warmest), according to a recent study in the Journal of Vulcanology and Geothermal Research. The study's authors looked at tree rings from centuries-old trees in the Cairngorms in northern Scotland (and also from dead trees buried at the bottom of icy lochs which were preserved in the mud’s low-oxygen conditions!), and determined that this particular cold spell, long known as “The Ills,” was caused by a few significant volcanic eruptions in the tropics and Iceland from 1693-1695, and possibly a shift in the North Atlantic/Arctic Oscillation, the atmospheric pressure pattern that effects the climate of the northern hemisphere.
Anyway, the authors of the study, having established that this was a horrible decade -- snow through June, frost all summer -- explain the consequences: population loss in Scotland of around 10-15 percent (25 percent in some places) because of crop failure, made worse by the Corn Laws, which required grain to be exported, and the relative technological backwardness compared to England, which saw similar temperatures but much less devastation. (France lost about 5 percent of its population from 1693-4 because of famine; Finland around 30 percent in 1696.) The authors also lay some blame on the climate/famine for the over-enthusiasm about Darien, a proposed colony in Panama, which was intended to revive Scotland's economy as a gateway to the Far East and its riches, and would help some people escape the cold and famine. Unfortunately, it was a spectacular failure: about 2,500 colonists went to Panama, and only a couple of hundred returned; Scotland lost about a third of its wealth in the ill-fated expedition. The colony collapsed for a few reasons: mosquito-borne illness, to which the Scottish had no immunity; attacks from the Spanish; and because of the famine in Scotland, ships meant to resupply the colony with grains were delayed. It lasted less than two years.
The effect of all of this -- population loss, economic and agricultural collapse -- was that Scotland united with England in 1707 after centuries of resistance, the authors write. And while no decades were as bad as the 1690s, once unified with England, Scotland never saw the same kind of desperation again.
Hail Britannia I guess! (CHRONICLE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)
The authors of the study write that this can be taken as a cautionary tale as we undergo changes in our climate and as Brexit may either isolate the United Kingdom from the European Union, or parts of the United Kingdom from each other. “The bigger message for today,” according to Rosanne D’Arrigo, the lead author and a tree-ring scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, “is arguably that as the climate changes, nations will be stronger if they stick together and not try to go it alone.” And that’s especially true for us, since our climate is changing not only on a regional or hemispheric scale, but a global one. Though effects may be worse in some places than others, there are no parts of the world that climate change will leave be.
Though this is what the scientists/experts emphasize, I think they’re understating the importance of their contribution. As they suggest in their paper, we typically have an unnuanced understanding of how the environment affects human affairs; that the environment is at least partly responsible for a famine, a drought, an apocalyptic storm or other Act of God, or an epidemic, we can acknowledge. We’re less good at the more subtle interactions we have with our natural resources and our climate. Basically, I think we consider ourselves and our history as separate from nature and physical systems at our own peril. And we make a mistake when we don’t understand climate change, pollution, and resource exhaustion as historical phenomena, especially in the United States. The desire and need to get more from nature and the belief that more could always be gotten is in part what drove settlers across the continent. The American sense that our resources have no limits -- there has always been more -- makes us think of the nature and its resources and their limits an abstract idea rather than a physical reality, as much as our growth has depended on our resources and easy and cheap access to energy and calories.
The passenger pigeon, John James Audubon (audubon.org)
A pile of bison skulls to be used as fertilizer, 1870
But we see it in cautionary tales too: the extinction of the buffalo and the passenger pigeon. For instance, we can’t (or shouldn’t) understand the Ludlow Massacre of 1914 without considering the environmental costs and transformations that came with coal mining. (From Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War, a book that does just that: “Fossil fuels simultaneously liberated Westerners from the previously insuperable constraints of aridity and geographic isolation and rendered them utterly dependent on coal supplies.… Burgeoning Western metropolises, gold and silver mines in the Rockies, steel mills and smelters in Denver and Pueblo, farmsteads on the high plains, and the railroad networks that bound them together—none of these could have adopted the forms they did…without the vast quantities of coal unearthed by southern Colorado's miners.”
The Strikers Tent Colony Ludlow 1914 (Colorado Encyclopedia)"
Thinking about centuries of exploitation of resources and the seemingly innate human tendency to resist the long view has helped me understand climate change in a broader historical context: climate change may be an especially intense and new problem, but we’ve been dealing with versions of it for as long as we’ve built our economic systems around resource use and consumption; we take life in general and the stability of our natural world for granted, but it is always changing, both on its own timeline and in response to the things we do that scramble time.
Migrants arriving in Lesbos from Turkey. (Sergey Ponomarov for the New York Times)
We’re seeing it already. Mass migration to Europe following the Arab Spring and the Syrian Civil War can be attributed in part to climate change, because of its role in increasing the severity of drought conditions in the region. The influx of new immigrants to Europe was often met with hostility, and triggered some political changes, namely the rise of right-wing populism, and ultimately, possibly, Brexit. So it all comes full circle, and I’m sure historians will look back at our own age and what’s to come and see climate signatures everywhere.
Here’s what else I’m reading and thinking about:
Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America by Eliza Griswold: This book will convince you that we need to stop using fossil fuels, and that we’ve sacrificed generations of people in order to get them. (Also it won the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction in 2018.)
The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future by Gretchen Bakke: This book will convince you that, with our current, very old grid, it will be really hard to stop using fossil fuels. If we want renewable electricity, we really need to reimagine how we generate and distribute electricity.
The Department of Justice has been coordinating with the oil industry to oppose climate lawsuits. (InsideClimateNews)
And in case you haven’t had enough of me by the end of this newsletter, here’s an article I wrote for Air Mail about how young fashion designers are reimagining what we’ll wear in the climate crisis, and three recent podcast interviews with...me!
Tell me what you'd like to read about, or ask me any questions you have! I'd love to hear from you.
Order your copy (or audiobook! read by me!) of Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don't Know You Have. Find more of my work here.
(It's number 9 because I sent two number 6s by accident.)