Let me start by saying, I am a big fan of Brian Fagan’s writing. I was going to brag that I had read all his books – I’ve read four – and then I took a look at that page at the start of the book, where it lists all the other books that an author has written and I realized that I am behind the curve ball here. As of the 2009 edition of this book, he had written 19 books. Nineteen!¹ Books about how weather systems have impacted historical civilizations! How is that even possible? I feel obligated to book a week at the beach and start downloading books so I can catch up.

Fagan is a sailor, an archaeologist, and a climate anthropologist.² The popular books that he’s written – as opposed to the sailing guides and the technical archaeological guides³ – look at weather patterns over years, decades, or centuries, and how that influenced human development. This one, for example, looks at El Niño.

Many of us don’t really understand El Niño. We think of it as this thing that causes flooding in California, but we don’t realize what causes the rains or the impact of El Niño on the rest of the world. I’m going to try to summarize it here but keep in mind that a) I am not an expert in these things, I just read a book; b) the book is at least 15 years old – and the first edition was actually written 25 years ago – and perhaps science has discovered new information since then that answers some of the things that I will call mysteries, or data that shifts the assumptions that were made when this book was written.⁴

So here we go: In the midst of the Pacific Ocean – maybe a little closer to Asia than the Americas – there is a huge⁵ pool of hot water (mystery #1: why?). Most of the time, the winds blow across this pool from East to West, driving warm humidity towards Asia and eventually causing the monsoons that serve as the primary irrigation for agriculture there. Sometimes (mystery #2: why?), this pool shifts eastward towards the international dateline, driving warm humid air and warm water towards the Americas, and we call this El Niño⁶. When this happens, droughts and wildfires plague Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand; and it floods on the West Coast of the Americas. The waters along the West Coast also usually run cold, which makes them particularly attractive to fish. During El Niño, those cold waters are displaced by warm waters, and the fish migrate too far offshore for coastal fisheries. For communities that rely on fishing for food and on fish meal and guano for agricultural purposes, this can cause famines.

Isn’t it funny that the same monsoon rains that bring bounty to Asia bring devastation to the Americas?

But wait, there’s more.

There is another weather pattern that flows around the equator like a belt, kind of oscillating above and below, keeping rain moving around the globe. El Niño disrupts this pattern, pushing it North. Which means that equatorial lands that depend on those rains – like Ethiopia – don’t receive them⁷ causing droughts across the Sahel – the band of not-quite-desert on a good day just south of the actual desert, and includes much of Ethiopia. The Nile originates in Ethiopia and 90% of its water depends on the Ethiopian rains; when it doesn’t rain in Ethiopia, Egypt has historically been unable to irrigate their agriculture and has faced famine.⁸

Okay, I don’t want to give the whole book away so I’m going to stop there. The first part of the book explains what El Niño (and La Niña) is (are) and the second part of the book talks about several historical civilizations that were impacted by El Niño events: the ancient Egyptians; the Mayans (of course); the Anasazi; and the small and long forgotten Moche empire in what is now Peru. As you can imagine, drought, famine, and flooding. But what is interesting is how the different leadership styles of each civilization helped or hindered the people to survive, or not. Essentially – read the book – if the governmental leaders of the three of the empires, the Egyptians, the Mayans, and the Moche, were focused on the people (storing up grains and organizing the people to use what little water there was during a drought effectively), their rule survived. When leaders were focused on self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment (believing their own press: that they were gods and all should pay tribute to them) instead of the needs of the people, things went poorly and civilizations fell, grinding the leaders into the dust of history.

In the fourth civilization that Fagan recounts, the Anasazi, he focuses on the Pueblo tradition of movement, how the people responded to years with poor rainfall by dispersing and relocating away from the drought-stricken areas, to areas that could support more people. They had a tradition of doing this lightly – a few people here, a few there – avoiding the great migrations that we see today and that have historically caused war and conflict. Of course, this was all upset when the Europeans imposed their tradition of land ownership on the First Peoples, pinning them down – usually in marginal places with poor rainfall and little agricultural potential – and preventing them from moving when droughts hit.

I will say it is refreshing to read a book about natural history and civilizations that doesn’t hit you over the head with climate change apocalyptica. It’s getting to be that you can’t watch a nature show on TV without 5 minutes of doom and gloom at the end.⁹ Now, this book was written in 1999 and updated in 2009. In 1999, you know what everyone was worried about? Not climate change – they were worried about the population explosion.

Here’s how it all comes together: when there are more people, those people populate more marginal lands, lands that, when there is a drought or flood, suffer the most.¹⁰ At the same time, with this many more people, more food is needed, and more land is cleared to grow that food. Clearing land – draining wetlands, cutting down forests, turning up prairie grass – also makes the land more vulnerable to flooding, droughts, and wildfires – all of which result from El Niño and his sister, La Niña.

