Medieval Iceland, Greenland, and the New Human Condition: A case study in integrated environmental humanities

Hartman, Steven; Ogilvie, Astrid E. J.; Ingimundarson, Jón Haukur; Dugmore, Andrew; Hambrecht, George; McGovern, Thomas H.

doi:10.1016/j.gloplacha.2017.04.007

Cited by 41 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 54 publications

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“…Social indicators collected for many individual Arctic communities, supporting comparisons across times and places, hold promise for studying the complex causality of Arctic social change. Although Arctic environments exhibit high variability, we know that impacts from past environmental changes often have been contingent on details of social organization (Hartman et al 2017). Figures 1-3 illustrated a contemporary analytical approach using communitylevel data to test for migration impacts from climatelinked problems.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Archeological studies find many examples linking ancient environment, resources, and population (e.g. Finkelstein et al 2009, Hartman et al 2017. More recently, twentieth-century crises in northern Atlantic fisheries, precipitated by ocean/climate variations atop overfishing, spurred outmigration from fishing communities of Newfoundland, Greenland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands Haedrich 1999, Hamilton 2007).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Demographic variation and change in the Inuit Arctic

Hamilton

Wirsing

Saito

2018

Environ. Res. Lett.

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Arctic societies, like Arctic environments, exhibit variability and rapid change. Social and environmental changes are sometimes interconnected, but Arctic societies also are buffeted by socioeconomic forces which can create problems or drive changes that eclipse those with environmental roots. Social indicators research offers a general approach for describing change and understanding causality through the use of numerical indices of population, health, education, and other key dimensions that can be compared across places and times. Here we illustrate such work with new analyses of demographic indicators, particularly involving migration, for contemporary communities of three predominantly Inuit Arctic regions: northern Alaska, Greenland, and Nunavut. Many places exhibit persistent outmigration, affecting population growth. Net migration and growth rates are not significantly different, however, comparing northern Alaska communities that are or are not threatened by climate-linked erosion. Stepping back to compare the three regions highlights their contrasting birth rates (high in northern Alaska and Nunavut) and outmigration (high in Alaska and Greenland)-yielding divergent population trajectories of gradual decline in Greenland, erratic but slow growth in Alaska, and rapid growth in Nunavut. Evidence for one consequential pattern observed in northern Alaska and Greenland, disproportionate outmigration by locally-born women, appears weak or absent in Nunavut.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Demographic variation and change in the Inuit Arctic

Hamilton

Wirsing

Saito

2018

Environ. Res. Lett.

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“…But defining this threshold potentially shifts attention from antecedent processes of cultural-ecological change (Erlandson and Braje, 2013) and past human resource-use and decision-making in response to climate stimuli. As argued by Hartman et al (2017), the notion of the new human condition is in need of updating in light of past humanenvironment interactions, and how these impinge on the present and future of human planetary stewardship.…”

Section: Global Change Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A key challenge for global change researchers is to use climate change as an opportunity to engage in new collaborations with archaeologists and historians, and vice versa. Many disciplines, including history and archaeology, already engage in interdisciplinary research with the natural sciences-to understand human interactions with changing environments-and with the humanities-to examine environmental knowledge through art, literature and historical texts (Hartman et al, 2017;Holm and Brennan, 2018). Existing research frameworks of historical ecology and environmental humanities, have forged integrated projects that combine past climate, environment and human datasets-for example, IHOPE (Integrated History and Future of People on Earth, http://ihopenet.org) and PAGES (Past Global Changes, http://www.pastglobalchanges.org).…”

Section: Research Design and Collaborationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rediscovering lessons of adaptation from the past

Jackson

Dugmore

Riede

2018

Global Environmental Change

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We argue that the deep time perspectives offered by historical disciplines, such as archaeology and history, provide important human-scale data about climate-adaptation over long timescales, and that these insights are currently lacking in global change research and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports. Pre-modern societies are not comparable with contemporary societies, but the completed experiments they represent can offer evidence of the consequences of climate change, the challenges of uncertainty and socio-cultural limits to adaptation. The limited visibility of data on long-term human interactions with climate change in global change research could be overcome through a 'new social contract', a two-way movement between global change and historical disciplines to, 1) make use of, and apply, historical data to contemporary climate-related challenges; 2) to design robust interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research, 3) publish synthesised research in high-impact climate-adaptation journals and 4) communicate research to the public in cultural history museums.

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“…Ogilvie, Jón Haukur Ingimundarson, A.J. Dugmore, George Hambrecht, and Tim McGovern's collective paper (Hartman et al 2017) describes the benefits of an integrated approach, using the lenses of historical ecology, environmental humanities, the social sciences, and geosciences. The paper considers Iceland and Greenland during the medieval period, and discusses how settlement patterns, agricultural thresholds and climatic changes were linked and can offer new information on how past societies understood and coped with such changes.…”

Section: The Global and Planetary Change Special Sectionmentioning

confidence: 99%