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The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization
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Customer Reviews
Rating:  - interesting book
interesting account of how changes in climate may have helped to shape our civilization giving rise to farming and eventually cities
Rating:  - Excellent overview of climate's effects on human culture
This slim volume by Brian Fagan provides an excellent overview of the changes in climate effecting human culture over hundreds and thousands of years. The climate changes are shown with their global and regional effects. Professor Fagan then relates the geological changes to gross changes in human culture such as the switch from a hunter-gatherer culture to a settled development of agriculture. He proposes that drought is one of the causes of the growth of cities from villages.
This book could be of benefit in World History, American History, and European History classes in addition to basic enviromental science classes.
Rating: - Climate Didn't Do It All
This is a good book on the effects of climate on history. The other reviews (11 as of this writing) tell the good points. I merely want to add a cautionary note: Dr. Fagan is prone to give only the "climate did it" side of what are often very complex arguments. Most scholars would generally agree with him, and where there are differences I think he is usually on the right side, but he can get too simplistic. Significantly, the cases he knows best are told with more nuance and detail. The story of the Chumash of the Santa Barbara area (where he lived for many years) is particularly good: he shows how they responded creatively and thoughtfully to varying climates. He is also knowledgeable about, and thus nunanced when writing about, Europe and the Atlantic. He is farther from home with the Maya; he gives the most likely scenario for their fall, which involves drought as the key factor, but does not discuss other theories (warfare, trade route shifts, distant power shifts...) that have at least enough merit to be advocated by many Mayanists. Still farther from home is the Tiwanaku case, where he credits the fall of Tiwanaku on drought that may actually have happened a century or two later than the fall. And he has the Old Kingdom of Egypt falling because drought convinced the people that the pharaohs weren't God after all. Surely the Egyptians were more sophisticated than that, and surely the situation was much more complex. Only in old travel accounts does anyone seriously hold the idea that "those other folks" are so dumb that they think the chief is a god because the volcano erupts or the river floods on time.
Looking over European history, I am struck by how little the shift from the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age affected history. It had its effect, and a lot of people died, but people usually coped well and intelligently. On the other hand, Fagan misses one beautiful case where that shift mattered a lot: the decline of steppe-nomad power and the Silk Road. The Mongols rode out to conquer the world, and the Silk Road flourished, during the Medieval Warm Period. The Little Ice Age ended this--the steppes got too prone to horrible winters that killed the livestock, and the Silk Road got difficult just as the sea lanes were opening up due to Chinese, Arab, Spanish and Portuguese advances in shipping.
Moral: climate affects history greatly, but people don't just let it happen or naively think "God done it." They respond with all sorts of creative and interesting strategies. This emerges from Fagan's book, especially when he talks about Native Americans, but the reader is cautioned to look into the full complexity of the cases he describes.
Rating: - Excellent Reading
If you like Fagan's work --you will love this book! As all of his work it's engaging, insightful and a joy to read.
Rating: - THE SUPERTANKER OF SOCIETY AND THE MEDIEVAL HOT STUFF
This should be a five-star review, but I have deducted a star. First the good points. Why is this book a great achievement? Because it makes an enormously convincing case - that climate is the great under-rated driver of human pre-history (up to about 3100BC, before the invention of writing), and, with a brilliant you-can't-see-the-join sweep, moves the argument through the following historical period.
It is an engaging read. The metaphors and analogies are often good. He compares early man, who adapted and survived the constant storms of climate change, with the way that a wooden yacht rides a storm. The seas may blow at storm force, or even present a 25-metre megawave. A well-battened down yacht will bob like a cork. But, a sophisticated steel supertanker will cut through all the waves as it steams on - it is designed to ignore them, so to speak. Except of course, if a megawave catches it side on, then it will roll over. And it could just hit an iceberg, we all know it has happened. The supertanker is modern civilisation, we have aircon in our houses and cars, we turn on the lights when it gets dark. The electricity could be generated by wind turbines, coal, or nuclear power. Just so long as the lights are on. But a big enough volcano, asteroid hit, or reduced solar gain triggering an ice age? That would be our megawave: we might be rolled over.
