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Title: Floods, Famines, and Emperors : El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations by Brian Fagan ISBN: 0-465-01121-7 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 01 March, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.14 (7 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Water, water, everywhere and nowhere
Comment: According to Brian Fagan, the phenomenon known as El Nino has abruptly entered our collective awareness. That's a good thing, since its effects have a long, and often disastrous reach. It is not, he contends, the only issue to consider in climate impact. It has been "over-hyped" by media. The issues go beyond freak storms and harsh droughts. Humans have confronted weather throughout their evolutionary history. How society copes with global weather impact is Fagan's real concern. He's collected a wealth of information in this well written account. There is much to learn from this book, which includes some intriguing
surprises.
Comfortably divided into three major themes, Fagan opens with an explanation of El Nino's "discovery". What had seemed to be freak weather events proved to have an underlying pattern. The El Nino Southern Oscillation [ENSO] is an eastward moving body of warm Pacific Ocean water. The warmth blocks the flow of the Humboldt Current moving from Antarctica along the South American coast. Fish die or depart, with birds duplicating the pattern. Fagan stresses that the effect of that warm cell has global reach and has roots deep in time. Pharonic Egypt felt its impact, perhaps contributing, if not causing, social upheaval and even a new philosophy of rule by those absolute rulers.
How society and its rulers deal with abrupt weather change is the focus of the second part. As an anthropologist, Fagan is conversant with ancient societies. He examines the Andean Moche people who engineered extensive irrigation systems to catch feeble rainfall. With El Nino, rainfall changes from feeble to fabulous and the Moche watched their canals being flushed away. The following famines broke the power of the Moche aristocracy and the culture collapsed. A similar fate occurred to the Maya, whose rigid social pattern prevented them from coping with crop loss. However, the Anasazi people of the American Southwest, long skilled in desert agriculture, had a different method for dealing with drought. A loose, flexible society encouraged sharing of resources, then departure when the soil failed. Fagan overturns the long-held view that the Anasazi "mysteriously" disappeared. He contends they simply dispersed.
In the final section, Fagan relates some historical climate events such as The Little Ice Age and the Sahel drought. He examines the short-sighted policies that have exacerbated the human impact of such events. Over expansion in good years leaves no flexibility for addressing the needs of bad times. Governments must avoid superficial solutions in the face of knowing climate will generate surprises. Better planning scenarios are required for land occupation and use. Although it's been said before, Fagan urges better understanding of what is sustainable. That, of course, means more research and the application of political will derived from its results. While that may curtail some short-term profit gains and force revision of some cultural noms, it's the survival of the species that's at stake.
Fagan's easy writing style mustn't undercut the value of this book. Enhanced with good maps tied nicely to the text and an outstanding bibliography make this book required reading. Weather, after all, is part of the human condition everywhere. We all need to understand better its impact, and cheap jokes about El Nino aren't part of that comprehension. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
Rating: 3
Summary: Good to read; a nice beginning
Comment: To be honest, I enjoyed this book far more than I anticipated. Fagan is a smart archaelogist, and does not reduce human history to weather; rather he shows how weather can influence politics, religion, agriculture, and economics. Fagan could have made this point more clearly: weather can sometimes be influential; it's not determinative.
Fagan offers a good direction for archaelogists and historians to head; more serious works would do well to take up Fagan's challenge to analyze historical weather patterns. It'll be a tough go, but well-worth the trouble.
One of the book's strongest chapters is Chapter 11, showing how French colonial rule in the Sahel helped to impoverish and starve peoples living there, while increasing desertification. Here, he echoes the theme of the vastly superior _Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino and the Making of the Third World_. This latter book, by Mike Davis, is one of the most important books of recent decades. Where Fagan fails to consider structural inequalities and human suffering as a result of El Ninos, Davis fully succeeds. The books make for some nice contrasts (I assigned both to my college students). Turn to Davis, after you've had fun with Fagan.
Rating: 4
Summary: Weather Side of History--One Really Big Core Idea
Comment:
This book is an excellent complement to David Key's book on "Catastrophe", and I found it a worthwhile fast read.
It has one really big core idea that ties environmental, political, economic, and cultural readings together--it explores the inter-relationship between sustainability of any given society within the constraints of the time and the legitimacy of the government or other form of political organization.
Two things appear to help: long-term vision on the part of the leader, and whatever it takes to maintain the people's faith in their leadership.
The author concludes with an overview of where we stand today, and draws attention to the especially dangerous combination of overpopulation, global warming, and rapid climate changes occurring all at once.
For me, this book combined an overview of how seriously we must take ocean currents and related climate changes; and how important it is that our leaders understand these issues and take long-term views that add stability and sustainability in the face of varying challenges to our well-being.
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Title: The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850 by Brian M. Fagan ISBN: 0465022723 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 24 December, 2001 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization by Brian M. Fagan, Brian Fagan ISBN: 0465022812 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 23 December, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future by Richard B. Alley ISBN: 0691102961 Publisher: Princeton University Press Pub. Date: 01 July, 2002 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: Climate, History and the Modern World by H. H. Lamb, H.H. Lamb ISBN: 0415127351 Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: 01 August, 1995 List Price(USD): $43.95 |
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Title: The Ice Chronicles: The Quest to Understand Global Climate Change by Paul Andrew Mayewski, Frank White, Lynn Margulis ISBN: 1584650621 Publisher: University Press of New England Pub. Date: 01 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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