Review by Jane Smiley in the current Harper’s. GLOBAL CRISIS: WAR, CLIMATE CHANGE AND CATASTROPHE IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY (Yale University Press, $40)
It deserves, and rewards, careful reading; so rich is it with cross-referenced scholarship that it must be consumed in small doses. Global Crisis does not concern itself with the causes of climate change but instead does something much more frightening: it details the political ramifications. Like Robb, Parker makes use of tools both scientific (studies of ice cores, tree rings, stalactites and stalagmites, deposits of pollen and spores) and historical (harvest records, parish registers, documentation of revolutions, wars, and famines) to paint a novel picture of a familiar world. Parker situates the 1649 beheading of Charles I of England, for example, in its ecological context—the “Little Ice Age” that engulfed the world during the seventeenth century. Between the years of 1617 and 1651, this global shift caused flooding in Catalonia; heavy snowfall in Fujian province; the wettest European summer in five hundred years; a “perfect drought” in northern India; thirteen years of flooding and drought in the Canadian Rockies; the coldest year ever recorded in Scandinavia; the freezing of the Chesapeake Bay; and ice floes that impeded the progress of the barge carrying Charles’s body up the Thames, an event followed by 226 days of precipitation in other parts of northwestern Europe. The important question is not the cause of the chill (volcanic eruptions and reduced sunspots are two of many suggested culprits) but how governments and their populations dealt with it. The answers are not reassuring. The first was to look for scapegoats, the second to invade neighbors and take their possessions, and the third for the people to rise up against the government. Drought and floods led to crop failure and disease, which led to war and revolution, which led to the deaths of an estimated third of the world’s population. Only one state addressed the crisis effectively—early Tokugawa Japan. Parker makes clear that Shogun Iemitsu succeeded in reforming the nobility and civil service so that the population of Japan survived and even grew through the seventeenth century (he instructed that large stores of grain be set aside in years of plenty and forbade the growing of cash crops instead of food crops in lean years). But the population of Japan was already small as a result of the century of war that had put the shogunate in power. Perhaps the most gruesome chapters are those that trace the English, Scottish, and Irish civil and religious wars. Parker offers telling quotes: “In 1652 an English soldier in Ireland reported that ‘You may ride twenty miles and scarce discern anything, or fix your eye upon any object, but dead men hanging on trees and gibbots.’ The arrival of famine conditions just at the time when the three populations were most riven by religious disagreement meant that divine self-justifications were ready to hand, and armies had no reservations about being brutal. Global Crisis presents us with a challenge: it implies that we should worry about the consequences of global warming as much as its explanations, at least if we want to avoid the bloody havoc of the seventeenth century. Parker shows us that the population must be fed, that agriculture focused on profit eventually fails, that a starving population cannot be overtaxed to preserve the privilege of the few, and that devastation that is predictable must be prepared for (he writes of the barrier completed in the Thames in 1982, at a cost of £534 million, to preserve London from flooding; the property it has protected is now worth £200 billion). I am not the only one who missed Global Crisis—it has gathered only a handful of reviews on Amazon. But it is one of the best and most important books of the year. Every bureaucrat should have a copy. I’ve already started to reread mine. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
