The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization

by Brian M. Fagan

Book Overview

For more than a century we've known that much of human evolution occurred in an Ice Age. Starting about 15,000 years ago, temperatures began to rise, the glaciers receded, and sea levels rose. The rise of human civilization and all of recorded history occurred in this warm period, known as the Holocene. Until very recently we had no detailed record of climate changes during the Holocene. Now we do. In this engrossing and captivating look at the human...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0465022820
• ISBN13: 9780465022823
• Release Date: December 2004
• Publisher: Basic Books
• Length: 284 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.4" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Excellent, epic overview of climate and human history

_The Long Summer_ by Brian Fagan is in essence a follow up of his excellent earlier work, _The Little Ice Age_, a book that explored the effect of a particular climatic episode on European civilization between the years 1300 and 1850. Fagan expanded his focus greatly in _The Long Summer_ as in this work he analyzed the effects of various climatic events since 18,000 B.C. on the course of Stone Age life, early farming societies, and the evolution of civilizations in Europe, southwest Asia, north Africa, and the Americas, covering climatically-influenced human history from the settlement of the Americas to the origins of the Sumerians to the conquest of Gaul by Rome (which was fascinating) through the end of the Mayan and Tiwanaku civilizations (in Central and South America respectively). As in _The Little Ice Age_, Fagan dismissed both those who discounted the role climatic change had played in transforming human societies and those who believed in environmental determinism (the notion that climate change was the primary cause of major developments in human civilization). Fagan provided many examples of climatic change affecting human history. Between 13,000 and 8,000 B.C. Europe became covered in forest thanks to warming climates and retreating glaciers. This climatic change - and resulting alteration in the ecology of the region - lead to the extinction of the large and medium-sized herd animals that were the favored prey of the Cro-Magnons (such as the mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, giant deer, and reindeer) and their replacement by smaller, generally more dispersed game like red deer, wild boar, and aurochs. Not only did this change in fauna lead to a change in hunting techniques, it also lead to an increased reliance on plant food and in general a much broader diet that included nuts, seeds, tubers, fruit, and fungi. Other changes included increased mobility - and the end of cave art, as tribes and bands were no longer attached to certain areas - and the development of the bow and arrow, much more effective in dense forest against solitary, skittish prey. While Europeans adjusted to a world without megafauna, by 11,000 B.C. a group known as the Kebarans became dependent upon a relatively moist area of oak and pistachio forests that extended from modern Israel through Lebanon and into much of modern Syria. Though not developing agriculture per se, as they did not plant crops but rather relied on wild plants, they nevertheless developed some of the early signs of agriculture, such as pestles, mortars, and other tools to process the seeds and nuts that they harvested, the Kebarans relying on the millions of acorns and pistachios that they collected each year, supplemented by wild grass seeds and wild gazelles. While the development of permanent Kebaran villages anchored to groves of nut-bearing trees and grass stands was a response to climatic and ecological changes brought on by the end of the Ice Age, their eventual end was also largely b

Often spellbinding

Fagan adds a new dimension to the failure of civilizations outside value reversals and psychological self-destruction posed by Brooks Adams, Spengler or de Tocqueville. Data from a variety of sources, not available until now, correlates with history the impacts of climate on civilization. Fagan opens with a curious personal experience - his small sailboat on treacherous Spanish waters, passed by cargo-laden hulks seemingly oblivious to nature's furry. This introduction becomes a wonderful analogy for the "scale of our vulnerability". As we complicate society and "tame" nature we also massively increase the calamity of nature's accumulating response. The Sumerian city of Ur becomes our first tour and what a tour it is. Fagan hits his stride, crystallizing his point when Sumerians are his centerpiece. Conceived around 6000 BCE as a collection of villages already employing canals for irrigation, the region suffered a monsoon shift driving Sumerians to increase organization through innovation. Hence, invention of the city by 3100 BCE. Volcanic induced climate shift eventually ran the Sumerian ship aground, as similar shifts did for others, not only starving the populous but dissolving faith in their gods, kings and way of life. But, Fagan writes, "The intricate equation between urban population, readily accessible food supplies and the economic, political and social flexibility sufficient to roll with the climatic punches has been irrevocably altered." "If Ur was a small trading ship, industrial civilization is a supertanker." And supertankers split in half now and then. The ability to simply return to farming or hunter gathering is now lost given that so many of us occupy the landscape, competing with everyone else under the same conditions. If some of us once comforted ourselves with notions of shinning up the hunting rifle, returning to nature in our tent during such a calamity - forget it. When societies - stretched to the limit - falter under climate change, stress in the psyche comes to the fore in ways never imagined, even (or especially) in abrasive group-oriented societies like ours. Tribal suspicions lie waiting for such opportunities. Making light of Postmodernists without trying to, Fagan notes the same human response by cultures separated by thousands of years, different continents, "meaning and value" systems; "In both the Old World and the New, human societies reacted to climate traumas with social and political changes that are startling in their similarities." Universal human truths after all. "But if we've become a supertanker among human societies, it's an oddly inattentive one. Only a tiny fraction of people on board are engaged with tending the engines. The rest are buying and selling goods among themselves, entertaining each other... Those on the bridge have no charts or weather forecasts and cannot even agree that they are needed; indeed, the most powerful among us subscribe to a theory that says storms don't exist... And

