In 1958 and 1959, as Mao moved into the next phases of the Great Leap Forward, he demanded that each province meet fantastically high quotas on agricultural and steel output. According to regional records uncovered recently by the University of Hong Kong history professor Frank Dikötter, this was when the famine began to claim millions of lives—eventually killing as many as 45 million people. People died as a result of two policies: dispossession and fruitless labor. First, the government created vast work collectives by confiscating all private property, dispossessing people of their food stores, homes, and other belongings. Then local party representatives forced the understandably reluctant members of these new collectives to engage in unscientific, misguided experimental agricultural methods and steel manufacture. Farmers were told to plant rice seeds very close together, extremely deep in the soil, because it was considered a scientific method of producing a higher-yield crop. Meanwhile, to meet steel quotas and avoid punishment, people took to melting down farm equipment and anything else they could. Needless to say, the experimental farming techniques left the collectives with little food, and the steel production often left them more impoverished than ever.
Though China wasn’t at war, Mao borrowed the language of militarization to propagandize on behalf of the policies that were starving his people. China’s Great Leap Forward spawned terms like “the People’s Army,” which Mao used to characterize the displaced masses that party leaders deployed to work on China’s industrialization projects. Dikötter suggests that Mao favored terms like this because being in a state of war—if only a metaphoric one—would inspire people to sacrifice even more for the good of the country. It’s easy to see similarities between this strategy and the situation in occupied Greece. In both cases, war was used to justify abuses that led to millions of deaths.
China’s Great Famine was the worst famine of the twentieth century, and it was entirely manufactured by human political choices, which in turn affected land use. Dikötter calls the famine a mass murder, while the Chinese government considers it to be the result of tragically misguided policies. Regardless, it’s clear that the worst famines in recent history are cultural disasters rather than natural ones.
Survivors of the Great Famine included people who were willing to bend the political rules that Mao and his representatives had imposed on them. They secreted away foods that were supposed to go to the communes, engaged in illegal forms of trade, and, in a few cases, formed armed mobs and robbed trains, communes, and other villages. It wasn’t until 1961 that Mao acknowledged the desperate conditions in some provinces and called off the programs of the Great Leap Forward. When people were allowed to live in more permanent homes and return to tried-and-true methods of farming, the famine slowly abated.
Are We Going to Kill Ourselves?
Stories of recent famines raise the same question that stories of war always do: Are we humans going to exterminate ourselves more efficiently than a megavolcano ever could? It’s undeniable that one of the greatest threats we face is ourselves. Though famine has historically been a less efficient killer than other disasters like pandemics, and our systems for dealing with it have improved immensely over time, our survival is still at risk from malnutrition caused by environmental change and what demographer Hionidou called political will.
Evan Fraser’s predictions about environmental change in North America’s breadbaskets are already being borne out by the dire drought conditions that struck in the summer of 2012. Many farmers in Africa have suffered similar droughts for decades because they depend entirely on rainfall rather than irrigation systems.
Some of the environmental changes we’re witnessing in the grain baskets of Africa and North America are cyclical changes that have nothing to do with humans’ use of fossil fuels. But if the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent models of rising global temperatures from carbon emissions turn out to be accurate, we’ll soon be dealing with cyclical drought conditions, exacerbated by the heat humans are adding to the party. Many regions will suffer the same problems that farmers face in Africa every season, when drought can wreck an entire region’s hope for food and incomes. It’s very possible that our dreams for a global society in an industrialized world will have the unintended consequence of pushing most people on Earth into lives of poverty, hunger, and disease.
Leaving aside questions of environmental change, we’re still contemplating an exceptionally harsh future. As UC Berkeley economics professor Brad DeLong put it to me:
You get a famine if the price of food spikes far beyond that of some people’s means. This can be because food is short, objectively. This can be because the rich have bid the resources normally used to produce food away to other uses. You also get famines even when the price of food is moderate if the incomes of large groups collapse.… In all of this, the lesson is that a properly functioning market does not seek to advance human happiness but rather to advance human wealth. What speaks in the market is money: purchasing power. If you have no money, you have no voice in the market. The market then acts as if it does not know that you exist and does not care whether you live or die.
DeLong describes a marketplace that leaves people to die—not out of malice, but out of indifference. Coupling this idea with Sen’s entitlement theory, you might say oppression and war deprive people of the entitlements necessary to feed themselves. The problem is that the market doesn’t care if people starve or grow ill. Based on historical evidence from famines in Ireland, Greece, and China, we can reasonably expect that if our economic systems remain unchanged, we will continue to suffer periods of mass death from famine. These famines will get worse and worse while the market continues to ignore the growing impoverished class.
