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Book
Review |
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Fagan, Brian. Floods, Famines and Emperors: El Niņo and
the Fate of Civilizations (Basic Books:
New York, 1999). 284 pp, $16.50.
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Over the
past few decades, an ever-growing cadre of world historians repeatedly remind
us that humans interact not only with each other but also with the diverse
ecosystems in which they live. The tremendous interest generated among world
history instructors at both the secondary and university levels in Jared Diamond's
much-acclaimed and provocative works on global environmental history is certainly
emblematic of this trend. The wide-ranging appeal of Diamond's Guns, Germs,
and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997) made it a national best-seller,
garnered the Pulitzer Prize, and even paved the way for its adaptation into
a television special on PBS. Diamond's latest book, Collapse: How Societies
Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), has also captured a readership that
extends well beyond the confines of academia. Yet Diamond's works form only
a small part of the growing literature on global environmental history. |
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Another important contribution to this discussion is Brian
Fagan's Floods, Famines and Emperors: El Niņo and the Fate of Civilizations
(1999). Using the dramatic climatic shifts
that accompanied the El Niņo years of 1982-1983 and 1997-1998 as his point
of departure, Fagan combines recent scientific advances in the understanding
of El Niņo events with archaeological data in order to highlight the role
of climatic anomalies throughout human history. As this well-known archaeologist
at the University of California-Santa Barbara notes in his preface: "Until
recently, scientists studying ancient civilizations and those specializing
in El Niņo barely spoke to one another. Now they work closely together, for
they realize that this once-obscure Peruvian countercurrent is a small part
of an enormous global climatic system that has affected humans in every corner
of the world" (xiv). |
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Fagan points to a strong correlation between climatic upheavals triggered
by El Niņo events, such as droughts, famines, floods, and temperature extremes,
and the collapse of ancient civilizations. Through his discussion of how ancient
societies responded to these environmental challenges, Fagan weaves a sobering
cautionary tale, reminding us that similar threats loom large in the twenty-first
century. He warns that "societies already strained by unwise management of
the environment," are often pushed beyond the "breaking point" by short-term
climate events like El Niņos. While "overpopulation, global warming,
or rapid climate change alone will not destroy our civilization," Fagan argues
that the combination of these stresses, "make us vulnerable to the forces
of climate as never before" (xviii).
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Fagan's study unfolds in three parts. In Part One, he describes the scientific
identification of El Niņo as well as recent advances in our understanding
of its role in global weather patterns. El Niņos occur when warm water accumulates
in the central Pacific and pushes eastward, interfering with the normal pattern
of northeast trade winds. This allows unusually warm, humid air to invade
the west coast of South America, reversing normal weather patterns across
the Pacific. As a result, "the deserts west of the Andes can receive their
average annual rainfall in a day, while the rainforests of Southeast Asia
and Borneo turn as dry as tinder" (xiv). |
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| Until the 1960s, this phenomenon was considered a local counter-current,
particular to the Peruvian coast. Although Sir Gilbert Walker's earlier efforts
to discover the causes of late nineteenth-century monsoon failures in colonial
India uncovered the swaying cycle of atmospheric pressure moving between the
Pacific and Indian oceans, known as the Southern Oscillation, it was not until
UCLA meteorologist, Jacob Bjerknes, demonstrated the intimate relationship
between El Niņo and the Southern Oscillation (collectively referred to as
ENSO) that the global importance of El Niņo became clear. As a result of this
discovery, Bjerknes constructed a groundbreaking conceptual model of climatic
cycles, connecting the "see-saw movements of the Southern Oscillation, the
large-scale air and sea interactions that cause Pacific warming, and some
much larger global telecommunications with climatic variations in North America
and the Atlantic Ocean" (36). |
| While Part One provides the reader with a working knowledge of the global
oceanic and atmospheric interactions associated with the El Niņo phenomenon,
Part Two outlines how El Niņos and similar climatic anomalies in the North
Atlantic have affected the course of human history. Here Fagan poses his central
question: how do droughts, famines, and floods affect the institutions of
a society and the legitimacy of its rulers? He begins by pointing out that
while "we have long known that long-term climatic change profoundly influenced
human evolution and history," relatively little attention has been paid to
short-term climatic shifts (81). His first example analyzes how the end of
the last Ice Age and the long warming period that followed dramatically changed
the rules of human existence, encouraging humans to embrace settled agriculture.
