Climate Chaos
Lessons on Survival from Our Ancestors
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
A thirty-thousand-year history of the relationship between climate and civilization that teaches powerful lessons about how humankind can survive. Human-made climate change may have begun in the last two hundred years, but our species has witnessed many eras of climate instability. The results have not always been pretty. From Ancient Egypt to Rome to the Maya, some of history’s mightiest civilizations have been felled by pestilence and glacial melt and drought.
The challenges are no less great today. We face hurricanes and megafires and food shortages and more. But we have one powerful advantage as we face our current crisis: the past. Our knowledge of ancient climates has advanced tremendously in the last decade, to the point where we can now reconstruct seasonal weather going back thousands of years and see just how people and nature interacted. The lesson is clear: the societies that survive are those that plan ahead.
Climate Chaos is a book about saving ourselves. Brian Fagan and Nadia Durrani show in remarkable detail what it was like to battle our climate over centuries and offer us a path to a safer and healthier future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
There's an incorrect yet widely held assumption "that the human experience with ancient climatic shifts is irrelevant to today's industrialized world," according to this impassioned history. Anthropology professor Fagan (Fishing) and archaeologist Durrani (Bigger Than History) look at how previous generations have adapted to climate change, going as far back as before the first millennium CE, when early humans valued cooperation and showed "an intimate knowledge of the changing environment... and a deep respect for the natural world." Later sections revisit the end of the Roman Empire, when a plague ran rampant, and how, for example, Native Americans in the early 16th century dealt with drought via "mobility and by maintaining kin ties with neighboring communities." The authors round things out with a handful of "brutally simple" lessons: that humans must better use their skills at planning, cooperation, and reasoning in the face of climate change; that humans have a remarkable ability to predict climate change thanks to science and technology; that a great deal of adaptation must come at the local level; and that connections with family and communities are "a remarkable survival mechanism." Educational and earnest, Fagan and Durrani's work offers an original historical perspective. Climate-minded readers will find much to consider.
