A 600-Year-Old Blueprint for Weathering Climate Change
Modern politicians play the role of wheelers and dealers, brokering alliances or negotiating compromises between different constituencies or interest groups. In Nambikwara society this didn’t happen much because there weren’t really many differences in wealth or status. However, chiefs did play an analogous role, brokering between two entirely diff
... See moreDavid Graeber • The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
Fluctuations in climate have played a significant role in history, first in precipitating the Agricultural Revolution after the close of the last Ice Age, and later in destabilizing regimes during periods of colder temperatures and drought. Lately, there have been concerns over the possible impact of “global warming.” These concerns cannot be dismi
... See moreJames Dale Davidson, Lord William Rees-Mogg • The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age
the Egyptians, who were in charge of the administration in Canaan at that time, had had the foresight to plan for the drought, increasing the production of grain and breeding more hardy cattle, in order to counter the climatic problems that they saw coming. This may, in part, explain why they were in a position to send shipments of grain to the Hit
... See moreEric H. Cline • 1177 B.C.
The Cascadia situation, a calamity in its own right, is also a parable for this age of ecological reckoning, and the questions it raises are ones that we all now face. How should a society respond to a looming crisis of uncertain timing but of catastrophic proportions? How can it begin to right itself when its entire infrastructure and culture deve... See more
The Really Big One
Putting Native Americans back in the picture meant radically redefining what nature means and what the human place in it might be (another undoing of a dichotomy, the nature–culture divide, with profound implications for the environmental movement, which has not yet altogether come to terms with this revision of meaning).