Of all the forms of mass death we’ve looked at so far, famine can be understood as the least natural of all disasters. The good news is that famines (often accompanied by pandemics), unlike megavolcanoes and asteroid strikes, are human-made problems with human solutions. If we consider the examples of famine we’ve explored in this chapter, there are a few common themes that emerge in the stories of survivors. All of them have to do with ways that countries have acted collectively to fight mass death. One key lesson we can draw from Black ’47 is that mobility—movement either internally or across national borders—often saves lives. A million Irish immigrants escaped death, thanks in part to other nations allowing them to relocate. Today, Somalian and Ethiopian refugees are attempting to do the same thing as they stream out of regions where food supplies have dried up. By contrast, during the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s government prevented the Chinese who lived in famine-racked provinces from fleeing to other places with better food security. The death tolls that resulted were staggering. Similarly, Greeks who suffered the worst effects of famine during World War II were trapped on islands, unable to flee even if they had wanted to risk the dangers of slipping through the blockades.
Still, global cooperation did ultimately prevent the Greek famine from reaching the proportions that the Great Leap Forward did. A few Greeks left the country, but for the most part the population was saved by humanitarian aid coming in from outside. Like immigration, food aid is a solution that requires other nations or regions to cooperatively step in. This solution to famine involves what Sen called transfer entitlements. To survive, starving regions must rely on the kindness and generosity of regions that can ship in their surplus food.
There is another lesson to be drawn from Black ’47 and the Great Leap Forward that is especially important in today’s drought-stricken times. Mass societies need to adapt better to their environments, figuring out ways to farm sustainably so that a few years of bumper crops don’t give way to decades of blight and dust bowls. It is one of history’s great tragedies that Mao’s attempt to revolutionize China’s land use was so horrifically misguided and ill-informed. He was right that farming methods needed to change radically to sustain China’s huge population. But to say that his implementation was faulty is a gross understatem
ent. Changes in our land use have to be based on an understanding of how ecosystems actually function over the long term. Ultimately, as we’ve learned from studying both human and geological history, the safest route is to maintain diversity. Farmers need to move away from specialized landscapes and monocultures that can make a region’s food security vulnerable to climate change, plant diseases, and pests.
None of these solutions—immigration, aid, and transformed land use—is foolproof, certainly, but they can all prevent large groups from being extinguished. These are solutions that also require mass cooperation, often on a global scale. Preventing famine, like preventing pandemics, has meant changing our social structures. But those changes are always ongoing, often spurred by protests and political upheaval. We even have today’s version of the Peasants’ Revolt in the form of the Occupy movement, whose goals those London rioters in 1381 would undoubtedly have recognized and understood. Still, sometimes it feels as if change doesn’t come soon enough. Famines and their accompanying pandemics are problems that we’ve been trying desperately to solve for hundreds of years. How are we ever going to survive over the next several hundred?
In the rest of this book, we’re going to explore the answer to that question. As we’ve seen, human mass death is caused by a tangle of social and environmental factors. Our survival strategy will need to address both factors. We need a way forward based on rationally assessing likely threats, which we’ve learned about from our planet’s long geological history and our experiences as a species. But we also need a plan that’s based on an optimistic map of where we as a human civilization want to go in the future. To draw that map, we’ll take our cues from some of the survivors around us today, human and otherwise. Those survivors and their stories are what we’ll explore next.
PART III LESSONS FROM SURVIVORS
10. SCATTER: FOOTPRINTS OF THE DIASPORA
IN THE LAST two parts, we’ve looked at all the ways life on Earth, and especially humanity, have managed to survive hardships that ranged from meteorite strikes and megavolcanoes to the perils of migration and disease. Now we’ll turn to the stories of humans and other life-forms who have survived into the present day, using techniques that could serve us well as we make plans for a future world where our descendants can thrive. We’ll begin with the story of a group of humans, an ancient tribal people today called the Jews, who have retained a distinctive cultural identity for thousands of years. They’ve survived several deadly episodes of persecution in part by scattering and escaping in the face of adversity, rather than allowing themselves to be extinguished in the flames of war. In fact, this strategy of scattering is a crucial lesson taught to children during Passover, one of Judaism’s most important cultural rituals.
When I was the youngest kid at Passover gatherings, I was given the job of reading some questions that are a crucial part of the prayers. None of them made any sense to me, including the very first one: “Why is this night different from all other nights?” As I squirmed in my seat waiting for dinner, I hoped that the answers would explain why I had to eat such weird food, like parsley dipped in salt water and sweet apples mixed with eye-watering horseradish. After many years of grumpily contemplating why I had to eat things that symbolized the tears we shed during slavery, I figured out that Passover had nothing to do with dinner, and everything to do with memory. Passover is the one night every year when Jews retell the biblical story from Exodus about how the diaspora began. It’s become such an important ritual for Jews because the allegorical stories in Exodus mirror actual catastrophic events in Jewish history. This story of survival in the Bible became, in a sense, a template for survival in the real world.
