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Once upon a time in Europe, the winters were very very cold and the summers were incredibly hot. "The spring of this year was winter, cold and wet, the bloom of the wine was terrible and the harvest was bad," wrote the Swiss theologian Heinrich Bullinger in 1570.
At first it seemed like a temporary problem, just a bad year. Thus, across the continent, farmers ignored their poor harvests and winegrowers sold wine made of sour grapes that consumers drank with anger as they envisioned rising grain prices.
But extreme weather conditions continued, season after season, until the situation became abnormal again. As William Shakespeare said in the 1593 Richard III"It's the winter of our discontent"
In his book Mutiny Nature, According to the German journalist Philipp Blom, WW Norton & Company, published in March, Shakespeare wrote these words as a literal description of the succession of difficult winters he had just undergone. This period of extreme weather, which would last more than 100 years, is now known as the "Little Ice Age", and Blom says that if we examine its effects in Europe – where they have been best documented – we will do better Understand how we got to where we are today and anticipate the future, because climate change is affecting our lives more and more.
God has abandoned us
In Shakespeare's day, religious authorities postulated that God punished humans for their bad behavior in the face of bad weather, and called for more piety to appease the disappointed deity. This way of thinking has inspired European witch hunts – the idea being that burning women at the stake would thaw the frozen winter land, gently dropping rain on crops in the spring and cool the hot summer sun. But the persecution has failed to change the extreme climate, of course, and so, very slowly, people's ideas about how to deal with the crisis have changed.
Over the next hundred years, in the seventeenth century, a new metaphor of the world begins to impose itself. Instead of God watching over us, the planet – and all of nature – is treated like a clock, a mechanism that follows the natural laws that we humans can discern through observation and observation. ;experimentation. Scientists are seriously interested in the exchange of information. Botanists send plants across continents and Europe, fighting for grain growing, adopts new crops, such as tulips and potatoes, which prove to be the basis for new markets and new cuisines. The economies are changing. The rich get rich, the poor get poorer and a small middle class is born.
Towards 1700, when the weather returned to more lenient weather, many of the ideas shaping the world we live in have already emerged, including the notions of a free market with its own logic. And, of course, it is the "forces" of the market that have motivated the behavior that has led to the widespread exploitation of natural resources, contributing to the current climate crisis, Blom points out.
So, the snake eats its tail. The new approach to growing food and wealth created by the Little Ice Age has brought us to where we are today, with the melting of its ice sheets and sea level rise. .
More things change
It was not thought that the Little Ice Age was man-made, although later research in Quaternary Science Reviews challenges it, concluding that the war and diseases in North America have resulted in cooling. Some hypothesized that it was the result of an increase in volcanic activity that affected the salinity of the oceans, which altered the pressures of deep water and, consequently, weather conditions. Others argue that the increase in volcanic activity is the result and not the cause of the extreme climate.
Whatever the cause, Blom says we can better understand the future by examining the past. History tells us how we arrived at the current situation and the difficulties that await us.
If he is right, there is a reason to be both fearful and optimistic. The Little Ice Age was a time of crisis in Europe. But the need has turned out to be the mother of the invention. The problems also sparked innovation and exploration, laying the groundwork for a whole new way of life.
For example, at the beginning of extreme weather, Amsterdam was essentially an unimpressed village in the Netherlands. In a century, it has become a bustling port city and a sophisticated metropolis, a place where intellectuals of all beliefs and beliefs have exchanged new and radical ideas, where markets, arts and publishing houses have all prospered. Trade with the Baltic Sea ports in places where the serfs whose work was essentially unpaid farmed the grain allowed Amsterdam to evolve.
Positive transformation has been forced by difficult circumstances. So, in the best case, we will also have our own Enlightenment period to which we will be eager to wait. But according to the story, before things get better, they will get worse, predicts Blom.
Take only what you need
His analysis of the Little Ice Age as it has affected Europe is a testament to the struggles of a continent in evolution. To cope with the new circumstances and feed the hungry people at home, the Europeans relied on international mass exploitation – slavery and colonization – to accumulate great wealth that led to the rise of the continent.
Rich Europeans have also forced the poor to make profits. Landowners across the continent have eliminated public commons that once served as a place where anyone in a village could let their animals graze or grow grain. Farming was formerly practiced on a small scale to feed individual families, but it became a large company exporting large-scale foodstuffs from the country to growing cities, prompting landowners to recover all their land. courses. Blom explains:
The social and economic system of European feudal societies was based on land ownership and local cereal production. This was his central pillar as well as his main vulnerability. When temperatures have fallen enough to disrupt cereal production and thus undermine this pillar, the social model as a whole has declined. Europeans have had to think of other ways to organize and manage their economic life.
This elimination of communal land led landless villagers to the growing cities where they worked for a pittance to buy grain that they grew themselves. At the same time, the rich have strengthened their fortunes by speculating on markets now offering investments in new commodities.
The most beautiful onion
Tulips, for example, provoked the first documented bubble in the stock market. A Constantinople merchant from the Ottoman Empire sent the flower bulbs to a Dutchman in the late 1500s. The recipient gave the bulbs to his cook, thinking that it was about the same. 39; onions. He tossed them in a trash can when he realized they were not edible.
But in the spring, when the rubbish heap bloomed, the merchant sent this foreign specimen to the greatest botanist of the time, Charles de l'Ecluse, in Leiden. They survived the extremely harsh winter of 1593 and the botanist, delighted, sent the flowers of the new Europe to his friends, naming them so after the word "turban" in Turkish.
The flowers became such a sensation that the entrepreneurs stole the bulbs from the botanist and started cultivating tulips for sale. By 1630, the price of a variety of tulip bulbs could be equivalent to that of a "well-appointed country house," as Blom says. A bouquet of tulips has become the essential accessory of any beautiful home in the Netherlands and beyond, inspiring investors to "buy and sell out of breath".
The tulip bubble burst suddenly and inexplicably in February 1637, leaving many investors without resources and leading some to suicide. The bulbs were again considered virtually valueless, put aside as the first cook who confused them with inedible onions.
Fortune telling
Blom says that the extreme weather conditions of the past have created new pressures that have led to new economic models bringing unexpected wealth and risks, as well as unquantifiable human suffering from exploitation, as well as the changing weather of the past. future. "Then, as now, climate change is putting pressure on economic and social structures, on natural resources and on social cohesion … Then, as now, a change in weather conditions leads to natural disasters, societies in difficulty, fears, so change, he writes.
Blom believes that we are in a situation similar to that of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the late 1500s, as we approach a revolution provoked by the pressures of extreme weather conditions. In other words, the winter of our discontent has begun, but this time it is probably a very hot summer, with the increase in global temperatures, the destruction and abandonment of extreme temperatures. .
Rather than despair, Blom asks us to see the possibilities. Yes, there are problems ahead. But there is also a chance that climate change will lead to the next great evolution of ideas – new metaphors and new conceptions of the planet – just as before, transforming Europe from a religious society into a society. rational. Blom says we can no longer wait, writing: "Twenty-first century climate change makes it urgent to rethink once again our cultural metaphors, as well as humanity's place in this vast array of things."
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