Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction

by Newitz, Annalee

  David S. Jones, a Harvard historian and medical doctor, sums up the issues succinctly in his influential paper “Virgin Soils Revisited”:

  Any factor that causes mental or physical stress—displacement, warfare, drought, destruction of crops, soil depletion, overwork, slavery, malnutrition, social and economic chaos—can increase susceptibility to disease. These same social and environmental factors also decrease fertility, preventing a population from replacing its losses.

  American epidemics were likely triggered by the same factors as the European ones. The main difference was that the rapid advance of colonial intrusions in the Americas prevented populations from recovering before they were hit with another wave of disease.

  Survival and Survivance

  What the plagues of the past 700 years reveal is that human mass societies can magnify the effects of threats that come from the environment, like disease. As our cultures grow, so, too, do our vulnerabilities to extinction. There are many failure modes when we try to adapt to our new circumstances as creatures who can no longer wander off to found a new community the way our ancestors did. Rigid class divisions and warfare are two such failure modes, and they are often accompanied by pandemics. As the University of Colorado history professor Susan Kent explains in her recent book about the 1918–19 flu epidemic—the worst in human history since Chaucer’s time—this pandemic virus quickly became more virulent because it spread with the movements of soldiers during World War I. As waves of soldiers succumbed to the flu, new ones came to replace the dying. The virus always had fresh new hosts, who were generally being shipped across the globe to new locations where the flu would take hold. Like the Black Death, the 1918–19 pandemic led to reforms in health care and indirectly sparked several colonial rebellions reminiscent of the Peasants’ Revolt.

  We can excavate a grim survivor’s lesson from the piles of bones these pandemics left behind. We are currently struggling to adapt to life in a global society, where the dangers of culture-saturated, densely populated cities have replaced the dangers of the wilderness. And we are adapting. With each plague, there arise social movements that inch us closer to economic equality and clarify what’s required to take a scientific approach to public health.

  The lingering social effects of the American plagues are nevertheless a reminder that there’s a lot of work that remains to be done. Those waves of colonial-era pandemics helped usher in an era of economic inequality between colonizers and the colonized, undermining civilizations that had thrived for thousands of years. Anishinaabe author and University of New Mexico American Studies professor Gerald Vizenor argues that native cultures and peoples have survived throughout the Americas, though often in dramatically altered form. They’ve done it by maintaining communities, passing on stories to younger generations, and fighting for political sovereignty when they could.

  Vizenor coined the term “survivance” to describe the practices of natives today who are connected to their cultural traditions, but also living them dynamically, reshaping them to suit life in a world forever changed by colonial contact. The difference between survival and survivance is the difference between maintaining existence at a subsistence level and leading a life that is freely chosen. As we contemplate the ways humanity will endure, it’s worth keeping the idea of survivance in mind. One of the best things about H. sapiens is that we are more than the sum of our biological parts. We are minds, cultures, and civilizations. I don’t mean to say that people can live on ideals alone: That’s obviously stupid. But when we aspire to survive disaster, we are perhaps without realizing it aspiring to survive as independent beings. We aren’t aiming for a form of survival that looks like slavery or worse.

  The European and American plagues changed the world, both environmentally and economically. They also revealed a basic truth: Survival is cultural as well as biological. To live, we need food and shelter. To live autonomously, we must remember who we are and where we came from. As we’ll see in the next chapter, this is especially the case when it comes to another one of the greatest threats to human survival: famine. Often, the regions most deeply stricken by hunger are also places where people have been deprived of social and economic power.

  9. THE HUNGRY GENERATIONS

  IT’S BEEN CALLED Black ’47, the Great Irish Famine, and the Potato Famine. From 1845 to 1850, Ireland was hit with one of the most brutal famines of the nineteenth century after several annual harvests of potatoes were ruined by blight. Two million people died, and the harshness of the experience sent at least a million more to seek new homes in the United States and England. Though the Irish population was 8 million in 1841, today it hovers at roughly half of that. The country still, over 160 years later, has not recovered from the aftereffects of a disaster that changed not just Ireland but the entire way we conceive of famine.

  Famines have been recorded in historical documents and religious books for almost as long as humans have been writing, and yet they are still among the most poorly understood causes of mass death among humans. The University College Dublin economist Cormac Ó Gráda has spent most of his career studying famine, and admitted to me that it’s very difficult to say how many people die of starvation when “most people in famine die of diseases.” In fact, he added, malnutrition is a bigger killer than generally believed because it leads to the scenarios we explored in the previous chapter, where people are more vulnerable to epidemic disease. It’s only in the last few centuries that we find reliable, complete records of famine that scholars like Ó Gráda can use to piece together the events that lead to masses of people dying from want of the most basic resource: food.