But before we consider Jewish survival in recorded history, let’s recall the Passover story (apples and horseradish are optional). Thousands of years ago in ancient Egypt, the story goes, Jews lived as slaves under a cruel Pharaoh, making bricks for his pyramids and sorrowfully watching their families destroyed by backbreaking labor. Eventually a great leader came along, named Moses, and he begged the Pharaoh for his people’s freedom. When Pharaoh refused, he discovered that the single, incorporeal God of the Jews—so different from his people’s many half-animal gods—had some tricks up His sleeve. The God of the Jews sent ten plagues to devastate the Egyptian population, including crop-eating locusts, frogs falling from the sky, and a rain of blood (this always struck me as particularly awesome when I was a kid). In the worst of the plagues, God’s “angel of death” took the firstborn son from every house that wasn’t Jewish. Finally, the Pharaoh was persuaded. He told Moses to get his people out of the city, and the Jews spent one frantic day packing all their goods. They didn’t even have enough time to let their bread rise, which is why we symbolize this part of the story by eating a flatbread called matzo during Passover.
Apparently, at the last minute, the Pharaoh changed his mind about the whole deal and tried to send his soldiers after the fleeing Jews. That’s when Moses got superheroic, held out his hand, and parted the Red Sea. If you’ve ever seen Charlton Heston chewing the scenery in The Ten Commandments, you know what happened next. The Jews raced to the other side of the sea, hotly pursued by the Egyptian army. But once they’d reached the far shore, Moses let the waters smash back into their proper place, drowning the army and beginning the first chapter of the diaspora story.
For forty years, according to the Bible, the Jews wandered in the desert of what was then called Canaan, looking for a place to live. That’s when they became a diaspora people, a group far from their ancestral home and searching for a place to live where they wouldn’t be enslaved or worse. Later in the Bible, God leads the Jews to their “promised land,” eventually called Israel, which their children are destined to conquer. But the story of the book of Exodus ends with the Jews still in the desert, having won one battle but facing many more, unsure whether they’ll survive to find a home.
This ending is as significant as the structure of the story itself. It’s oddly realistic, leaving our main characters stranded in the middle of events whose outcome only their children will ever know. It suggests that when we struggle for a better life, we may never reap the benefits of that struggle ourselves. At the same time, the meat of the story is a powerful antidote to ancient tales glorifying war that were written during the same era as Exodus probably was. Stories about how cool it is to rip your enemies’ faces off appear elsewhere in the Bible (the books of Kings and Judges are complete bloodbaths), as well as in cuneiform tablets created by groups in the Assyrian empire and others. During a time in history when most nations celebrated military force and gory battles, the diaspora story in Exodus teaches us that there is great bravery in retreat. It is an act of tremendous strength to choose life and an uncertain future, rather than death in war. For the Jews who internalized this message, rather than the slaughter-is-nifty one, survival became a struggle that was often more difficult than death. But they lived. And so did their children, for generations that spanned millennia.
The First Diaspora
In modern parlance, the term “diaspora” refers to the geographical dispersion of people who are separated from their homeland. But, as political scientist William Safran explained in the first issue of the scholarly journal Diaspora, it can also refer to the diverse peoples who are the result of such a movement. Many groups have experienced a diaspora, including Africans outside Africa and Asians outside Asia, often due to some kind of major social upheaval. Today, these groups as well as Jews are commonly called diaspora peoples, even though many of them live in the same place that their families have for generations.
The word “diaspora” comes from ancient Greek, where it was first used to describe people who left their homelands to colonize distant regions. Gradually the term was applied to the Israelites of the era of the Babylonian exile, whose experiences were ironically the opposite of the original Greek meaning.
Though the rich geographical detail of the story in Exodus has led many to assume that it’s based o
n an actual historical event, archaeological excavations over the past few decades suggest that the story captures the spirit of the Israelites, but not their actual historical origins. UC Berkeley archaeologist Carol Redmount studies ancient Egyptian civilizations, and says there’s no evidence that the Jews or even their Asiatic ancestors were in Egypt during the time period described in Exodus—roughly during the reign of Rameses in the late second millennium BCE.
Instead, based on archaeological surveys of the region, it seems likely that the Jews during this time were a nomadic group whose members began to settle in small subsistence communities in the hills near Egypt at the height of the Bronze Age in the 1400s or 1300s BCE. Over the next several hundred years, these groups established many kingdoms, including a thriving northern region called Israel. But then in the eighth century BCE, Israel fell to the Assyrians and the formerly backwater southern kingdom of Judah rose to power. Judah’s biggest city, Jerusalem, once a hick town, became a thriving, walled metropolis hugging the base of the famous Temple Mount. It was also during this period that some archaeologists believe Jewish priests in Judah put the book of Exodus together from several sources.
Still, we don’t find archaeological evidence for a situation comparable to the one described in Exodus until the sixth century BCE. At that point, Judah had been a client state of Babylon for decades, and tensions between the two powers finally reached a breaking point. Judah revolted against the Babylonians and was completely crushed. In 587 BCE, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II led his troops into Jerusalem and destroyed it. Archaeologists have found sooty traces of a massive fire within the city’s walls from this era, along with countless arrowheads. The burning of the city sent many Jews into exile throughout the region, but within a few generations many returned to Jerusalem and assimilated into Babylonian society, adopting the local language, Aramaic, for writing. Indeed, in Jewish writings of the period, Judah is referred to by the Aramaic name Yehud. It’s also during this era that the nomadic hill people who created the nations of Israel and Judah started calling themselves Yehudim, or Jews.
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