Georgina H. Endfield

Critical perspectives on historical collapse

Historical collapse of ancient states or civilizations has raised new awareness about its possible relevance to current issues of sustainability, in the context of global change. This Special Feature examines 12 case studies of societies under stress, of which seven suffered severe transformation. Outcomes were complex and unpredictable. Five others overcame breakdown through environmental, political, or socio-cultural resilience, which deserves as much attention as the identification of stressors. Response to environmental crises of the last millennium varied greatly according to place and time but drew from traditional knowledge to evaluate new information or experiment with increasing flexibility, even if modernization or intensification were decentralized and protracted. Longer-term diachronic experience offers insight into how societies have dealt with acute stress, a more instructive perspective for the future than is offered by apocalyptic scenarios.

The resilience and adaptive capacity of social-environmental systems in colonial Mexico

Civilization collapse scenarios highlight what for some are worrying parallels between past case studies and societies under threat from apparently unprecedented global environmental and climate change today. Archive-based studies of socio-economic responses to climate variability in colonial Mexico suggest that the complex interactions between environment and society influence the degree to which regional livelihoods may be vulnerable or resilient to disruption and also illustrate that vulnerability to change can lead to improved understanding of risk and increased adaptive capacity. In this paper, I draw on examples to argue that experience of climate variability, extreme weather events, or weather-related events and crises can challenge societal resilience, but can also increase opportunities for learning and innovation, extending the repertoire of adaptive responses. The historical examples selected might help inform the degree to which societies can develop strategies to deal with environmental perturbations at different scales and highlight that social breakdown and collapse are not an inevitable result of transformation.

Drought, desiccation and discourse: missionary correspondence and nineteenth-century climate change in central southern Africa

This paper examines the role that representatives of the London Missionary Society in central southern Africa during the nineteenth century may have played in the development of geographical debates concerning the long-term desiccation of the African continent. Observations on climate included within missionary documents are used to reconstruct a chronology of intra-decadal climatic variability for the period 1815-1900. This reveals six drought periods and seven wet phases that affected large areas of the region, but identifies no evidence for progressive desiccation. The chronology is then used as a framework within which to view missionary perspectives on drought and desiccation. Major influences upon the development of desiccationist theory appear to include the prevalence of contemporary moral economic explanations of climatic variability, as well as the uptake and acceptance of indigenous understanding of climate change. Significantly, many of the key observations by eminent missionaries used as supporting evidence for progressive desiccation are identified as having been made during periods of severe drought. This is used to suggest that the most widely propagated evidence for desiccation may, therefore, simply be the end-product of periods of short-term drought rather than long-term climatic deterioration.

Conflicts Over Water in 'The Little Drought Age' in Central Mexico

M?xico represents one of the most climatically sensitive regions of the world. Over the Colonial period, prolonged drought episodes had severe impacts on all sectors of society, particularly indigenous rural populations. This paper employs a variety of colonial historical records to document the nature and extent of these impacts within the context of prevailing social, political and economic condi tions. It is clear that access to water has long been a source of contention especially during drought episodes. Resource monopolisation by individuals and institutions such as the church served to exacerbate this situation particularly during the 18th century.

Multi-proxy summer and winter precipitation reconstruction for southern Africa over the last 200 years

This study presents the first consolidation of palaeoclimate proxy records from multiple archives to develop statistical rainfall reconstructions for southern Africa covering the last two centuries. State-of-the-art ensemble reconstructions reveal multi-decadal rainfall variability in the summer and winter rainfall zones. A decrease in precipitation amount over time is identified in the summer rainfall zone. No significant change in precipitation amount occurred in the winter rainfall zone, but rainfall variability has increased over time. Generally synchronous rainfall fluctuations between the two zones are identified on decadal scales, with common wet (dry) periods reconstructed around 1890 (1930). A strong relationship between seasonal rainfall and sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the surrounding oceans is confirmed. Coherence among decadal-scale fluctuations of southern African rainfall, regional SST, SSTs in the Pacific Ocean and rainfall in south-eastern Australia suggest SST-rainfall teleconnections across the southern hemisphere. Temporal breakdowns of the SST-rainfall relationship in the southern African regions and the connection between the two rainfall zones are observed, for example during the 1950s. Our results confirm the complex interplay between large-scale teleconnections, regional SSTs and local effects in modulating multi-decadal southern African rainfall variability over long timescales.

Drought and disputes, deluge and dearth: climatic variability and human response in colonial Oaxaca, Mexico

Abstract ‘Extreme’ weather events such as droughts, floods, hurricanes, frosts and unusually high or low temperatures can have immense and immediate social, economic and environmental impacts. Investigations of historical extreme weather events, and the nature of the social responses to them, afford insight into the way in which societies have been affected by and have adapted to these events in the past. Historical documents represent invaluable sources to investigate these themes. In this paper we use a range of archival sources to investigate how society in colonial Oaxaca, southern Mexico, was affected by and responded to different types of extreme weather event. Our findings indicate that while drought contributed to antagonism over water supplies between users, it was also used opportunistically to support or challenge cases of water deprivation in legal proceedings. Flooding appears to have been a relatively frequent phenomenon in colonial Oaxaca, but a number of particularly devastating flood events are recorded in the archives. The impact of these events appears to have been determined as much by the timing of the events and level of socio-economic preparedness, as by scale of the flood itself. We then analyse harvest losses due to a range of different climatic phenomena. We highlight how different cross-sections of the community and the local administration responded to these events and suggest that some of the documented harvest losses might have actually been encouraged by high risk agricultural practices.