  The Potato That Starves Us

  Before the events of Black ’47, the dominant theory of famine came from the eighteenth-century demographer Thomas Malthus, who believed that epidemics and famines were natural “checks” on human populations to keep them in balance with resources available. From the Malthusian perspective, famines should come on a regular basis, especially when a population is outstripping its ability to subsist in a particular area. When the Irish Potato Famine first began to unfold, however, journalists covering the events realized that the Malthusian explanation wasn’t adequate. This famine had its roots in politics. In the decades leading up to Black ’47, industrialization had completely reshaped the Irish landscape. Lands that were once dotted with small farms devoted to a variety of crops were taken over by landlords who converted these farms to pastureland—there, they raised animals for export. Seeking a high-yield crop that could feed their families, peasants on the land that remained available for farming switched from grain crops to potatoes. Many of these peasants were working entirely for “conacres,” or the right to grow their own subsistence food on a landlord’s property. They were living hand-to-mouth, on potatoes, and had no cash to use if their crop failed. When the blight struck, the Irish poor lost both food and money at once. Even at the time it seemed likely that the famine, rather than being a natural “check” on the island’s growing population, was the result of political and economic disaster (itself partly the result of Ireland’s colonial relationship with Britain).

  In the century and a half since people began to perceive the political underpinnings of famines, it has become commonplace to view them as caused primarily by economic problems. The Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen first advanced this theory in the 1980s, in his highly influential book Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. There, Sen lays out the details of his famous theory. He explains that “entitlements” are avenues by which people acquire food, and famine is always the result of how those entitlements work in a particular society. Direct entitlements refer to subsistence methods of getting food, like growing potatoes. Indirect entitlements are avenues that allow people to get food from others, usually by earning money and buying it. Transfer entitlements are ways that people get food when they have neither direct nor indirect means—generally, from famine-relief groups. Sen’s theory has allowed ec
onomists to diagnose the causes of famines by looking at the causes of “entitlement failures.” In the case of Black ’47, most Irish people suffered all three forms of entitlement failure.

  But there is a missing piece in Sen’s theory of entitlements, and it’s one that is only going to become more important as we move into the next century. That piece is the environment. Evan Fraser, a geographer at the University of Guelph, in Ontario, researches food security and land use. He argues that the Irish Potato Famine reveals how poor environmental management can lead to mass death. He believes we should supplement Sen’s theory of entitlements with an understanding of how “ecological systems are vulnerable to disruption.” In other words, famines are undeniably the result of how we use (or abuse) our environments to extract food from them.

  Many famines begin when economic or political circumstances encourage people to convert environments into what Fraser calls “specialized landscapes,” good for nothing but growing a limited set of crops. In Ireland, for example, landlords pushed farmers to transform diverse regions into landscapes that could yield only one crop: the potato. Often, this kind of farming appears to work brilliantly in the short term. Black ’47 was preceded by years of escalating productivity as Irish farmers converted grain crops to potatoes. Paradoxically, the wealth of the ecosystem meant that it was also precarious. Any change to these “specialized landscapes,” whether a blight or a slight change in temperature or rainfall, can wipe out not just one farm but every single farm. What’s bad for one potato farm is bad for all of them. As Fraser put it, “You get one bad year, and you’re stuffed.” In the case of the Irish famine, there were at least two bad years of blight before true famine set in, during 1847.

  The ecosystem vulnerabilities leading to Black ’47 could very well become common over the next century. Seemingly minor problems like temperature and rainfall changes could spell death for regions that depend on a single crop that is sensitive to such changes. The most immediate areas of concern lie in the breadbaskets of the American Midwest, a vast region of prairies that stretches from Saskatchewan to Texas. “Most societies are interested in grain, and if you think in terms of wheat, then you need a hundred and ten days of growing conditions,” Fraser said. “You need weather that’s not too hot and not too cold, and abundant but not excessive rainfall. If you get long periods of good weather, you don’t realize there could be a problem. And then you get one bad year, and it all unravels very quickly.”

  During the dust-bowl famines of the 1930s, farmers saw a collapse of the Midwest ecosystem. And we’re going to see a return to the dust bowl again. “We know from climate records that the Midwest experiences two-hundred- to three-hundred-year droughts. There are periods where we see centuries of below-average precipitation. The twentieth century was above average. We’ve had a long rhythm of good weather. But the next hundred years will be much drier. We’ve already seen droughts hitting in Texas. It’s going to be hard to maintain productivity then.” I spoke to Fraser in early 2012, before the worst drought in over 50 years hit the Midwest that summer, destroying crops and livelihoods. According to the weekly U.S. Drought Monitor that year, “About 62.3 percent of the contiguous U.S. (about 52.6 percent of the U.S. including Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico) was classified as experiencing moderate to exceptional drought at the end of August.” Fraser’s predictions for drought are already coming to pass, and he and his colleagues believe more is yet to come.

  Does this mean we are witnessing the leading edge of a global famine? Yes and no. The issue here isn’t that people are inevitably victims of their environment, nor that mild changes in the weather always lead to famine. Trouble comes when you see a growing group of people who are extremely poor, combined with a vulnerable ecosystem that’s not diverse and therefore can’t withstand any kind of climate change or pests. A failed crop is a tragedy, but it doesn’t become a famine unless people don’t have the money to buy food elsewhere.