From the book:

• When the El Niño struck in 1982, the Santa Rosa area of Ecuador had 35,000 hectares of shrimp farms. When it struck again in 1997, Santa Rosa had 180,000 hectare, many hacked out from coastal mangrove swamps that protected the area from flooding. The government was not prepared.
• 10,000 years ago, the world population was about 10 million people, who lived by hunting and gathering. Then civilization began and, by about 5,000 years ago, there were 20 million people. 3000 years later, around 1800, there were about 1 billion people. By the time the book was written 200 years later, in 1999, there were 9 billion people, and about 240,000 more people were being born than dying daily.¹¹
• “In the entire three-plus centuries between AD 1500 and the early 1800s, no more than 3 million people crossed a border voluntarily. Today [1999], millions of refuges are on the move, responding to shortages of food, land, and water…. Even without the complication of humanly caused global warming, we are in danger of a potential world food crisis. Global food production has not risen since 1990, while population has climbed by 440 million people.”¹²
• “History teaches us that the best leaders were prepared to learn from experience and hard lessons. Flexibility and farsightedness are rare leadership qualities, especially in societies shackled by rigid secular or religious ideologies, where drought and flood are attributed to the whim of the gods.”
• “History tells us that El Niño’s have sometimes provided the knockout punch that topples states and great rulers.”

I sometimes look at what’s going on in the world and remark, “Mayan Apocalypse.” I am not, when I say that, buying into that conspiracy theory that claimed that the world would end according to the Mayan calendar on my birthday several years back. I am referring to what I read in this book and other books about the collapse of the Mayan empire: short-sighted rulers, focused on self-aggrandizement and internecine arguments, who do not do the work of the people; short-sighted policies that exploit natural resources for the current generation instead of future generations; a populace that lives off the fat of the land and expands and expands; and then a weather event occurs – flood, famine, drought, a plague of grasshoppers, or maybe just a plague – civilization becomes disordered, the people rise up against those in charge – those who said they could make things better and didn’t – civilization falls, and eventually someone finds the crown of the Statue of Liberty sticking out of a sandy beach and wonders at how the mighty have fallen.

Westerners think of history as linear. It started here, it progressed here, it will go there. Other cultures say it is circular – it started here, it went there, it came back here again. I’m beginning to think they are right.¹³

Okay, one more factoid that I got from this book: El Niño has been around for thousands of years – after all, the Egyptian El Niño-caused droughts happened around 2,100 B.C.¹⁴ Being Westerners, we’d be tempted to think that means that El Niño has always been around. BUT, if I read this right – and I’m prepared to be wrong here – it sounds like El Niño has only been a weather pattern since about 5,000 BC. Before that, it didn’t exist and other stuff happened instead. Which means – wait for it – weather patterns like El Niño and the ENSO and the NAO, could disappear and be replaced with new weather patterns, ones that completely change areas of the world that are, today, bread baskets, or deserts into something else. After all, the Sahara was once an oasis, with lagoons and grasslands.

Well, on that cheerful note, I heartily recommend this book. It makes El Niño, La Niña, and the ENSO very easy to understand – and explains what happened to the Mayans, the Anasazi, and those guys who built the Egyptian pyramids. Totally worth it.

Great beach read.

1. And that’s 19 as of 2009 – god only knows how many more he’s written in the 15 years since then. Oh cr*p, just looked at his Wikipedia page and the list is too long to even count – and there’s a little note at the top that says the list is incomplete! My life is too short for all this. ↩︎
2. I may have made that last term up. Possibly people in this field call themselves something else entirely. ↩︎
3. Which I do not intend to read. ↩︎
4. In other words, if you are someone who does this for a living and knows more than I do, be kind. I am just someone who reads and writes about reading. I don’t pretend that makes me an expert in what I read. I know that’s unique in the U.S. right now, where everyone reads a tweet and decides they’re an expert in something and go around knowledge-flexing like a boy who just discovered a muscle; but it’s true. ↩︎
5. Huge, like four times the size of the U.S. and hot enough to send heat high into the atmosphere. ↩︎
6. Because it often happens just after Christmas, like in January. ↩︎
7. I feel like this explains Live Aid but I could be wrong. ↩︎
8. This was true until Egypt starting building dams. Not so sure it holds true anymore. ↩︎
9. Yeah, I get it; it’s dire. But you’re not persuading anyone to do anything about it by scaring us – when people get scared, they become more conservative and not the conservative that conserves nature, the kind that claims Climate Change is a myth. If what just happened in Houston didn’t convince anyone that Climate Change is real, they are just determined not to be convinced. ↩︎
10. I was watching this Lottery Dream Home the other day and this single dad in the Midwest had won a small amount of money – well, enough to buy a starter home, which these days isn’t small, but not enough to buy a mansion. He was really excited because his kid could live someplace nice. They went to see three homes. The one they picked was new construction on what was obviously a flood plain, just off the Mississippi. I shouted like a drunk in a movie theatre when the killer sneaks up behind a blonde teenager: Don’t do it! Get out of there! This poor single dad thinks he’s made it, he’s found a home for him and his kid and the river is right there. They can see it out the window. They’re not even up on a bluff; they’re at river level or maybe even a couple of feet beneath. They film these things months in advance and all I could think was that this guy would probably be flooded out before the show even aired. That builder should be held responsible and never allowed to work in the industry again. Right now, people with very little money can only afford first homes on marginal land like this and don’t recognize or accept the risk of getting wiped out. ↩︎
11. The math is mine, based on what I think I read in the book. If I got it wrong, don’t blame Fagan. His math was probably accurate. I mean, he does this for a living, right? ↩︎
12. Hence all the unwanted immigrants at European and U.S. borders and the sudden increase in war in the middle east and the Sahel, i.e. Darfur. You can claim it’s religion but that’s just the differentiator between me and you; when there’s enough, you and I can get along. But when I need more, you are the one I will push against to get it. ↩︎
13. I’d like to learn more about this concept of circular history if anyone can recommend a good book on it. ↩︎
14. Sorry, this book was written before historians and anthropologists switched from BC/AD to BCE. ↩︎