TEN

Global Environmental Change, Resilience, and Sustainable Outcomes

Charles L. Redman

It is increasingly clear that change is as “normal” a condition as stability when considering the condition of social-ecological systems. It is equally clear that knowledge of those systems must rely not just on the characteristics of the elements of the systems but equally on an understanding of the interactions among those units and the interactions of that system with forces and entities external to it. Moreover, there is deepening recognition that the world is extremely complex, that even the best scientific research on it comes with great uncertainty, and that many processes that govern it behave in a nonlinear fashion. All of this makes understanding and managing the world around us and our place within it extremely challenging, yet doing so remains fundamentally important to our collective future. We all must face living with the dangers of sudden environmental change. The chapters in this volume provide a new perspective on this problem by analyzing how past societies attempted to understand the hazards they faced, mitigate their impacts, and each in its own way avoid disasters. Each chapter is an analysis of regional archaeological data to learn about social responses to the threat and actuality of environmental hazards engendered by sudden and not so sudden but significant environmental change. Despite their limitations, archaeological data provide a new and potentially useful source of insight into how human groups adapt to the threat of environmental changes and how they respond to environmental changes that do occur.

The new insights archaeological case studies offer are particularly welcome in that global environmental change is one of the primary threats to society in the twenty-first century. Because the impact of climate change can be expected to be a gradual process that, on average, may not change as much as interannual or interregional variability, most global changes will not be obvious to the casual observer. However, predictions are that we will best sense the effects of anthropogenic climate change through the occurrence of more frequent and extreme “natural events.” For example, the gradual increase in atmospheric temperature will not be noticeable on a year-to-year basis (or at least separable from normal inter-annual fluctuations), yet it is likely that the frequency and intensity of heat waves impacting cities around the world will increase and significantly affect their populations. Heat waves are already the natural disaster responsible for the greatest number of fatalities worldwide, and we can expect that number to grow in the coming decades. Climate change will also alter regional precipitation patterns, leading to more frequent and intense flooding in some regions and more frequent and intense droughts in others. These changes, in turn, will exacerbate patterns of erosion and be responsible for mudslides, dust storms, and other hazards. It is expected that as ocean waters warm, storms such as hurricanes will increase in intensity, leading to greater wind damage and coastal flooding.

The impacts of global climate change will most likely be experienced as the kinds of natural hazards that have been happening regionally since prehistoric times, but they can be expected to occur more frequently and to be more intense. Hence, the way people have organized themselves in the face of regional natural hazards or sudden environmental changes in the past provides insight into what the key variables will be in organizing ourselves to recognize and deal with global environmental change in the future. Several observations reported in this volume’s chapters have revealed patterns in the past that should help structure contemporary thinking. A theme that runs through almost all of the chapters is that environmental change and natural hazards are not disasters in themselves. As Jago Cooper points out, the recognition and impact of hazards on local societies are culturally contingent and are very much shaped by the ecological knowledge of members of the society. Several of the authors indicate that the way these hazards are culturally constructed and conveyed is directly related to their frequency of occurrence and impact in the recent past. More frequent and more sudden hazards are often prominently encoded in local knowledge and are more likely to be acted upon in precautionary ways Cooper and Payson Sheets describe in the volume’s introduction.

Geography is also a key factor in understanding human attitudes and adaptations to potential natural hazards. Although volcanic activity is not usually associated with anthropogenically caused global environmental change, it is certainly a natural hazard and also an excellent “laboratory” for understanding human preparations and responses to sudden environmental change. As both Ben Fitzhugh and Sheets point out, the direct impact of each form of volcanic activity has a spatial signature that is different from others, depending on the distance and direction from the epicenter. In some areas destruction and fatalities are so complete that avoidance may be the only safe adaptation. In other situations there is a warning; serious impacts can be avoided through mobility, and the locality can be reoccupied relatively soon. Fitzhugh found that settlements were not in the locations that would have been most vulnerable to destruction from tsunamis, perhaps not because of recognition of that danger itself but more likely prompted by the more frequent and sometimes devastating ocean storms. This avoidance of vulnerable areas was more possible in the Kuril Islands because of their low population density and the relative mobility of their settlements, allowing residents to avoid and reoccupy areas relatively soon after hazards hit. In fact, in both regions (and in the US Southwest as well) the authors suggest that for some localities the long-term effect of volcanic activity is positive because it improves agricultural potential and even increases usable land surface in coastal or island situations.

