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Book Review
| The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization. By Brian Fagan. New York: Basic Books, 2004. xvii+284 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. $26.00.
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| Chronologically longer than civilization, Fagan's account begins with the onset of the warming trend that ended the last great Ice Age c. 15,000 BC and continued to AD 1200. Geographically narrower than civilization, his focus is on Europe, north Africa, southwest Asia, and the Americas, i.e. Fagan's areas of expertise, and of mainstream American archaeology. The principal sources are sediment cores taken by scientific teams from sea floors, Arctic or mountain ice-caps, and especially a core from the Russian Antarctic Vostok station, some 420,000 years long. The method is chronological coincidence. A chronological table opens each of the book's three parts, then the narrative points to climatic and historical events and attempts to explain linkages between them. |
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This book is important to environmental history for three reasons. First, most environmental history begins from the premise that humans alter the environment, mostly detrimentally. Fagan reverses the causal sequence, making abrupt climatic changes determinants of human adaptations, and he convincingly demonstrates them, although more persuasively in some instances than others. Second, Fagan demonstrates that the world has enjoyed a warm period of some fifteen millennia that is unprecedented in the Vostok or other time series. "Civilization arose during a remarkably long summer. We still have no idea when, or how, that summer will end" (p.25). But end it surely will. The book opens with a metaphor of ships at sea, a small sailing craft that rides out a storm, and a great supertanker crushed by twenty-five meter waves and gale winds. "As with ships, so with civilizations" (p. 2). Third, the book cites examples of abrupt climatic shifts and how they stimulated historical change. To archaeologists accustomed to sweeping through millennia, "abrupt" means two or three centuries. |
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One determinant was the advance and retreat of the ice packs sitting astride northern America. The Laurentide glacier in particular switched on and off the "Great Ocean Conveyor belt." Its meltdown beginning c. 11,000 BC shut down oceanic currents and created a one-thousand-year cold spell in Europe and drought in southwest Asia, compelling sedentary foragers to make the transition to agriculture and pastoralism. Another example is a shift in the earth's angle to the sun, which after c. 3800 BC stimulated the rise of civilizations, and then their distress, in Egypt and Sumeria. Skipping ahead to the last two chapters, a warming trend c. 900–1300 encouraged the rise of medieval civilization in northwestern Europe, but also resulted in drought in south America which ruined Mayan civilization and Tiwanaku in today's Peru. |
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These and other points encourage controversy. On agricultural transitions or the rise of civilization (i.e. urbanization), examples from east or south Asia could amplify or weaken Fagan's case. Archaeology also offers alternative explanations for transitions to agriculture, or human-induced environmental stress as a factor in the demise of Sumerian civilization. His artful and even evasive construction of explanatory connections may leave a reader skeptical at points, but his key arguments that climate change matters in history, and that abrupt climatic shifts can shatter contemporary gigantic civilization, seem incontrovertible. These points and his concluding remark that powerful decision makers today ignore and even deny that climate change should be a public issue are sure to excite discussion. Accessible to the general reader, this book would work well in an environmental history course or a world history survey. |
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Paul V. Adams teaches history at Shippensburg University, Pennsylvania. |
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