Climate Shifts and People’s Instinctive Travels

Things feel pretty precarious as of late – globally and locally. A shifting climate exerts its pressures in ways big and small, the occurrences of extreme weather phenomena are increasing while this changing environment turns the dials on the habitats of plants and animals all over the world. Soils are not what they once were, insects and the wildlife that exist upon, and with, them move out of their usual habitats. Droughts, forest fires, and floods slowly scrape away at a few centuries of agricultural certainty, exacerbating food chains, and triggering the movements of people. These all inflame age-old, sometimes even brand-new, tensions leading to conflict. Various regional and/or global powers then swoop in seeking to assuage the conflicts, some with more benevolent intentions than others, all with an eye on either securing a long-term benefit or preventing a long-term problem. The longer this feedback cycle goes on, the larger the conflicts become, and the further afield the movements of people tend to stretch. Prices of commodities and foodstuffs also begin to be affected, and society at large becomes aware that something is happening, though they tend to think of it as many disparate things – things which are dubbed individual “crises” – happening suddenly. But is this something new? What else is a crisis but our inability to come to terms with reality? Our present reality, it turns out, is something fairly common.

A shift in climate putting its thumb on the scales of civilization, with all the knock-on effects that entails (see various “Dark Ages”), is a continuing theme throughout human history, but I’ll focus on two big ones to illustrate the common pushes and pulls that geopolitics is subjected to. The first is what is known as the Bronze Age Collapse. In the late 12th century BCE – either 1177 or 1183 BCE – what had been a stable geopolitical world whose trade networks stretched from Cornwall in England to Afghanistan, from the Baltic to the Persian Gulf, came crashing down. What sounds sudden was a process that had started earlier and lasted longer, with the actual collapse taking somewhere between 50-100 years. The most striking manifestation of this collapse is the appearance of the so-called “Sea People,” who raided along the Mediterranean coasts, bringing kingdom after kingdom to its knees until the Egyptians eventually stopped them – but not after the loss of lands and lots of bloodshed. The Hittites, Ugarit, Minoans, and the Mycenaean Greeks all disappeared because of this marauding group of people who have still not been identified.

Studies have shown that the climate around the Mediterranean became drier and cooler for a period of roughly three centuries, precisely in this time of collapse. The Sea People are assumed to be a society from the western regions (maybe the Iberian Peninsula, maybe Sicily), whose own habitat came under such strain that they began undertaking these raids. When they arrived on the shores of the various kingdoms, they found societies that had already been grappling with the fallout of the shift in climate. Droughts and the connected food shortages exacerbated already existing societal rifts and problems. This unrest, combined with an outside enemy attacking them, further disrupted the food supply as well as trade, setting in motion more migration. Power was eroded and with further raids, these kingdoms began to crumble, further speeding up the process of dissolution of the geopolitical order.

The effects were felt further afield. Around the same time, a large battle was fought in the north of what is today Germany. In the Tollense Valley at the site of a Bronze Age bridge, the world’s oldest known battlefield was discovered in the 1990s, bearing witness to the clash of two armies made up of thousands of soldiers – many of whom were on horseback. Forensic evidence additionally suggests that many of the soldiers at the battle were not from the valley or the surrounding areas, meaning that these were armies assembled out of warriors from other regions that had traveled and converged on this strategic site. This type of armed engagement, and at that scale, is completely atypical for this time in that region. So, we have a completely unrelated example from the same period of people on the move and pressures being exerted on societies that bring about large-scale changes. In the region of northern Germany, settlements went from what had been the centuries-long standard of farmsteads to heavily fortified settlements. In the Mediterranean, kingdoms and cultures collapsed completely. With the dissolution of trade networks, substantial amounts of wealth were also lost with an ensuing miniaturization of cultural and economic spheres. This did not affect everyone equally, and some kingdoms found ways to weather the storm better than others, but until recently what followed would have been described as a Dark Age.

The other famous case of shifting climate, peoples, conflict, and arising new geopolitical order surrounds what is known as the Migration Period, the Hunnic Invasions, and the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Stretching over roughly three centuries (approx. 300-600 CE), the many events, movements, and clashes of this time triggered the most well-known of the Dark Ages and laid the foundation for nearly all modern continental European nation-states. A lasting period of climate instability, cooling, and drought – and the inevitable food shortages brought about by them – triggered a mass movement of Germanic tribes from what is today southern Denmark and northern Germany. Very simply outlined, thousands made their way around Europe – some to the British Isles (Angles, Saxons), others eastward (Goths). These were not small wanderings through uninhabited lands, but massive migrations of tribes through other tribal lands, sometimes being integrated into those societies, sometimes causing unrest, and triggering further movement and pressure on the big European empire of that time – Rome. When the Germanic tribes reached and tried to settle further East, they ran into and were pushed back by another people on the move – the Huns.

