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Global Climate change leading to new types of lifeways?

Jim Jaeger

Still reading Professor Christian's book This Fleeting World while seeing the wildfires on the news brings the idea of climate change to the forefront. One question Professor Christian offers is based on the idea that warmer, wetter, and more productive climates after the last ice age may explain why foragers came together as agricultural communities.

Might global climate change in the twenty-first century alter the nature of communities that we live in? Furthermore, could it even lead to the creation of entirely new types of lifeways akin to the changes of 11,000 years ago?  

As an aside, I visited my family in Wisconsin over the break.  Coming up from Tucson, I feel like the midwest never left the ice age as it is freezing there. 

Welcome back from the winter break everyone!

Parents

  • Digging into the archives today and this made me think of how climate is affecting us here in the mid-Hudson valley of New York. We grow a lot of apple, hay and corn. I think if you asked a farmer a few decades ago when they would do their first hay harvest, they would have said early June. Now we are getting one or 2 cuts in in May. If you asked a corn farmer when to sow the seeds, again I think it would be June. Now the expression "knee high by the 4th of July" needs to be changed to "taller than a silver spoon by the 6th of June". And the apple crop is a roller coaster. This year we had 2 nights of hard frost in April as the apple blossoms were peaking. Farmers had to activate their anti-frost fans and chew their fingernails to get through it.

    Maybe someone would say that means that climate change isn't happening. More likely is that climate change is just making things less predictable. You simply can't know how your crop is going to fare from one year to the next. Is it great that we can plant the corn earlier and mow the hay in May? Maybe. But it's also a sign that we should read and pay attention to. 

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  • Digging into the archives today and this made me think of how climate is affecting us here in the mid-Hudson valley of New York. We grow a lot of apple, hay and corn. I think if you asked a farmer a few decades ago when they would do their first hay harvest, they would have said early June. Now we are getting one or 2 cuts in in May. If you asked a corn farmer when to sow the seeds, again I think it would be June. Now the expression "knee high by the 4th of July" needs to be changed to "taller than a silver spoon by the 6th of June". And the apple crop is a roller coaster. This year we had 2 nights of hard frost in April as the apple blossoms were peaking. Farmers had to activate their anti-frost fans and chew their fingernails to get through it.

    Maybe someone would say that means that climate change isn't happening. More likely is that climate change is just making things less predictable. You simply can't know how your crop is going to fare from one year to the next. Is it great that we can plant the corn earlier and mow the hay in May? Maybe. But it's also a sign that we should read and pay attention to. 

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