The Little Ice Age

Once upon a time, Brian Fagan became curious about how history has been shaped by climate.  He did a remarkable amount of research, and then delivered a fascinating and very readable book, The Little Ice Age.  Mainstream history tends to focus on rulers, empires, wars, and technology, providing us with a pinhole perspective on ages past.  Fagan used a wide angle lens, and revealed how the miserable peasantry of Europe struggled to survive in a world of daffy rulers, steamroller epidemics, wildly erratic weather, and the ever-present threat of famine — a highly insecure existence in a world with no safety nets, and brief life expectancy.

Most of our detailed, regularly recorded weather data is less than 200 years old.  Older writings made note of climate conditions, times of prosperity, famines, plagues, and natural disasters.  More recently, we’ve discovered that tree rings and ice cores can provide climate information going back thousands of years.  The annual rings in tree trunks are thicker in ideal weather and thinner in lean years.  The annual layers of ice in glaciers are thicker in cold years, and thinner in warm ones.  In this way, climate leaves a fingerprint pattern that we can decode.  Ice also preserves ash residue, marking volcanic activity, which can have significant effects on weather.

While climate can vary from year to year, and day to day, modern climate science has discovered broader trends in weather patterns.  Fagan examined three trends: the Medieval Warm Period (900-1200), the Little Ice Age (1300-1850), and the warming trend of the fossil-fuelled industrial era. 

In northern Europe, the years between 800 and 1200 were the warmest period in the last 8,000 years.  There were vineyards in England.  Generous grain harvests fed a population explosion, which naturally triggered a rash of bloody conflicts.  Because of the warm weather, sea levels rose between 1000 and 1200, creating challenges for the lowlanders.  “At least 100,000 people died along the Dutch and German coasts in four fierce storm surges in about 1200, 1212-1219, 1287, and 1362.”

The kickoff for the Little Ice Age came in 1315, when it rained almost continuously from May to August.  Fields became lakes or knee-deep mud.  Floods erased entire villages.  Wars had to be cancelled.  The population, which had exploded between 1100 and 1300, now had to share a puny harvest, if any.

The survivors eagerly awaited a return to normal weather in 1316, but rains resumed in the spring.  Livestock diminished, crops failed, prices rose, and the roads were jammed with wandering beggars.  Many villages were abandoned.  People dined on pigeon dung, dogs, cats, and the corpses of diseased cattle (rumors of cannibalism).  By the spring of 1317, they had eaten their seeds, and had few oxen to plow with.  The rains returned.  There were seven years of bad harvests, creating steady employment for gravediggers.

For the next 550 years, the weather got colder, and there were more storms.  Frigid spells might last a season or a decade.  Cold weather was extreme from 1680 to 1700.  London trees froze and split open, and the Thames was covered with thick ice.  Chilly summers led to poor harvests from 1687 to 1692.  You could walk across the ice from Denmark to Sweden in the winter of 1708-09.  The All Saints Flood of November 1570 submerged the Dutch lowlands, drowning 100,000. 

This book is jammed with stories of weather-related problems — floods, droughts, crop failures, epidemics, famines, and food riots.  Most people struggled to survive via subsistence farming, using primitive technology.  Most didn’t have enough land for livestock, which meant little manure for fertilizer.  Under ideal conditions on prime land, planting a bushel of wheat would produce just four or five bushels at harvest time.  Because of this low productivity, feeding society required the labor of nine out of ten people.  Famine was common, and food relief was rare.  “Even in the best of times, rural life was unrelentingly harsh.”  “Farm laborers lived in extraordinary squalor….”

Fagan’s tales reinforced my dislike of agriculture.  It fuels overpopulation, converts healthy wild ecosystems into wreckage, enslaves plants and animals, and requires inequality and brutality.  It is proprietary — all the big juicy melons in that field belong to my group, and our field is strictly off-limits to any other creature.  This is the opposite of nature’s way, in which a big juicy melon is fair game for one and all, finders keepers.   

