Societal Collapses
Environmental determinism has long been out of favor among historians and social scientists, although well into the 19th Century even the majority of Westerners were highly dependent on the climate and environment for their survival. Since the entire world economy was based on agriculture, a shortfall in harvests meant famines, epidemics and death for those who were at or below subsistence level. Such famines were a primary cause for the overthrow of the monarchy in France in 1789, for example, and they led to rebellions, riots and instability wherever they occurred. As late as the 1840s in Ireland, the great potato blight led to the death or immigration of half the population, and the near-destruction of Irish society. In the case of Easter Island, Norse Greenland and the Classic Maya civilization, climate change combined with deforestation and agricultural practices that destroyed the environment led to the total collapse of these societies. These examples should serve as object lessons for the depletion of natural resources and environmental destruction taking place today, when human technology is far more advanced than anyone in the past could even have imagined and its impact on the global climate and environment infinitely greater.
Historically speaking, the present industrial civilization is a phenomenon situated in a relatively warm period between ice ages. In the last ice age, atmospheric carbon was at a low of 180 parts per million in the atmosphere, which had risen to 260 million by its end.[footnoteRef:1] All the early agricultural civilizations in the Nile valley, China, India and Mesopotamia came into existence after the ice retreated 12,000 years ago, and all depended on irrigation for their existence. Some periods of this interglacial age have been warmer than others, such as the Medieval Warm Period of 900-1200, or the present period of global warming caused by deforestation and burning of fossil fuels. In contrast, during the Little Ice Age of 1300-1850 the glaciers moved south again further than at time in the last 12,000 years, and only began to retreat in the 19th and 20th Centuries. This climate shift destroyed the Norse colony in Greenland, while "colder and wetter weather and malnutrition from low crop yields made humans more susceptible to diseases from flu to malaria."[footnoteRef:2] Unlike the Norse, however, most European adapted to this colder climate by building stronger vessels that could sail far out into the Atlantic during storms, and developed new, more intensive agricultural techniques in Britain and the Low Countries that "offered effective protection against the famines of earlier times."[footnoteRef:3] As European farming methods spread throughout the world over the last 200 years, deforestation contributed to global warming and the increase of carbon in the atmosphere, the effects of which were unknown when modern industry and agriculture were first developed. As Easter Island, the Greenland Norse and (perhaps) the Classical Maya also demonstrate, human activities have always affected the climate and environment at least as much as solar activity, volcanoes and other natural phenomena, and civilizations that fail to understand and adapt to their environments are doomed to extinction. [1: Jim Snook. Ice Age Extinction: Cause and Human Consequences. Algora Publishing, 2008, p. 111.] [2: Snook, p. 121.] [3: Brian M. Fagan. The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History. Basic Books, 2000, p. xviii.]
Easter Island is a microcosm of environmental degradation and misuse of natural resources that can destroy a society. Deforestation and clearing the soil for agriculture led to soil erosion in the years 1200-1650, and "Easter Island's society failed soon after its topsoil disappeared."[footnoteRef:4] Storms gradually stripped the
While on one hand, the Nile gets the highest discharge from rainfall on the highlands of Ethiopia and upland plateau of East Africa, located well outside the Middle East region; on the other hand, discharge points of the other two rivers, Euphrates and Tigris, are positioned well within the Middle East region, prevailing mostly in Turkey, Syria along with Iraq. In other areas, recurrent river systems are restricted to
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