Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Greenland Norse community at the end of the Medieval Climate Anomaly, an
approximately 400-year warm period centred around the North Atlantic region
that allowed the settlement of southern Greenland by people of European
lifestyles just before ad 1000. About 400 years later, the Norse quickly and
somewhat mysteriously disappeared (Diamond, 2005).
In all of these cases, though, the collapse was not driven directly or exclu-
sively by climatic shifts in a simple cause-effect relationship. Features of the
institutional organization, value systems and socio-economic dynamics of the
civilizations themselves played at least as strong a role in their demise, as did
climate, strongly hinting of multiple, compounding stresses and interacting
impacts (Costanza et al., 2006).
Some important lessons can be learned from these earlier societies. Although
there is no consensus on the precise explanatory factors that describe their
collapses, several generic hypotheses have been put forward to explain why
some societies collapsed in the face of external pressures while others trans-
formed, survived and even thrived. Two of these explanations have particularly
direct relevance for twenty-first-century society. Joseph Tainter proposes that as
societies evolve they generally solve problems by becoming more complex and
more highly organized. This is an effective response to problems to a point, but
as the societies become ever more complex, they erode resilience and are less
adaptive, thus becoming more vulnerable to collapse in the future (Tainter,
1988). Jared Diamond proposes that if societies cling to core values that have
become dysfunctional as the world changes around them, they become increas-
ingly vulnerable to challenges and shocks and thus prone to collapse (Diamond,
2005).
Whatever the complex causes of the collapse of these earlier civilizations,
their populations had the opportunity to disperse and move to new lands that
were either unpopulated or lightly populated. That option does not exist for
contemporary populations. In fact, the world of today is vastly different from
anything that has come before it in terms of human experience, complexity
and connectedness. Although many contemporary societies have achieved
unprecedented wealth (albeit very unevenly distributed), sophisticated technol-
ogies, ever-increasing economic efficiency and global-level connectivity, these
developments may have eroded resilience compared to that of the simpler, less
integrated, less interconnected and less economically efficient (but with more
in-built redundancies) societies of the past.
The Anthropocene: a planet under pressure
Not only are the contemporary, globalized societies of today vastly different
from any that have preceded them, but the environmental changes that they
are facing - and indeed, to a large extent, causing - are also unprecedented.
The consequences of a Four Degree World, then, would be played out in the
context of very dynamic, rapidly changing contemporary, globalized societies,
