The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization (Paperback)

Establishing a scenario beginning twenty thousand years ago, Fagan lines out three Acts for the peopling of the Americas. The first is in "the primodial homeland", Ice Age Siberia, followed by conditions revealed about the Beringian Land Bridge of fifteen thousand years ago. The final act takes us to the chaotic Atlantic and the European environment. Conditions were rarely stable as "the glaciers were never still". Their "irregular dance" kept conditions variable and human response was adapt or perish. Canadian fresh meltwater interrupted the Gulf Stream letting harsh cold envelope Europe.

Human adaptibility often meant improvements on older technologies or innovative ones to cope with the result of climate change. Spears, later with atlatls - "spear throwers" to improve range and accuracy, then bows, were significant tools. Yet, one of the most momentous inventions was the needle - still in use almost unchanged today. This device could produce layered clothing, a major adaptive step in times of abrupt weather changes.

Weather changes can be due to single events - even those occurring at intervals like El Nino. A critical solitary event happened around 6200 BCE with the "implosion" of the Laurentide Ice Sheet. The cascade of fresh water into the North Atlantic created drought conditions throughout Europe and the eastern Mediterranean while raising ocean levels. This rise later led to a catastrophe when the Mediterranean found an outlet to the Euxine Lake. The inflow created the Black Sea, driving people west into the Danube Valley and changing human society in the area drastically. Continuing fluctuations brought further challenges to increasing populations. Stable food supplies provided by agriculture reduced mobility and fed population growth. The cost was people tied to the land and a new vulnerability to climate change.

Fagan's example of this new situation is found in the history of a California people known as the Chumash. These coastal people had deep ties with family members living inland. The arrangement kept food supplies relatively stable through exchange networks. This continuum expanded over a large area resulting in concomitant population growth. When expansion was no longer feasible, war substituted for exchange systems. Not a violent people, the conflicts were the result of environmental pressure on food resources. A drastic social change took place around 1150 AD. The lost networks were restored through a new arrangement. The family system was shelved for a new oligarchy of powerful community leaders working cooperatively with meagre, but sustaining food stocks. While the Chumash remained vulnerable to climate vagaries, they didn't starve as in the past.

Fagan stresses that vulnerability has been built into modern society. Civilisation is a high-stakes game, and the planet is the banker. Most of the cards we played in the past are now in the discard pile. Mobility is not an option when the planet is so thoroughly occupied. New technologies will not provide new lands submerged by rising seas nor blighted by drought. If the Gulf Stream fails again, as it has in the past, it will be all Europe faced with the need for a new home. Where? A Europe covered in ice will produce drought throughout western Asia and likely beyond. It isn't the cause of climate change that requires examination, but what must be done to deal with, Fagan urges. The "stewardship" of resources successfully adopted by some societies must be invoked again. That requires a knowledgeable population, briefed by readers of this book. This is far from a "should read" book - it is a "must read" for us all. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

Overall, if found this to be a very interesting book. On the down side, its various chapters do not tie together in a progressive unfolding of history, but instead hop from subject to subject, like a series of articles. But, that said, this is a fascinating book. The author has an excellent grasp on both human and climactic history, and he succeeds in putting them together to tell the story of mankind, bringing out information that you will be hard pressed to find anywhere else.

I really enjoyed this book, and must admit to have found its lesson of unpredictable, but inevitable, climate change to have been quite sobering. If you want to understand human history, and I mean really understand it, then you must read this book!

Fagan brings together great professional experience to summarise existing anthropological and archaeological evidence, and paints pictures of the human strategies for survival in good and bad environmental conditions over the past 15,000 years. He describes the progressive developments of societies, from hunter gatherer communities to city states, and shows how they made the best use of available resources and ingenuity.

In The Long Summer Fagan clearly illustrates the ever-changing nature of climatic variation. As patterns of glaciation ebb and flow, events such as melting ice can dramatically change the climate of large regions of the earth, often remote from the origin, thrusting the people who live there into new ways of existence as communities are destroyed, often within short time periods. In former times, people survived by changing their diet or migrating to areas with more favourable climatic conditions, but this is denied to more recent civilisations because of national boundaries and competition for resources in a world of high populations.

Choosing examples from different societies in Europe and Asia, and then the Americas, Fagan progresses through the centuries towards the present day, but omits contemporary society except to say that we ignore human impacts on the global climate at our peril, likening the attitudes of modern political leaders to a ship's captain who denies the existence of bad weather.

Repeatedly through the past centuries, societies have waxed and waned in response to favourable and unfavourable climatic conditions. At the end of the good periods comes hardship and destruction, themes which have intensified as time progresses and populations grow. There are sober lessons to be learned from this book, and we had better start learning them.

Fagan has combined the scientific and the social brilliantly to produce an important contribution to debate and a gripping read.