Was ecocide the cause of the collapse?

Whilst having a procrastination break (don’t judge me, we all have them!) from the seemingly never ending statistical analysis I have to do for my dissertation; I ended up reading a blog post about our excessive consumption of our natural resources such as metal. It struck me how industry and technology have alienated us from nature and its constraints. Clive Hamilton (2010) attributes this to our society’s 'growth fetishism', which is our addiction-like need for the growth of GDP to continue year on year regardless of any environmental consequences. The unsustainable way we are depleting our resources is not wholly different from the way past societies existed before they collapse. 

Easter Island is often referred to as a prime example of ecocide and the collapse of a society, whether this is accurate or not I’ll leave Steve to look into (Hunt and Lipo, 2009). This led to me to wonder whether it was ecocide that was the cause of the collapse of Norse Greenland society.

A quick definition of ecocide from Wiktionary: "The complete destruction of an ecosystem due to human activities. It may result from exploitation of resources, nuclear warfare or the dumping of harmful chemicals" (Broswimmer, 2002).

The 8000 years previous to the Viking’s colonisation showed little/no signs of deforestation or soil erosion; such degradation only began to occur with the arrival of the Norse, but this unavoidable and to be expected. Diamond (2005) outlines three ways in which the Norse damaged their environment:

1. deforestation
2. the cutting of turf
3. soil erosion

Unfortunately Greenland’s harsh environment includes fragile soils this together with the short plant growing season dictates that there is slow plant growth and soil formation. This leads to a thin topsoil layer and low organic humus content in the soil. Therefore, Greenland’s soil was very vulnerable to overgrazing, trampling and soil erosion that could lead to serious environmental damage. Furthermore, there is evidence of over-exploitation and the hunting to extinction of Icelandic walrus and Great Auk (Amorosi et al., 1997).

Just in case you didn't know what a Great Auk looked like

This paints a rather destructive picture of Norse practices in Greenland. It supports the view that people are fundamentally bad for the environment and thus, that ecocide was highly likely to happen anyway. It changes the outlook from if the Norse were to collapse to when the Norse were to collapse (Dugmore et al.,2007). Furthermore it infers that the Norse were ignorant with little appreciation of their environment. This is a simplistic judgment to make as there is an indication that the Norse were environmentally aware and did implement practices adapted to their harsh environment. They managed there environmental impacts to avoid total devastation in this delicate environment. Some of these include, monitoring the weight of livestock to make sure there weren't too many livestock grazing on the land. In addition the conservation of vital resources such as charcoal pits has been discovered (Dugmore et al., 2006).

The evidence of semi-sustainable Norse practices make me doubt that ecocide was the only reason for the collapse of Norse Greenland. However, there was significant environmental damage found at both the Western and Eastern Settlement making the society fragile and vulnerable. An alternate theory for the cause of this degradation is that climate change pushed the environment and the Norse to the brink of collapse and I’ll examine this theory in a later post (Dugmore et al., 2007).

List of references

Amorosi T., Buckland P., Dugmore A., Ingimundarson J.H. and McGovern T.H.(1997) ‘Raiding the landscape: Human Impact in the Scandinavian North Atlantic’ Human Ecology, 25, 3, 491-518.

Broswimmer F.J. (2002) Ecocide: a short history of the mass extinction of species, London: Pluto.

Diamond, J. (2005) Collapse: How Societies choose to fail or survive, London: Penguin Group.

Dugmore A.J., Church M.J., Mairs K-A., McGovern T.H., Newton A.J., and Sveinbjarnardottir G. (2006) ‘An Over-Optimistic Pioneer Fringe? Environ- mental Perspectives on Medieval Settlement Abandonment in Þórsmörk, South Iceland.’ In The Dynamics of Northern Societies. Bjarne Grønnow, Jette Arneborg, and Hans C. Gulløv, eds. Pp. 333–344.

Dugmore A.J., Keller C., McGovern T.H. (2007) ‘Norse Greenland Settlement: Reflections on Climate Change, Trade, and the Contrasting Fates of Human Settlements in the North Atlantic Islands’ Arctic Anthropology, 44, 1, 12-36.

Hamilton C. (2010) Requiem for a Species: Why we resist the truth about Climate Change, London: Earthscan Ltd.

Hunt T.L and Lipo C.P (2009) ‘Revisiting Rapa Nui (Easter Island) “Ecocide”’ Pacific Science, 63, 4, 601-616.