  In Black ’47, the main way that people survived the famine was a method that spoke to both problems. They emigrated, moving themselves and their families away from a failing economy and a failing ecosystem. But during many famines, people don’t have that option.

  The War That Divides Us

  There were many famines during the mid-twentieth century, and most of them were related to war. A lot of these deaths were probably from diseases exacerbated by conflict and malnutrition. War rationing and deprivation leave people weakened, vulnerable to dysentery and epidemic disease. But in the early 2000s, Newcastle University historian and demographer Violetta Hionidou found evidence of a terrifying period during the Axis occupation of Greece from 1941 to 1944, when 5 percent of the population died directly from want of food.

  The Greek Army staged a highly successful resistance to Italian invasion in 1940, and the Greek premier refused to buckle under to Mussolini even after a protracted battle. Indeed, had it not been for the aid that Bulgaria and Germany gave to the Italians, it’s likely that Greece would have held fast. Instead, after intense German bombing, Greece fell and was occupied by troops from Italy, Bulgaria, and Germany—all of whom were taking orders from Nazi commanders in Germany, and securing the public’s docility through a Greek puppet government in Athens. In the wake of the occupation, England withdrew its support (the British had been aiding the Greek military) and set up a blockade to prevent supplies from reaching the country. Carved up into territories occupied by three different hostile nations, and cut off from its former allies, Greece was fragmented and intensely vulnerable.

  That fragmentation—political, economic, and, in the case of the famine-stricken islands Syros, Mykonos, and Chios, geographical—is what led to the horrors that came next. A first wave of famine struck Athens, claiming as many as 300,000 lives after the German occupying forces requisitioned food and demanded that the Greek government pay the costs of the occupation. In one fell swoop, the people of Athens had lost what Sen would call direct and indirect entitlements, and the blockade prevented transfer entitlements from easing their suffering. Often, that is where the story of the Great Famine of Greece is said to end, with a few nods made to the fact that there were also poor harvests. But according to Hionidou, there was much more to the story than that.

  First of all, the production levels from Greek farming did not actually dip below the norm. She found that the numbers historians have used to make this claim are entirely based on products that the occupying government collected tax on. But there was widespread resistance to paying tax, as well as the simple fact that people couldn’t afford it. Therefore a lot of foodstuffs that Greece produced during the famine went untaxed and unrecorded. Still, Greek citizens relied for much of their food on imports and trade; remote island areas were especially dependent on imports. The occupying forces restricted people’s movements to small areas, which meant that nearly the entire Greek population had to sneak around and participate in a black market for food. Of course, as Hionidou pointed out, “Those who couldn’t afford the black market died.”

  And then there were those who had no access to the black market at all. On some islands, there was no way, physically, to sneak past the blockades and get to people selling food. On Syros, Mykonos and Chios, for example, people had to depend entirely on the food they produced to eat. And there simply wasn’t enough of it. The mortality patterns Hionidou found during her research flew in the face of the traditional idea that death from starvation is rare. She pored over records from the time, amazed to discover that accounts from both the Axis side and the Greek side matched up. “Greek doctors were reporting the cause of death as starvation, and some could argue that they had good reason to report starvation to blame the occupying forces,” she said. “But the occupying forces produce documents talking about starvation, too. They don’t try to cover it up by saying it’s disease. They’re not denying it at all.”

  The only way that people survived these outbreaks of famine was to hold out until 1942, when the blockade was loosened up
and food aid reached the Greek people. Some managed to escape the country into Hungary, while others got rich on the black market. But the artificial barriers that the occupation erected between people did more to starve them than any failed crop ever could. For Hionidou the lesson of the Great Famine in Greece is stark. When I asked her how a famine is stopped, she said firmly, “I think it’s political will.”

  Nothing could underscore her assertion more than the greatest famine of the twentieth century, which ripped China apart just a little over a decade after World War II came to an end.

  The Great Leap Forward That Sets Us Back

  It started as a crazy dream based on the urge to transform the world. Mao Zedong, chairman of the People’s Republic of China, wanted to secure his political power in the party and turn China into an industrial powerhouse that could rival Britain. He’d grown up on the utopian promises of Marxism, and as an adult revolutionary leader was awed by the massive engineering projects of the Soviet Union. So when Mao informed his fellow Communist leaders at a 1957 meeting in Moscow that China would surpass Britain in the production of basic goods like grain and steel, he drew up a plan that sounded like something out of science fiction. Under the Great Leap Forward, he said, the Chinese people would turn their prodigious energies to a massive geoengineering project—damming up some of the country’s greatest rivers, halting deadly floods, and creating enough stored water to irrigate even the most arid regions in the mountains. Unfortunately, the plan turned out to be more fiction than science. Mao refused to listen to the advice of engineers, and pushed local party leaders to harness every citizen’s energies to dig dams that failed and divert rivers in ways that didn’t irrigate the soil. Worst of all, these projects prevented farmers from doing crucial labor on farms.