Climate Warming and 21st‐Century Drought in Southwestern North America

Since 2000, southwestern North America has experienced widespread drought. Lakes Powell and Mead are now at less than 50% of their reservoir capacity, and drought or fire-related states of emergency were declared this past summer by governors in six western states. As with other prolonged droughts, such as the Dust Bowl during the 1930s, aridity has at times extended from northern Mexico to the southern Canadian prairies. A synthesis of climatological and paleoclimatological studies suggests that a transition to a more arid climate may be occurring due to global warming, with the prospect of sustained droughts being exacerbated by the potential reaction of the Pacific Ocean to warming.

Missionaries and Morals: Climatic Discourse in Nineteenth‐Century Central Southern Africa

The letters, personal papers, and journals written by British missionaries based at mission stations within and around the Kalahari region of central southern Africa in the nineteenth century provide an invaluable insight into time- and place-specific interactions with local cultures and environments. This article employs a range of unpublished and published missionary correspondence and travelogues to examine two key aspects regarding the conceptualization of and responses to climatic variability in the region. First, we explore the way in which missionaries positioned climate variability within a moral economic framework and illustrate their attitude towards local drought myths and rainmaking superstitions. This reveals a degree of conflict in the respective environmental ideologies of missionaries and the local populations. Moreover, while missionaries appear to have linked drought to moral degradation, local populations had their own “environmental religion” or climatic philosophy that located the arrival of the European within a framework of climatic change. Second, we examine the introduction of irrigation technology to the region by the missionaries. The actual construction of irrigation projects provided a forum for cultural interaction, but findings also indicate that irrigation was considered to be not only a practical response to climatic conditions in the region and a means by which the missionaries could assert some ideological control over this environment, but also a route towards moral redemption of the local populations and environments.

Cultural spaces of climate

Climate change has become a dominant environmental narrative at the start of the twenty first century. The political and media focus on the possible implications of climate change, however, the predominantly scientific discourse in which this is couched, and the increasingly globalscale of climate thinking, have obscured the culturally specific and spatially and temporally distinctive meanings of climate more generally (Ross 1991; Hulme 2008a, b). Climate and its cultural significance have, in effect, become decoupled, and popular conceptualisations and discourses of climate, and its manifestations through local weather, have been replaced by a global, and predominantly scientific, meta-narrative. Moreover, contemporary debates over the ‘imminent’ climate threat obscure a long, complicated history of public engagement in meteorological science and changing ideas about climate. There have been different ideological and symbolic constructions of climate at different points in history and in order to better understand these distinctive meanings, it has been argued that there is a need to reintroduce particularity to the debate (Hulme 2009). Recent geographical scholarship, for example, has called for research that considers the ‘idea’ of climate as a “hybrid phenomenon” which can and should be constructed, not only through the use of meteorological statistics but also “inside the imagination”, through “sensory experiences, mental assimilation, social learning and cultural interpretations” (Hulme et al. 2009: 197), while there is a need to understanding of how different groups of people in different spatial contexts conceptualise and understand climate and its fluctuations (Hassan 2000; Adger 2003). Such work would investigate climate (and weather) as a function of personal memory, experience and intergenerational transfer of ‘climate knowledge’ (Hulme 2009: 330), and by definition, demands a more intimate spatial resolution than global perspectives can offer. Various publications have begun to focus on cultural histories of attitudes toward the weather (Jankovic 2001: Golinski 2007; Boia 2005; Anderson 2005), the myriad ways in which humans have understood the idea of climate across a range of temporal and spatial scales (Fleming et al. 2006), and the genealogy of climate change debates (Fleming 1998). Such approaches are demonstrating the importance of spatially, temporally and culturally Climatic Change (2012) 113:1–4 DOI 10.1007/s10584-012-0416-6

Perception or deception? Land degradation in post-conquest Michoacán, west central México

Historical sources are increasingly being used as a media for reconstructing environmental histories in many parts of the world. The rich archival collections of Mexico, for example, are recognised as an important source of information relating to Post-Conquest environmental change at both a regional and a local scale. While such sources provide a unique window through which to view the past, it is imperative that the degree of subjectivity and bias inherent within these documents must be taken into account. In this paper we illustrate some of the problems and pitfalls in the use and interpretation of these sources using the example of colonial Michoacan, west-central Mexico. Three document types relating to different phases of the colonial period are used to exemplify this concern. These indicate that to gain significance and meaning archival information must be considered within the socio-economic and political context of the period in which they were compiled. Copyright