Private property turns humans and societies into obnoxious two-year olds — “that’s MY melon!”  Possessions become objects of wealth, power, and status.  If I steal your horse, then its power becomes mine.  In the insatiable pursuit of wealth, people will lie to your face, snatch your purse, cut your throat, bomb cities into ashtrays, and destroy entire planets.  You can’t farm without warriors to protect the real estate, livestock, and granaries, and you can’t control warriors without hard-fisted leaders.

The legions of hungry dirty peasants who produced the wealth were expendable, and lived in a manner that none of us would tolerate — while the lords gaily feasted.  “Excavations of medieval cemeteries paint a horrifying picture of health problems resulting from brutal work regimes.  Spinal deformations from the hard labor of plowing, hefting heavy grain bags, and scything the harvest are commonplace.  Arthritis affected nearly all adults.  Most adult fisherfolk suffered agonizing osteoarthritis of the spine from years of heavy boatwork and hard work ashore.”

 Today, our lives are unnaturally soft and cozy.  We exist in a “luxurious” unhealthy cocoon created by a temporary bubble of abundant energy.  The shelves at the store are always full, a wonderland of easy calories.  We have no memories of the hellish life of muscle-powered organic agriculture.  We have forgotten how recently our ancestors died from famines and pestilence.  As the cost and scarcity of energy increases, our bubble will surely pop.

Fagan gives us an eye-opening preview of what life is likely to look like when the fossil fuel bubble becomes the subject of scary old fairy tales (The Big Bad Consumer).  As our miraculous machines run out of fuel, we will have no choice but to slip and slide into a muscle-powered future, which will be anything but unnaturally soft and cozy. 

He also warns us that climate change is often not smooth and gentle.  History is full of sudden catastrophic shifts.  Despite our whiz-bang technology, and hordes of scientists, climate shifts remain beyond our control.  We will experience whatever nature decides to serve us — even if we exercised our famous big brains, and permanently stopped every machine today.  Climate was a persistent threat to agriculture-based societies long before coal mining was invented, because agriculture had far more defects than benefits.

This book provides vital information for those struggling to envision a sustainable future based on organic agriculture.  Ideally, enlightened humans will deliberately keep the transition to muscle-powered organic agriculture as brief as possible, whilst devoting immense wisdom to the essential goals of full-speed population reduction and rewilding.  There is nothing finer than a sustainable way of life.  All other paths lead to oblivion.

Fagan,Brian, The Little Ice Age — How Climate Made History 1300-1850, Basic Books, New York, 2000.

The Rapid Growth of Human Populations 1750-2000

It’s heartbreaking being an older person during a population explosion, witnessing the effects of catastrophic progress, while remembering the lost goodness.  William Stanton (1930-2010) grew up on a lovely English countryside.  He became a geologist and wandered the world in search of metal-bearing ores.  When he returned to Somerset in 1970, the healthy land of his childhood was in ecological ruins.  England was suffering from a baby boom, growing by 300,000 each year.  This inspired Stanton to embark on a voyage of learning, and in 2003 he published The Rapid Growth of Human Populations 1750-2000. 

Explosive population growth was new to history, beginning roughly around 1750, driven by new advances in “death control.”  While birth rates remained very high, death rates were dramatically driven down by the introduction of sanitary sewers, municipal water, vaccines, and a sharp increase in the food supply, lubricated by the emergence of cheap and abundant fossil energy.

Prior to 1750, England was at carrying capacity, with five million people.  The birth rate matched the death rate, and the lack of extra food made further growth impossible.  Many lived on the edge of starvation, and were expected to die whenever harvests were below average, as they often were.

Then, extra food became available, first a trickle, and then a torrent.  Colonial forests were being converted to cropland.  European farmers began planting highly productive maize and potatoes from the New World.  Soil fertility was sharply boosted by potent new fertilizers.  New technology made farmers more productive.  By decreasing the risks of starvation, the flood of additional food provided a huge advance in death control.  This was not balanced by similar advances in birth control, so the population shot upward.