Similar climactic variables seem to have pushed the Hunnic tribes to unite and move through Asia and into Europe. As they pushed into Europe’s eastern regions, they began displacing the people there. Numerous battles ensued, leading to new alliances and new geopolitical forces taking their place on the European stage. All the while, Rome was trying to handle these dynamics along its intra-continental border. In this time, Goths became Ostrogoths and Visigoths, with some sections of Ostrogoths merging with the Huns. It is always good to keep in mind that this lasted centuries and that this is the time many contemporary nations and peoples consider the birth of their culture – the backdrop for all their epic poems and foundation myths. The Burgundians, Vandals, Alemanni, Alans, early Slavs, Avars, Bulgars, and Magyars are all players in this era, fighting against and alongside each other and the Huns, the dynamics leading to various Germanic tribes settling everywhere from current-day Russia to Spain and Portugal and northern Africa. All the while, they continuously deal with the Roman Empire – sometimes working together, sometimes asking for protection, sometimes raiding them. By the time the Sack of Rome happened in 410, this was already a very splintered geopolitical world, multipolar and often hard to grasp if you weren’t an emperor, king, or aspiring general. The movement and shifts would continue, with kingdoms and dynasties being born and dying out, and peoples merging and becoming new ones. At the end of this time, the foundation for medieval and later modern Europe would have been laid.

Before moving forward, and with a view on our current geopolitical transition, we might want to take a second to dispel certain, outdated ideas of Dark Ages that are affiliated with this turmoil. The idea of a chaotic time, bereft of culture and order is a somewhat linear, empire-centric, colonial view that saw anything that was not centered around strong power as being a slide backward, a decline. These times were not simply chaotic and conflict-ridden, they carried within them a wealth of cultural flourishing and a reset often overlooked by the historians of the past who were not inclined to allow tribal peoples or smaller states the same status of achievements as large empires. These were times of restructuring and shifting roles – from the rise of the Iron Age and the many kingdoms whose cultures still influence contemporary society, to the foundation of modern Europe, the Christian church, as well as power structures in today’s Middle East and the founding of Islam – these eras shape the future. The conflicts, disease, and uncertainties of these times were not all that different from those in times of great empires, just that there may have been less structure to feather the weight of their blows, leading to more dynamic effects.

So, where are we now, facing the climate “crisis” and the migration “crisis” and all the other crises of our time? As these crises have been ongoing for decades, so we might just want to call them our reality. Looking around the world and down through history, we see many smaller and larger instances of climate causing societies and civilizations to move, and some to disappear. The Nazca lines in Peru, for example, are literal human marks left by an ancient people trying to respond to the effects of deforestation, agricultural irrigation, and the ultimate devastation of their lands. More recent examples such as the Dust Bowl in the U.S. of the 1930s, show how climatic shifts pair up with human (mal-)practices to force movements across larger regions. The point is, that there are many examples – both regional and intercontinental – that back up the reality of what is currently happening and how this is not something that will change any time soon.

If we were analyzing the current era in the same way that historians analyze past ones, how might we lay out the facts? Currently, we have massive climate fluctuations, extended periods of drought followed by heavy rains, periods of extended heat as well as extreme cold. Especially around the Equator, more and more land is becoming inhospitable. The weather extremes affect agriculture and crops that have been the staple of certain regions for centuries. With the varying temperatures come the movement of flora and fauna into regions they were not formerly present in, bringing with them a host of new biorhythms not to mention blights and contagions, destabilizing the environmental foundation of various regions. It just so happens, that the regions hardest hit by climactic shifts are usually the economically poorest. So, we have a globally interconnected geopolitical order that is coming under pressure from a variable climate, large masses of people are on the move looking to find places to live that offer some kind of stability. The extremes of climate are also putting human health at risk, with more people falling into categories of disability due to general weather conditions or having to work in those conditions. This puts further pressure on regional economies. The completely networked global trade network also means that the threat of repeated global pandemics looms large. Then we have the various conflicts throughout the world and a new technology that has exacerbated inner-societal tensions. All of these things are realities and not temporary crises.

We can even take a step back and look at our time as a continuation of the great upheavals of the 20th century. It’s not too far-fetched to imagine some future historian looking at the early 21st century as an after-effect of the dissolution of the great colonial empires of the 19th and 20th centuries, triggered by the cataclysms of the two world wars, an initial pandemic (Spanish Flu) and economic collapse (Great Depression). This is then followed by the upstarts – The United States and the USSR – taking their place in the power vacuum along with the many independence movements of the former colonies. After their short rivalry in the Cold War, one empire fades (USSR) with the other (US) not far behind, and the ensuing geopolitical pressure begins to shape a new, multipolar world. It’s comparable to something like the ancient world after Alexander the Great had conquered Persia and then died. We may well be 100 years into the dissolution of the old order and another 200-300 years away from a new one, somewhere in the 2nd or 3rd phase of geopolitical restructuring.

The reality of our world is the same as any number of eras in the past, only that ours is happening at a much larger scale. In addition to global climate change – this time not triggered by volcanic eruptions or other natural catastrophes, but by human behaviors – we still harbor massive nuclear arsenals, we are grappling with new digital technologies whose effect on us we have yet to understand, let alone master. We are in a new historical epoch and maybe have been for quite some time without realizing it, one which is similar to past “collapses,” but which holds far greater dangers. The things we call crises are simply effects of our reality, and our political and societal responses will determine how well we weather this huge shift.