History From The Climate's Point Of View

This is Brian Fagan's most ambitious work yet, an explanation of the development and diffusion of civilization based on climate factors. As in Floods, Famines and Emperors and The Little Ice Age, Fagan here digs into the minutiae of years of research into tree rings and glacial ice cores to illuminate just how much human history has been influenced by our planet's weather. Fagan also demonstrates that long term weather conditions and changes can be predicted with a fair amount of accuracy based on that research. It would be easy for Fagan to capitalize on the sensationalist aspects of other "studies" of global weather and climate trends which predict imminent disaster from global warming and/or cooling. Rather than stoop to such a level, Fagan instead calmly lays out the facts about ENSO, the Gulf Stream, and other global weather patterns and demonstrates that they have been factors in the rise and fall of many civilizations, from Mesopotamia to the Mayas. Just as dispassionately, he details why climatological shifts, some of which could be dramatically quick, in all probability are due to influence some or all of our planet at some time in the future.

Read this book

This is a great synthesis and one that everyone should read. Never mind those who claim some details are not correct. It is the overall scope of the history of this planet that is the important focus. Despite a long history of overpopulation and deforestation, we still have not learned to live reasonably and in harmony with our world. Ancient Egypt was once in a benign Sahara, but it was turned into a desert. Once a society is on the edge of environmental vulnerablity, it takes very little to push it over: a change in weather patterns, a drought, a 500 year cold snap (such as happened in Europe in the 14th century). It seems that we do not learn from the past but have only increased the scale of our vulnerability. Sea levels rise, icecaps shrink, and the world's population is placed in a global experiment of unguessable consequences. We pollute the atmosphere and the seas. This book is a wake up call. Fagan writes, "Civilisation arose during a remarkably long summer... We still have no idea when, or how, that summer will end."

Portrait of our own future?

The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization is another of Brian Fagan's volumes on the interaction of climate and human history. (Others I have read are the Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850, and Floods, Famines and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations). As with the others, this book chronicles the changes in climate throughout the globe and notes the changes effected in the human condition. Whether there is actually a direct correlation between the two or not it would be difficult to really prove since historic events are nonrepeatable, but the frequency with which major changes in human behavior have occurred when climate has shifted is certainly very suggestive. Like most such claims, however, there is probably more to the reality of the situation than is apparent from this distance. His topic, however, is not without significance for our own world, so I highly recommend reading it!The author discusses El Nino, the Southern Oscillation, and the Gulf Stream "conveyor belt" and the effects of the introduction of increased fresh, cold water into it as he does in his other books. A more complete discussion of these phenomena was given in Little Ice Age, however, so if the reader is a little confused by the more limited introduction in this book or is simply curious about them, he/she should definitely read LIA for clarification. Some of the author's points were not new to me. In particular I had read a collection of articles on the concept of human evolution as driven by continental drift and its effect on the Gulf Stream and climate. I have also recently read a book (Secrets of the Sands: The Revelations of Egypt's Everlasting Oasis), which discusses climate change and lifestyle, in this instance that in Egypt and its Oases. The theory that the invasions of the Sea Peoples into Asia Minor, the Levant and Egypt were climate driven had been discussed as early as the '60s and '70s. Other points were probably predictable but had never occurred to me, for instance that the attacks on settled societies by desert invaders were driven by the desperate living conditions of the latter with a major dry spell. Most of the history of the ancient near east is studied from the perspective of the city dwellers, the marginal populations being treated as "unfortunate" intrusions which brought collapse. One almost gets a sense that they did so arbitrarily just to be difficult!An interesting book. It might provide something of a background for courses on ancient civilization. Certainly it would make the ebb and flow of nomadic populations and their impact on the settled societies they boardered more sensible.For those WRITING PAPERS in history, climatology, sociology, and political science: one might look at the effects of climate on ancient societies and predict the likely outcome of a similar down turn on today's populations. Look at writers like Per Bak (How Nature Works: the Science of Self-Organized Criti