Humanity and environmental change
$250 million 82 scheme to link Aralsk with sea again by building a series of canals and locks. These examples of environmental manipulation demonstrate how human ingenuity can often negate the effects of environmental change. If a human population is unable to adapt its behaviour, manipulate their environment or move to another region when faced with environmental change then it will most likely die out. This is what happened to the Norse settlements in Greenland which lasted from AD 985 till the late 15 th century. This decline is largely attributed to the ‘little Ice age’, a cold interval that lasted from around the 1300s until the mid-1800s. 83 An increase in sea ice would have isolated them and made migrating difficult and a rising number of crop failures due to harsher and longer winters would have led to a decrease in population. Although the slow demise of an entire society is a sobering thought, the extinction of a population is unlikely to occur in the modern era due to improvements in technology (satellite communications, air travel etc.) and availability of aid (philanthropic or governmental). It is clear that humanity has a wide range of responses to environmental change; however, it is important to note that a change in human behaviour is very rarely as a result of just one factor and this is the same for environmental change. It is usually an accumulation of factors that causes a society to alter it behaviour. For instance, it is the believed that the collapse of the Mycenae civilization was a result of a cooling of the Mediterranean Sea that led to lower rainfalls that caused a
series of famines. However, there are those that argue that this was not the sole reason for the collapse, but that a succession of invasions by the sea peoples (see figure 10) finally brought the Mycenaeans to their knees. This demonstrates
Figure 10: The sea peoples pictured fighting the Egyptians at the battle of Djahy.
how a societal change can at first appear to be as the result of just one factor but in reality is the result of several factors of varying importance. This means that when humanity needs to respond to environmental change in the future we should take a holistic approach to finding a solution as we are unlikely to be able to solve the issues it raises without considering human factors.
82 Source 22 83 Source 8
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