Geography sometimes acts to draw settlements into vulnerable areas because of its potential advantages. As Margaret Nelson and colleagues suggest for the arid US Southwest, Daniel Sandweiss and Jeffrey Quilter for the deserts of coastal Peru, and Tate Paulette for Mesopotamia, settlement along river courses through otherwise arid terrain allows for irrigation agriculture that could have supported large populations and advanced societies. To take advantage of the potential of river water at the scale each of these societies did, major investments in infrastructure were required to divert the water from the rivers and distribute it across the fields. As Nelson and colleagues point out, this made these societies “place-restricted” so that moving their settlements was not easy to do; hence they were more or less “trapped” by their food-producing technology. This caused them to be vulnerable to floods that would periodically destroy much of the irrigation infrastructure, imposing a major reconstruction cost on society. Some major floods, as in the Peruvian case, carried such sediment loads that entire settlements could be destroyed; in extreme situations the actual course of the river would change, leaving many major settlements without their primary source of sustenance—as is hypothesized to have happened in early Mesopotamian history. In other situations, as Emily McClung de Tapia describes for Teotihuacan in central Mexico, the presence of a growing city whose residents were originally attracted by environmental resources often depletes those resources as its population and footprint grow. Hence the deforestation surrounding Teotihuacan made it more vulnerable to flooding and soil erosion, while at the same time the spread of the city itself consumed optimal agricultural land, leading to a dual vulnerability in the long term.

Just as geography may have acted as a positive attractor to settlements and, later, put the settlements at risk, so did social institutions develop that were designed to take advantage of the situation but eventually created a rigidity that stifled adaptive responses. Many of the authors report on situations that reflected this phenomenon. Andrew Dugmore and Orri Vésteinsson relate that the long-distance administration that had contributed to the establishment and periodic success of Icelandic society was also unresponsive to environmental changes and inhibited necessary restructuring of adaptations. Similarly, in Mesopotamia, hierarchically distant administrators had little awareness of or concern for the changing local conditions that undermined agricultural productivity. Both Sheets for Central America and Nelson and colleagues for the Southwest identified key cross-scale interactions in which the environmental changes gradually undermined the adaptive capabilities of the central government, stifling change and making it less able to cope with subsequent shocks.

Sheets and Cooper reflect the range of the chapter authors’ ideas by suggesting in their introduction six “tools” prehistoric (and perhaps contemporary) societies used to cope with sudden environmental change: settlement location, household architecture, food procurement strategies, reciprocal social networks, education, and disaster management planning. I would like to generalize this one level further and consider these and other strategies as examples of four basic problem-solving strategies people have used to cope with all sorts of challenges they have faced. The four domains of adaptive strategies societies have employed throughout time can be summarized as follows (Redman 1999):

1. Locational flexibility and mobility
2. Ecosystem management
3. Built environment and other technologies
4. Social complexification

What makes many of the strategies in all of these domains so challenging to either endorse or condemn is that each of them appears to have emerged because it had very positive results for the communities involved. Yet many of the strategies introduced new vulnerabilities that, over time, may have undermined those same communities. For example, locational flexibility and mobility as a key element of a settlement system dominated much of early human prehistory. However, the advantages of sedentism in terms of investing in more substantial facilities and productive infrastructure led increasing numbers of communities to adopt a more place-restricted settlement pattern. Similarly, with ecosystem management, many immediate advantages would accrue by practicing deforestation to open landscapes for cereal production, introducing non-native species for food production, and redirecting local hydrology for irrigating fields.

However, each of these practices also introduces vulnerabilities that may not be apparent until a substantial period of time has passed or the region experiences what would not otherwise be a disastrous environmental stress.

Humans are probably best known as creators of new technologies and built environments to meet the challenges they face. Terraces to improve agriculture on slopes, levees to keep modest rises in river levels from flooding homes and fields, and the more recent use of chemicals to combat pests and competing plants all produce clear advantages but also lead to unintended consequences. For example, terraces require continual labor inputs and inhibit mobility, levees allow more construction in floodplains that may be disastrous in extreme events when the river overtops them, and the heavy use of formerly effective chemicals can either have deleterious side effects or cause the pests to evolve into chemical-resistant strains. This is an important lesson for those currently considering technological versus social solutions to the threats posed by accelerating climate change. Finally, what may be the most subtle contradictions arise from the establishment of social institutions—both informal rules and more formal organizations—to take advantage of, and continue to manage, environmental opportunities and threats. The case studies point out how various institutions that emerged to derive benefits from local environmental conditions often stagnated or were at an inappropriate scale to continue as a positive force once the environment and society had changed.

The objective of recategorizing these adaptive strategies is to situate the insights that have emerged from the case histories of particular human responses to sudden environmental changes as reflective of the more universal issue of human decision-making as it led to the success or failure of societies. There are any number of specific reasons societies have stagnated, diminished, or ceased to exist as a cultural unit; but, as Jared Diamond suggests, all of these cases had one common thread: a failure within the decision-making process. Diamond sees four basic reasons for these failures that can also be seen in the case studies reported here: failing to anticipate the problem, not recognizing the problem, not trying to solve it, and, if recognizing the problem and trying to solve it, not responding in a timely or appropriate manner (2005: 221).

From the case studies, two other insights can be added. First, many human responses to environmental changes are intended to introduce adjustments or buffering that allow the society to weather the more frequent smaller-scale and smaller-intensity events that must be confronted on decadal or more frequent timescales; by doing so the responses often introduce serious vulnerabilities to the less frequent but devastating extreme events. Second and related to the first, most human decision-making appears to be designed to enhance shortterm opportunities and minimize risks to frequent or short-term threats, with little attention to the long-term implications of these actions or to how to deal with opportunities and threats that only become apparent after a long time. It is easy for an archaeologist who focuses on long-term phenomena to suggest that the panacea for a society is to reverse this priority or at least put long-term planning and management in the forefront. I would like to do this, but I also recognize that, in this competitive world, for a society to “reach” the long term it has to be successful in a series of short-term situations. Hence this is not a simple tradeoff; rather, one must discover long-term positive actions that are also positive in the short term. History has demonstrated that many societies are not able to find solutions that achieve both goals.

