Migration and Climate Change

Conclusion: Climate and Culture

C.1. Climate “shocks” and resilience dynamics

Work on climate change is confronted with the general problem of the possible relationships between human cultures and climatic variations. For a very long time, the unstable climate was oriented towards the cold, and this formed the context from which the first human cultures emerged. Humans were then very few in number and socialized in small groups of hunter-gatherers. After a great climatic transformation, where the speed of rising water was the fastest around 14 ka (14,000 years before the present), a warm period settled in, profoundly modifying human cultures, with aspects of great political instability and a paroxysmal rise in social violence. Pierre Clastres [CLA 74] concluded that it was impossible for a pacifying public law to emerge in the many conflicts between the Amerindians of the North American plains. The sacrificial slaughtering of children to reconcile the El Ninõ climatic phenomenon on the side of pre-Columbian Andean and the Rocky Mountain civilizations leaves no doubt about the links between climatic instability and human cultures, but questions the political and religious transformations that may have brought them about.

This question of climate and culture suffers from the obsolescence of theoretical approaches. The political or medical climate theories represent a very great tradition starting from Hippocrates to Montesquieu, through Aristotle and Christopher Columbus. They ...