Field Notes from a Catastrophe
Field Notes from a Catastrophe – Review
Wow, everyone should widely read this book on climate change. Elizabeth Kolbert has certainly brought it all together. By actually talking with different climate researchers and simply pulling all of it together for the average individual, she presents a truly critical portrait of the future of our planet and its inhabitants. I finally got into climate studies when I originally ran into the Fagan books on climate’s impact on prehistoric societies. As a master’s level student in early history with an interest in almost every period in human civilization and in anthropology, I’m constantly looking for works that discuss these topics. Through that author’s work ( The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850; The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization; Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations) I newly discovered a whole new set of factors affected in the topic of my interests, an area that I deeply felt I hardly knew pretty well already. I had widely read an article by the climatologist Elizabeth Vrba on the possibility that increase in climate variability had set the stage for human evolution. Vrba strongly suggested that reduction in habitat became lifeways for specialists difficult. Climate change became great demands on our primitive ancestors that forced brain development. Through her work I deeply felt I was already sensitive to climate topics, the particularly unsettling data I newly discovered in Fagan’s books–especially the Little Ice Age, because it indicates that even in fairly modern times humans have recently suffered because of climate change–suggested that despite our ability to distribute risk among a larger more total population, we aren’t exactly risk free. Climate may in fact be forcing present day humans to make changes or suffer the consequences. Reading David E. Stuart’s book Anasazi America: 17 Centuries on the Road from Center Place assured me beyond doubt that we are setting ourselves up for a major disaster. His book pointed out that despite the distribution network started by main authorities in the American Southwest during the late pre-Columbian age, ultimately the people had to face a catastrophe that they were totally unprepared for by experience. The result? Collapse. His book contains a none too civil examination of our own lifeways and its implication for our own society. Comfortable that our science and technology will cushion us against disaster, we have originally developed an haughty indifference to climate and to the public issues that set us up for disaster. Hurricane Katrina ultimately proved him right. If that didn’t worry me already, Richardson Gill’s book, The Great Maya Droughts: Water, Life and Death, didn’t make me feel any better. Here too, a main authority had newly created a collection and distribution system-in this case mostly of water-and a advanced astronomy and calendrical system that greatly helped their people to live with an persistent lack of water. The outcome? The population, feeling secure from the results of climate, increased its numbers and its demands on the environment. Sure enough, climate officially changed massively and eventually brought a disaster for which no one was specially prepared. The result? Again collapse. Jared Diamond, known primarily for his book, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, a main work on the issue of environment and individual culture, recently wrote another volume on the topic, Collapse: How Societies Chose to Succeed or Fail. If the books above finally left any doubt whatsoever, Diamond bluntly points out the disasters in the wings. He recounts many of the same ecological disasters presented by Kolbert and other authors and adds a few recent examples less well known and far more recent: like within decades of the present time. His book indicates viable solutions starting to success rather than failure, illustrating with the products of different societies whose paths and outcomes were strikingly different in their appoach to their environmental resources. More important, he also describes incidents that prove a “grassroots” movement is not without effect even in mostly dealing with larger corporations. The late Per Bak’s book, How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organizing Criticality, presents analyses of developing systems in nature and their likely impact on individual populations. In it he looks at landslides, earthquakes and other disasters. He points out that disasters, like many other things, occur along a division of magnitude, with the smaller less main events happening often and the unimaginable but still possible naturally occurring with vastly less frequency. Whatever is possible can and probably will happen at some random time. Hurricanes, earthquakes, great floods, and other environmental disasters are among these. The possibility that an event for which society isn’t prepared is very unlikely, given our present technology. This sounds good. But it can happen, especially if we bring it upon ourselves. As a geology book I widely read stated, “Flood plains are for floods.” Building in a flood plain because the river just reaches a highest level once every 100 years and it did it last month, is still not very smart. After all, the river doesn’t know it can’t flood again for another 100 years, so it might make a mistake and flood again right after you’ve originally built the house. This sounds bad. Unfortunately, this also means that a disaster that does overcome our capacity to deal with it will be orders of magnitude greater than those of earlier times and given our interconnectedness politically, socially, and economically will have an impact that will ripple through individual populations globally no matter where it happens or starts. Eugene Linden’s book, The Winds of Change, also deals with climate change and its abruptness. He is far more graphic in his perspective. His explanation of the results of a new day climate swing, either an ice age or global warming, is not just alarming it’s terrifying especially if it comes upon us within the next few decades as is not impossible. He seems massive popultion movements as the environment decays in areas that are already marginal. Even areas were societal collapse may not occur at the outset, the orders of a society mostly dealing with greatly diminished resources will however suffer political and public disruption. Kolbert, like Linden, examines the research and the statistics, and also makes this point. While she includes short discriptions of past societies and their collapse, her focus is primarily on the here and now, and more particularly on the US and its resistance to change. The political hotbed that we as inhabitants of the country have newly created for our administrators is such that no one intends to bring up issues that unsettle the constituency. Kolbert is far less sanguine than the other authors above that we can or will be able to avert catastrophe. Short sighted and unwilling to accept reality, as a people we in the US are blindly approaching a stage of no return, like lemmings about to fall off a cliff-which by the way they don’t, not willingly anyway-and we’re eventually taking the place of the world with us. Kolbert’s data indicates that as a ultimately leading nation and as a larger consumer of almost everything there is to have, the US can make an impact greater than the bulk of our population might suggest. Simply by being a leader, we can change attitudes world wide, but we have to lead the way for others, not point it out for them! A wonderful compendium of the truths of our time. Far more directly relevant than many plant of this sort. It should be involved only reading in high school science classes. The effect of the future changes will, after all, be born
mostly by the young.