Climate change’s most deadly threat: drought
The influential US paper the Christian Science Monitor has a review of anthropologist Brian Fagan’s new book; Climate change’s most deadly threat: drought.
While vineyards are being planned for northern England, millions of residents around desiccated Atlanta are praying for enough rain to flow through their taps.
Brian Fagan believes climate is not merely a backdrop to the ongoing drama of human civilization, but an important stage upon which world events turn.
This is essentially the same thesis as Jared Diamond espouses in his book “Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies“.
Part 1 of 18 of the National Geographic special based on the book
There he argues that it is largely accidents of geography that led to the current world configuration with Europe being more suited to domestication of animals and from that coming professional armies and trades/crafts people and the all important disease resistance. Radical changes in the world’s climate do more than just move the weather around a bit. They impact the entire web of life in unpredictable ways. — DS