He has such a wide sweep of the disciplines: scientific studies of ice cores and lake mud, anthropological studies of the ancient Sumerians, Egyptians, the Greeks, historians like Julius Caesar and Polybius. He is good. He knows that data from carbon dating, pollen studies, ancient written histories, geology, analyses of animal domestication, archaeological digs, and more, all have to handled with interpretive skill to make a coherent story. And the picture gets updated every time a new study rolls off the presses. I take off all my hats to him. He goes into considerable detail over the Medieval Warm Period (AD900-1300). This is important because Europe was as warm and in parts warmer then than it is today, and 21st century climatologists looking for their next tax-dollar research grant do not want you to know about it. They are willing to suppress the data and re-name it to an `anomaly', it ruins their scare-scenarios. The politicians want to sound concerned and raise your taxes too. So it's win-win for them, lose-lose for us. The Medieval Warm Period was extravagantly good for Europe, and bad for the West coast Americas, and Brian Fagan paints a fascinating diptych.
However, I come to review this book, and not to panegyricise. I do not care that his style is somewhat clichéd. I do not much mind that his unidimensional approach to climate-driven history is patently simplistic and ridiculously telescoped near the end. I can read any ordinary history, or economic history like the excellent Richard Bulliet's `The Camel and the Wheel', or Gordon & Rendsburg's `The Bible and the Ancient Near East' for an immensely better straight historical approach.
But what I object to in him in the strongest terms is what philosophers call `scientism'. (Try Mary Midgley, C.S. Lewis, John Wild, Michael Polanyi, or G.K. Chesterton for a good grab-bag of approaches to exploding this. I am coming to conclusion is better to mock it than reason with it. Dawkins is a hard-line offender on this, but there are so many others. They even start their books with stuff along the lines of, "I know I am a mere reductionist, and this is really philosophically silly, but I do not repent and recant because I know not how".) His religion and faith is science. It is belief in evolutionism, not just biological evolution. To him, other faiths (OK, let's get it out, Christianity, he cannot be that bothered to mock animists, Buddhists, or Hindus), are absurd in general. They are amusingly quaint and superstitious. His attitude to the `noble savage' of the Maya/Aztec, the Dakota Sioux, and the woadfully aggressive Celts wavers between the patronising and the politically correct multiculturally pseudo-respectful. The human sacrifice, scalping, and savage gods of the savages somehow fail to hold his attention long enough to actually write of them. (Just try watching the films `A Man Called Horse', and the sequel to get a real idea. Or read `The Epic of Gilgamesh', and the grislier bits of Greek mythology.) His equation of the beliefs of Stone Age man and the faith of builders of Gothic cathedrals is insulting, but there is more to any of them than there is to him. But modern is as modern does. He looks down on our ancestors, not at them. He is infected with what C.S. Lewis called `chronological snobbery'.
And what is science anyway? What is this god that he so worshipfully serves? It is just a description of `How Things Work'. How do plants work? Photosynthesis. How does photosynthesis work? By the chemistry of chlorophyll and capture of the photons of the sun. How does the chemistry work? By electrons being passed around, they are atomic particles, we can calculate the energy gained and lost, and glory, glory, we make bread from the plant and digest it and then we have the energy! QED, cogito ergo sum. You get the idea. Science is about mechanisms, how things work, how the knee-bone is connected to the ankle-bone. But does he `Hear the word of the Lord'? No. He does not know what it all Means, he is all Mechanism. And scientists really are just mechanics. All his many-spendoured anthropological terminological circumlocutions and prestidigitations lead to a big round `nil points' in the point-of-it-all department. `Skias onar anthropos' - 'man is but a dream of a shadow' - so said the ancient Greek, and the ancient Hebrew asked God `What is man that thou art mindful of him?', but in truth he has yet to wake up for the first time to these things. He thinks a lot, but he is not mindful. Man can live without science, and did so for thousands of years, but he cannot live even threescore years and ten without meaning. Let us not kow-tow to Science or its priesthood, either they serve us or destroy us. Only men can rule men. Ignore the soul and you lose it.
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