Ironically, while this fundamental human adaptation allowed for population
growth, urbanization, and the rise of complex societies, these settled societies
became more susceptible to short-term climate shifts. |
| Using case-studies from ancient Egypt, the Moche of Peru,
the Mayans of Mesoamerica, and the Anasazi of the American Southwest, Fagan
argues that there are only a handful of ways that societies can respond to
short-term climatic crises: "movement or social collaboration; muddling from
crisis to crisis; decisive, centralized leadership on the part of a few individuals;
or developing innovations that increase the carrying capacity of the land"
(xvi). While Egypt's Middle Kingdom pharaohs learned from the mistakes of
their Old Kingdom predecessors, avoiding civilizational collapse through a
combination of governmental action and technological ingenuity, Moche and
Mayan rulers were trapped by inflexible governmental structures, rigid religious
ideologies, and unsustainable population densities. By contrast, Anasazi society
avoided collapse by simply disbanding its urban settlements and moving to
escape unmanageable environmental conditions. Taken together, these examples
convey a simple message: "The ultimate equation of history balances the needs
of the population and the carrying capacity of the land" (97). According to
Fagan, a society's ability to balance this equation, even in the face of severe
climatic fluctuations, ultimately determines its sustainability or its collapse. |
| In Part Three, Fagan brings his polemical message full circle, reminding us
that "the same relationships between carrying capacity, population, and the
legitimacy of rulers and governments still operate today" (xvii). He scorns
the commonly held delusion that "human innovation will always triumph, and
that population, with its inevitable needs for food, space, and waste disposal,
may therefore expand indefinitely" (xvii). Whether during the four centuries
of the Little Ice Age, which spawned repeated subsistence crises across Europe,
or in the drought-stricken African Sahel of the post-colonial present, Fagan
documents how even in modern times human innovation has not always averted
environmental disasters. Moreover, he demonstrates our technological advancement
since the Industrial Revolution has only increased our vulnerability to both
short-term and long-term climatic crises. Fagan's warning is unequivocal:
"the Industrial Revolution has trapped us, through no one's fault, on an apocalyptic
path that threatens our very existence" (260). He argues that despite the
incredible technological advances of the past two centuries, much of the planet
suffers from unchecked population growth, entrenched poverty, urban sprawl,
deforestation, desertification, soil erosion, pollution, and other forms of
environmental degradation, while the still unknown costs of human-created
global warming loom large on the horizon. Fagan concludes with an impassioned
call for sustainability, arguing that without an unprecedented level of global
cooperation to curb our current shortsightedness humanity runs the risk of
civilizational collapse on a global scale. |
| While I am loath to fault Fagan for his well-intended environmental
advocacy or the ambitious scope of his work, the text is not without its flaws
and idiosyncrasies. Fagan clearly intends to make his research accessible
to both popular and academic audiences, creating an obvious stylistic tension.
The text waffles between meteorological minutiae and globe-trotting personal
anecdotes that read like scenes from an Indiana Jones film. Fagan's tendency
to slip back and forth between ancient history and 'presentist' environmental
advocacy compounds this unevenness. This also raises questions as to what
drives the book's conclusions: historical reality or an overly deterministic
initial premise. |
| Despite its flaws, however, Fagan's contribution to global
environmental history should not be underestimated. Fagan's research on El
Niņo and civilizational collapse preceded, and undoubtedly influenced, both
Jared Diamond's Collapse and Mike Davis's
Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niņo and the Making of the Third World
(2001). In fact, at the undergraduate and graduate level, professors teaching
upper division courses and graduate seminars on world or environmental history
may wish to have students compare and contrast these three books. For example,
it might be useful to take Fagan's pre-modern case-studies, the book's most
original contribution, and compare them with the nineteenth-century examples
in Davis's Late Victorian Holocausts.
Though I would be wary of assigning this sometimes difficult book to freshmen
or sophomore undergraduates or high school students, using individual chapters
to supplement related content may prove fruitful. Whether at the high school
or college level, Fagan's work may also prove to be an especially effective
teaching tool in light of the troubling questions raised by the human failure
to properly address the environmental challenges posed by hurricane Katrina,
earthquakes in Pakistan, and the devastating tsunamis in Southeast Asia. |
Michael Christopher Low
Georgia State University
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