Diamond presents another way to conceptualize this fundamental tradeoff. He sees many of these decisions coming down to a social group or a society having to decide in the face or threat of environmental change which of its normative beliefs, practices, and institutions to hold on to and which to give up. It is not a trivial matter that one should be expected to effectively “adapt” to the new conditions by giving up traditional ways of doing things because many of these traditional ways of doing things may be the essence of the group’s social identity or other functioning. Diamond retells how the late Medieval Norse of Greenland held on to their agrarian ways instead of switching to their neighboring Inuits’ mobile hunting strategies; this allowed them to retain their social identity but led to their complete demographic collapse (Diamond 2005: 248–276; McGovern et al. 1988). This is not just a historic issue, of little contemporary significance. Thomas Friedman suggests in The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999) that how to maintain traditional values while adopting efficient foreign practices is a basic conundrum facing much of the modern world.

We can go further in linking the insights from the case studies to two related conceptual frameworks: vulnerability and resilience theories. Nelson and colleagues and several other authors have already started this, and I am building on their foundations. A system’s vulnerability is related to three primary factors: magnitude of the stress or shock, exposure of the system to the stress or shock, and the system’s sensitivity to the stress or shock (Adger 2006; Turner et al. 2003). Concerning hazards such as volcanoes, hurricanes, droughts, and floods, it is unlikely that action by the social group to be impacted could significantly change the external input of the hazard. This does not deny the long-term impact cumulative, local mitigation strategies might have on diminishing the level of anthropogenically induced global environmental change, only that the results of these effects will not be apparent in a short time. However, mitigation and adaptation strategies aimed at reducing the system’s exposure to the stress and strategies aimed at reducing its sensitivity to the stress can have significant effects on reducing the impact. Minimizing exposure through settlement location and mobility, enhanced architectural precautions, and a diversity of food sources can reduce the vulnerability to associated environmental changes. Equally important are efforts to strengthen the system against the adverse impacts of hazards it will be exposed to, such as building social networks to provide aid and shelter to those affected. We have also recognized in recent years that hazards differentially impact the weaker segments of society and that building their capacities would disproportionately lower the overall vulnerability of the system.

Related to efforts to reduce system vulnerability by lowering the sensitivity of the system is building its resilience to stresses and shocks. The resilience of a social-ecological system is defined as its ability to experience external stresses and shocks and maintain its core functioning and characteristics (Folke 2006; Holling and Gunderson 2002). Nelson and her colleagues as well as Paulette relate their case studies to ideas from resilience theory. Several key concepts resonate with the situations described in the case studies. First is that change is to be expected and welcomed rather than feared and resisted. The goal is to experience change in a “graceful” way that does not damage the system in an undesirable way. Resilience theorists have created a metaphor figure shaped like a figure 8 to represent the stages of the adaptive cycle of a system experiencing change (Holling and Gunderson 2002: figure 2.1). The adaptive cycle emphasizes the opportunity for positive growth to result from stress-induced system change.

F. Stuart Chapin and his colleagues (2009: 324–328) have suggested four domains of strategies that would enhance social-ecological resilience: fostering biological, economic, and cultural diversity; fostering a mix of stabilizing feedback and creative renewal; fostering social learning through experimentation and innovation; and adapting governance to changing conditions. Among the strategies they recommend, several are particularly appropriate here. Renew the functional diversity of degraded systems after the hazard or sudden change has occurred. Foster retention of stories that illustrate past patterns of adaptation to change (eco-knowledge as described in Cooper’s chapter). Subsidize innovations that foster economic novelty and diversity. Foster stabilizing feedbacks that sustain natural and social capital. Allow modest disturbances that permit the system to adjust to changes in underlying controls. Broaden the problem definition by learning from multiple cultural and disciplinary perspectives and facilitating dialogue and knowledge coproduction among multiple groups of stakeholders. Provide an environment for leadership to emerge and trust to develop. Foster social networking that bridges communication and accountability among existing organizations.

Sudden environmental change has characteristically been viewed with horror. Its unpredictability, enormity, and devastating impact on numerous people contribute to its being seen as a terrible calamity. There is no question that both modern and ancient natural hazards have caused significant loss of life and property and adversely affected many people. Unfortunately, the course of modern history seems to have made these patterns worse, not better. Damage could be reduced and loss of life minimized, and in many cases positive results could emerge in the aftermath of many of these phenomena. It is laudable that this volume brings forward case studies from the past and endeavors to reanalyze them so that we might learn how to minimize our vulnerability to these hazards, build our social-ecological system’s resilience against their unavoidable occurrence, and seek ways to gracefully experience them and emerge with newly reformed and, it is hoped, improved societies.

REFERENCES CITED