I could hear the Zambezi River riffling in the rocky shallows, in the distant background the unceasing roar of Mosi-oa-Tunya, “The Smoke that Thunders,” the Victoria Falls. Dense bush pressed on the clearing, trees arching overhead, dry leaves rustling softly in the afternoon heat. I was completely alone—or so I thought. Then I heard the sound of trampling and crashing branches: I realized with horror that I had walked into the midst of small herd of elephants. The great beasts were invisible but close nearby, seemingly unaware of my presence. I tiptoed quietly back the way I had come until I emerged from the trees. As I reached the Zambezi, I looked back. A huge bull elephant flapped his ears at me, feet firmly set in the shallows. He watched closely and unmoving as I beat a careful retreat.
Elephants can tread delicately when they wish and can easily become invisible until it is too late to avoid them.
When novelist George Orwell of 1984 fame was a police officer in Burma in the 1930s, he was confronted with a beserk elephant in a bazaar. At a distance, “peacefully eating, the elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow.” But the beast had killed a man, and “a mad elephant had to be killed like a mad dog.”(4) Orwell was struck by the violent contrasts in his by now seemingly placid prey. And so it is with drought. As my research progressed away from Europe, I realized that drought was the hidden villain of the Medieval Warm Period. Prolonged aridity was the silent elephant in the climatic room, and the unpredictable swings of the Southern Oscillation were what brought the beast through the door.
A surge in ENSO research over the past twenty years has revealed that El Niños, and their sister La Niñas, are not merely local phenomena but, next to the passage of the seasons, among the most powerful factor in global climate change. Major ENSO events bring heavy rainfall and floods to the Peruvian coast, torrential precipitation to California, and reduce the frequency of tropical storms and hurricanes in the Atlantic. They also bring severe drought to Southeast Asia and Australia, to Central America and northeast Brazil, and to parts of tropical Africa. The less conspicuous, and often longer-lasting, La Niña can be just as destructive, especially in its ability to nurture drought over large tracts of the world--as was the case during the Medieval Warm Period, when the cool, dry sister of El Niño persisted for years on end. . . .
And later in the chapter: The lesson of the Medieval Warm Period for our time is subtle, yet alarming. Our journey through the warm and drought-ridden world of a thousand years ago revealed a great diversity of human societies, many of them interconnected by ever-changing economic and socio-political ties.
Our travels have taken us down the highways and seaways of a nascent global economy, through a world where interconnectedness and interdependency were beginning to become sustained political realities. We traveled through a time where, on the whole, people lived conservatively, with a good weather eye for risk. Now we confront a future where most of us live in large and rapidly growing cities, many of them adjacent to rising oceans and waters where Category 5 hurricanes or massive El Niños can cause billions of dollars of damage within a few hours. We’re now at a point where there are too many of us to evacuate, where the costs of vulnerability are almost beyond the capacity of even the wealthiest governments to handle. The sheer scale of industrialized societies renders them far more vulnerable to such long-term changes as climbing temperatures and rising sea levels.
This is the immediate crisis of global warming in human terms and it requires not a short-term response but massive intervention on a truly international, and long-term, scale.
We’re not good at planning for our great grandchildren, yet this is what is required of our generation and of those who follow us. There’s a political temptation to announce some short-term palliatives and then to claim that we have made a significant contribution to the battle against global warming. Unfortunately, we are past the moment when we can rely on short-term thinking. Drought and water are probably the overwhelmingly important issues for this and future centuries, times when we will have to become accustomed to making altruistic decisions that will benefit not necessarily us, but generations yet unborn. This requires political and social thinking that barely exists today, where instant gratification and the next election seem more important than acting on the long-term future. And a great deal of this long-term thinking will have to involve massive investments in the developing world, for those most at risk.
How much longer can we remain detached? What will today’s casualty figures be like if the droughts projected by the Hadley meteorologists came to pass? They’ll be catastrophic, far more so than the mind-numbing nineteenth century fatalities revealed by Mike Davis, and could produce frightening scenarios. Are we looking, for example, at a time when enormous, uncontrollable mass migrations of people fleeing hunger and drought will burst across territorial boundaries? Such population movements are not beyond the realm of possibility.
It’s been easy for us to forget that millions of people still live at the subsistence level and use basically medieval technologies to wrest a living from the soil. We can no longer afford benign ignorance, for the long-term perils of chronic drought connect all humankind in ways that we are only just beginning to understand. In an earlier book, I described industrial society as a huge supertanker that takes many miles to stop and maneuvers slowly.(10) I accused our society of being oblivious and inattentive, of ignoring the climatic danger signals that lie ahead.
Thanks to a new generation of science and activists ranging from Al Gore to university students, global warming has become a political issue and a topic of fascination for the chatterers. Yet, it’s striking, and very frightening, that the elephant of drought is still so widely ignored.
History is always around us, threatening, offering encouragement, sometimes precedents. The warm centuries of a thousand years ago remind us that we have never been masters of the natural world; at our best, we have accommodated ourselves to its fickle realities. As the Khmer and the Maya remind us, the harder we try and master it, the more the risk sliding down the hazardous slope of unsustainability. We should accept this reality and not be frightened by a future where we are not the masters and ceasing trying to assume that role. The people of a thousand years ago remind us that our greatest asset is our opportunism and endless capacity to adapt to new circumstances. Let us think of ourselves as partners with rather than potential masters of the changing natural world around us.
