You've undoubtedly heard British philosopher Thomas Hobbes's famous quote that in the past, our forebears' lives were "nasty, poor, brutish, and short." That's certainly true in my ancestors' case, given that just about all of them were poverty-stricken French and Scottish peasants who uprooted and came over to North America because they thought for some reason it would be lots better to be poverty-stricken peasants over here.
I've had at least some inkling about how difficult life was back then since my history classes in college, but it was always in a purely academic way. While my parents weren't wealthy by any stretch, we never wanted for food on the table, and any struggles they had paying the bills were well hidden and not talked about. As an adult, I went through a long period in my life when I was the sole member of the family with a paying job, and it was scary to think that if I'd lost it, we would have been screwed; but I never really was in any danger of that. As long as I kept showing up to school every day and teaching my classes with a reasonable level of competence, I could count on being able to pay the mortgage.
Hundreds of years ago, though, that simply wasn't true for the vast majority of humanity. I think what really brought home to me the precarious existence most people led was when I read the book The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History by Brian Fagan (which I highly recommend). For most of human history, people have literally been one bad harvest season from starvation and one sudden epidemic from being wiped out en masse. All it took was a single prolonged drought, early frost, or extended period of cool, rainy weather spoiling the crops, and people had nothing to fall back on.
No wonder so many of them were superstitious. It's easy to put your faith in magical thinking when your lives hinge on a set of conditions you don't understand, and couldn't control even if you did.
What is striking, though, is how insulated the leaders of countries have always felt from the effects of all of this -- often to the extent of ignoring them completely. There's an argument to be made that it was a series of weather-related poor harvests that lit the tinder box in the French Revolution (and many of the leaders didn't find out their mistake until they were being led to the guillotine). But to take a less well-known example, let's look at a paper that came out last week in the journal Science Advances about a different civilization, the fascinating Classical Mayan culture, which lasted over six hundred years -- from about 250 to 900 C. E. -- completely dominating the Yucatán Peninsula in southern Mexico and northern Central America before collapsing with astonishing speed. Cities were abandoned to the jungle, the elaborate building and carving stopped entirely, and the entire region went largely silent until the rise of the city of Mayapan in the twelfth century.
Scientists from the University of Cambridge did a study of the chemical composition of the oxygen isotope ratios in the limestone deposited on stalagmites in caves in the northern Yucatán, which can be read in layers like tree rings. Oxygen isotope ratios are a good proxy for rainfall; oxygen-18:oxygen-16 ratios tend to drop during the rainy season, so an overall low 18:16 ratio is a strong signal of drought.
And what the scientists found was that during the time between 871 C.E. and 1021 C.E. there was a severe thirteen-year drought, and three shorter (five to six year) droughts. Water supplies dried up, crops failed, trade stopped, and the inevitable happened -- the common people blamed their leaders. Violent revolution ensued, and in the end, a civilization that had dominated the region for centuries collapsed completely.
It's easy to think something like this couldn't happen to us, but right now we're in the middle of one of the most dramatic climate shifts on record, with global average temperatures rising faster than they did during the terrifying Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, 55 million years ago. And you know what the Trump regime's response to this is?
Just last week they announced plans to deliberately destroy the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, one of our chief climate monitoring satellites. Not because it's malfunctioning; it's working fine. Not because it costs lots of money; it's already paid for.
No, the reason they want to destroy the satellite is the same as the reason they stopped keeping track of new COVID cases during the height of the pandemic. If you don't measure something, you can pretend it's not happening.
Destroying the OCO won't stop the effects of anthropogenic climate change, of course. It'll just prevent us from seeing them coming.
So I may have misspoken at the beginning, in leading you to believe that our ancestors were any different from us with regards to the fragility of our existence -- and the tendency to fall back on unscientific thinking. But let us hope that the ignorance and greed of our current elected officials won't return us to another era of nasty, poor, brutish, and short lives, where the risk of starvation was never far away.
This time, though, if it happens it won't be an unfortunate result of living in a world we don't understand. It will be a self-inflicted wound caused by trusting power-hungry people who know perfectly well what they are doing, but value short-term expediency over the long-term habitability of the planet.
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