Population decline and adaptation

My earlier blog posts on environmental degradation and climate change have presented the fate of Norse Greenland as environmentally determined, but this isn't the whole story. The other part of this thrilling tale of societal collapse is the question: why didn't the Norse adapt to their environment and the colder climate? Whilst the cooler climate was distressing the Norse settlements,  the Inuits were thriving and their settlements were actually expanding. Therefore it was possible to survive in those conditions, but the Norse for some reason didn't. Many scientists and governments argue that contemporary climate change won't lead to our extinction because we will adapt to the warmer temperatures. However, the Norse analogue shows that it is very possible for a society to fail to adapt to such changes, which paints a rather bleak picture of our future. Dugmore et al.'s (2007) paper suggests that the Norse couldn't adapt successfully because of their decreasing population. This decrease was due to Inuit attacks, plague and emigration prompted by reduced economic opportunity because of changing trading patterns.

The model above is environmentally deterministic and so is similar to the earlier arguments about the impacts of environmental degradation and climate change. It emphasises the change in climate, maladaptation and dependence on pastoral agriculture. However, Dugmore et al. (2007) disagrees with this model and argues that there is evidence that the Norse did manage their environment by conserving animals and regulating grazing. In addition the article shows that as the climate worsened the proportion of the Norse diet from marine sources increased. This demonstration of sustainable practices and changes to their lifestyle indicates that the Norse did at least partially adapt to their new home. However, problems with predicting climate and misleading memories of the past are used to explain why the Norse couldn't better adapt to their changing conditions.

Instead, Dugmore et al. (2007) proposes this alternative model to explain the end of Norse Greenland. The model shows that the "commercial revolution" caused trade relations with Europe to change unfavourably (2007:18). This reduced the economy of the colony and so caused increased emigration to take place. The decrease in population reduced the stability of the community structure that had enabled the Norse to adapt to the changing climate and survive in the first, this lead to the rapid collapse of the settlements. 

Dugmore et al.'s (2007) model challenges the assumptions surrounding societal collapse in Norse Greenland. The first assumption being that humans are fundamentally bad for their environment and that this leads to its inevitable destruction as well as our own. This assumption often portrays past societies as inept stewards of their environment which leads us to dissociate our contemporary environmental issues with those past analogues. The second assumption is that the Norse chose not to adapt to the colder climate. However,  the evidence of changes in their diet and farming practices indicate that the Norse were somewhat aware of their declining circumstances and did try to adapt and survive.  

This article doesn't ignore or down play the environmental and climate factors in the collapse as others who have looked at Norse adaption have, rather Dugmore et al. (2007) critically untangle the different pressures climate change can have on a society. This helps to more precisely determine the influence climate change had in causing the collapse. In addition the argument that the Norse couldn't adapt successfully proposes some interesting questions about our own ability to adapt to 21st century global warming.