Sign in/joinLanguage: English [ others ]
Over forty million books on members' bookshelves.
Hide this

Results from Google Books

Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.

The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization by Brian Fagan
Loading...

The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization

by Brian Fagan

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingConversations
151534,983 (3.91)5
Loading...
won't like will probably not like will probably like will like will love

Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.

Showing 5 of 5
This book traces how climate change has been both a spur to development and a destroyer of civilizations. Beginning with man's pre-history in the stone age he traces how civilizations have tended to increase in size which can only be maintained by the food resources of the existing climate. If climate change occurs which is prolonged on a global scale, there are very few societies which can maintain themselves. ( )
maunder | Apr 21, 2008 |  
Heard Dr. Fagan in a Long Now Foundation lecture. Liked it so much I decided to read some of his books. Glad I did. ( )
rsbohn | Feb 27, 2008 |  
This is very interesting material, a survey from about 15000 BC of how climate change has had significant effects on humanity.
Unfortunately Brian Fagan is just not a very compelling writer. I look forward to seeing the same material covered by a better author.

In terms of substance, I was disappointed by the focus only on the Americas and Europe. Coverage of places like Australia, China, India and Africa would have been valuable.

The most interesting thesis, I thought, was that claim that in Israel we have Kerbarans (nomadic hunter gatherers, eat mainly animals, 13000BC), followed by Natufians (sedentary hunter gatherers, eat mainly plants, 11000BC), who suffer severe problems of drought caused by the Younger Dryas, which leads to agriculture.
The interesting point is that, at this stage, we now have studies of female bones showing stresses caused by hours of daily repetitive work grinding and pounding and whatever to convert agricultural crops into food. Fagan strongly implies that this was a univeral story, that women in pre-agricultural societies do not show these stresses, and those in post-agricultural societies do. I'd like to have seen a lot more discussion of this point from a world-wide perspective. Did the same thing occur when agriculture began in India, China, the Americas, Africa, New Guinea? And was it always women who were saddled with this role? Why not, eg, male and female slaves? And how long did this last? Do we still see these sorts of long term stresses in, eg, bronze age societies? ( )
name99 | Nov 18, 2006 | 1 vote
Michael Shermer counts this among the few books that convinced him that global warming is happening and that anthropogenic explanations are plausible.

Do get a skeptic like Shermer to switch sides is quite a feat! ( )
LokiTwoSpirit | Oct 19, 2006 |  
Showing 5 of 5
0.063 seconds to build listing
no reviews | add a review
You must log in to edit Common Knowledge data.
For more help see the Common Knowledge help page.
Series (with order)
Canonical Title
Original publication date
People/Characters
Important places
Important events
Awards and honors
Epigraph
Seas move within the deep sea, some to sunrises, others to sunsets;
Waves on the surface aspire to noon, waves below to midnight:
Many are the streams flowing in the darkling deep
And underwater rivers rolling in the purple ocean.
Vyacheslav Ivanov, Melampus's Dream, 1907
Dedication
To Anastasia
With love
Please - the cat's name is Copernicus, not Duane!
And archaeology? Blah ... Blah ... Blah
First words
My first introduction to ancient climate came in a freshman course on archaeology taught by a venerable lecturer who had last been in the field sometime before World War I and whose ideas had changed little since.
Quotations
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
Disambiguation notice
Publisher's editors
Blurbers
Book description

Amazon.com (ISBN 0465022820, Paperback)

A professor of anthropology by training, Fagan traces the effects of climactic change on civilizations over the past 15,000 years--a period of prolonged global warning that has only accelerated over the past 150 years. In particular, he's interested in how civilizations have responded to, or been radically altered by, changes in environment. One of Fagan's most compelling examples is his detailed history of the city of Ur, in what is now modern-day Iraq. Once a great city in one of the world's earliest civilizations, it first thrived thanks to abundant rainfall and then suffered even more severely when the Indian Ocean monsoons shifted southward, changing rain patterns. By 2000 B.C. its agricultural economy had collapsed, and today it is an abandoned landscape, an assemblage of decaying shrines in the harshest of deserts. Fagan views this event as pivotal. It was, he writes, "the first time an entire city disintegrated in the face of environmental catastrophe." But not, Fagan notes, the last. In his epilogue, which covers the last 800 years of human history, Fagan explores the climatic upheavals that left 20 million dead in famine-related epidemics in the 19th century. He notes that today 200 million people barely survive on marginal agricultural land in places such as northeastern Brazil, Ethiopia, and the Saharan Sahel. If temperatures rise much above current levels, and rising seas flood coastal plains, the devastation could dwarf any disaster humankind has previously known. Fagan doesn't offer easy solutions, but he presents a compelling history of climate's role in the background--and sometimes foreground--of human history. --Keith Moerer

(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:16 -0400)

(see all 2 descriptions)

The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details.

Popular covers

 

Help/FAQs | About | Privacy/Terms | Blog | Contact | LibraryThing.com | APIs | WikiThing | Common Knowledge | 41,219,090 books!