Prior to 1750, there were strong restraints on population growth: disease, war, starvation.  But then we entered the WROG era (weak restraints on growth), which is almost over now.  As the era of cheap and abundant energy concludes, we can expect sharp declines in agricultural productivity, and sharp increases in food prices — presenting a terminal restraint on growth.  Climate change is a wild card that is likely to create additional restraints. 

Population missionaries are pariahs who are shunned by most, because ignoring them has no immediate consequences, and ignoring them avoids the need for uncomfortable contemplation.  They have a depressing occupation — delivering one of the most important stories of our era to an auditorium of empty chairs.  Who cares?

Religions don’t care, babies are divine gifts.  The business community doesn’t care, because a growing herd keeps wages low and profits high.  Governments don’t care, because overpopulation is only a problem for other countries, and taking it seriously is a fast path to early retirement.  Even environmentalists don’t care, because population is an issue that rapidly drives away large numbers of contributors.  So, the herd in prosperous regions pretends that their comfortable way of life is not directly threatened.

Prior to WROG, life was cheap.  Human rights were unknown.  There were few prisons, because criminals were not rewarded with free room and board — most were hung or brutally flogged.  Imbeciles, heretics, rabble-rousers, cripples, and the mentally ill were not carefully protected by the ruling nobility.  Many died on the streets.  Infanticide was common, and the church looked the other way — there was no extra food, and there were many, many unwanted newborns.

Much to Stanton’s intense dismay, the WROG era ushered in a new mindset of sentimentality — the nanny state.  Since food was now cheap and abundant, it became possible to rescue the unwanted children, feed the poor, and care for the dregs of society.  A “politically correct” value system emerged, which advocated for human rights, but failed to balance these human rights with equal levels of human responsibilities, a fatal defect.

Decade after decade, we’ve spent millions and millions on food aid, and sent it to regions with high birth rates, having populations far in excess of the local carrying capacity — Ethiopia, for example.  As long as their birth rate remains high, they can never be rescued from poverty by any amount of food aid.  Political correctness insists that family planning decisions are a private matter.  Reproductive rights, without reproductive responsibilities, lead to an ever-increasing population of poor and hungry people.  Yet few charities promote family planning, so the problem proceeds briskly toward the cliff.

PC strategists argue that we don’t need to stop growth, the smart solution is to simply end poverty.  If we rape the Earth more, expand the economy more, and make everyone prosperous, then the whole world will be happy well-fed car owners — but this will destroy the planet (and it’s impossible, too).  Stanton shouts the obvious: sustainable development is an oxymoron.

He insisted that there was absolutely nothing immoral about Draconian birth control, like China’s one child policy.  Yes, it ruffled some feathers, but it was a dramatic success — between 300 and 400 million births were prevented.  Consequently, over the long run, the Chinese people, and their ecosystem will suffer far less.  The choices were intense birth control, or intense social misery, or aggression and conquest.  The PC faith absolutely opposes the notion of intense birth control, in every country, starting yesterday.  By default, collective inaction is a unanimous vote for catastrophe.

Stanton had no kind words for the PC faith.  Despite their good intentions, he believed that over the long run they were inadvertently increasing human misery and ecological destruction.  He was sure that PC was bound for extinction as the collapse proceeds, prosperity withers, and life once again becomes cheap.  PC believers denounced his book with great vigor (cruel, evil, racist, xenophobic infidel!). 

Here’s the bottom line: every genuinely sustainable culture that I have studied deliberately and actively practiced population management, in a wide variety of forms, many of which were extremely non-PC.  This was not cruel or immoral.  It was necessary to maintain the harmony of the community, the continuity of the culture, and the vitality of the ecosystem.  They had a different value system, and it worked well (unlike ours).  This was the norm for most of human history.

In our society, the values of political correctness are widely regarded as being normal.  But blind faith in any belief system is risky.  In an insane world, every core belief must be questioned, every right must be balanced by responsibilities, and every population must shift into reverse.

Stanton, William, The Rapid Growth of Human Populations 1750-2000, Multi-Science Publishing Company, Brentwood, United Kingdom, 2003.