Telegraph | Arts | What are we thinking of?

The Great Cold:

A book review in today's Telegraph asks "What are we thinking of?" It concerns a new book warning of environmental collapse based on historic models:

Some of the case-histories make this point convincingly. The early Norse settlers in Iceland, for example, came close to rendering the island uninhabitable, but veered from the brink just in time. (It took them a while to discover that although the green and wooded landscape resembled that of Scandinavia, the soil on which it was based was something quite unlike their native earth: a layer of fine volcanic ash, held in place only by a thin web of vegetation, and easily blown away once that vegetation was cleared.)

Their counterparts in Greenland, on the other hand, never learned from their mistakes: they cut down whatever they could burn, dug up huge areas of turf to make insulating walls, over-grazed the scanty grassland, and fought against the local Eskimos (whose ingenious methods for surviving in this environment they never bothered to copy). After several hundred years of frost-bitten subsistence, the two Norse colonies on Greenland succumbed to fighting and starvation.

How seriously should we take the idea that the failures of Norse Greenland, Easter Island and other such societies constitute warnings for our societies today?

The facts about Norse Greenland are a bit different than the book presents. The environmental change that mattered most had nothing to do with human activity, but a mini Ice-Age:

Sea ice off the coast of Iceland nearly vanished for three centuries. The effects seem to have spread to North America, where in AD 900 Eskimos settled Ellesmere Island at the usually frigid northwest corner of Greenland....

Then a chill set in. Slowly at first. People didn't want to believe it. Farmers were reluctant to give up their new fields. Settlers on Greenland held on for as long as possible. But the steadily expanding cold was irresistible by the 1200s. Unspeakable hardships began to take hold in much of the world. In Iceland, extensive grasslands that had supported sheep, goats, and cattle from AD 874 had receded by 1200. Farming became so difficult that Icelanders turned to fishing and the hunting of seals to support themselves. The population fell sharply....

By 1700, Iceland was surrounded with sea ice that made commerce with the rest of the world hazardous. And in faraway China, citrus groves that had survived for centuries froze in Jiangxi province.

There's a lesson here, yes. Just not the one the author intended.