Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations (review)

Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Niño and the Fate of Civilizations. By Brian Fagan. (New York: Basic, 1999. xix + 284 pp., preface, maps, bibliography, index. $25.00 cloth.)

The Chumash of the Santa Barbara area in California believed that Coyote and the Sun gambled during the year, the game to be decided at the winter solstice by the Moon. If Coyote won, the year would be wet, with much food. If the Sun were victorious, the year would be hot, dry, and hungry.

Recently another Santa Barbaran, Brian Fagan, has turned his mind to the same phenomenon: the Pacific Rim’s frequent and dramatic changes, precisely at the beginning of winter, from bone dry to soaking wet. Peruvian coastal people named the phenomenon El Niño (“the Christ child”) from its Christmastime commencement. (This has not stopped moderns from calling the more normal state of affairs La Niña, giving Jesus a female counterpart.) Today, thanks to a vast array of satellites, weather ships, buoys, and computers, we know that El Niño is a worldwide phenomenon. We explain it as an effect of the slackening of trade winds in the Pacific. The winds normally blow the warm surface waters to the west, causing cold waters to well up along the Pacific coasts of the New World. When the winds weaken, the warm water sloshes back, like a wave in a bathtub. The result is drought in Indo-Australia and drenching rain in California and the deserts of Peru and Chile—the opposite of the norm. It all sounds very scientific, but there is much we do not know. Old Man Coyote is still up there, laughing quietly at our efforts.

Fagan is a skilled writer, a legendary teacher, and an archaeological adventurer in the Indiana Jones style. In his latest book, Floods, Famines, and Emperors, he looks at several historical and prehistoric situations in which climate change—not just El Niño—seems to have had a role in human affairs. The book begins with a solid, accurate, clear explanation of the phenomenon. Fagan then looks at six cases: ancient Egypt, whose government succeeded so well in dealing with drought that the civilization lasted for three millennia; Moche, in Peru, which failed to do this and succumbed to natural catastrophe; the Maya collapse; the abandonment of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico; Europe in the Little Ice Age (the connection with El Niño is excessively tenuous here); and the modern Sahel. In all cases Fagan points out that climate and institutions interacted in complex ways. Sometimes people coped; sometimes they did not. Usually, they seem to have coped very well indeed, leaving us with hope for the future. The book’s final chapters discuss this; Fagan sees the world as balanced on the edge of overpopulation so severe that the hope for the future will evaporate unless we take immediate action. Like many other scholar-activists, he advocates working toward sustainability as well as population control. One can only second this opinion.

Fagan sees a vital role for climate and climate change in history, but he is well aware of the various ways humans can and do meet the challenge. He is, as always, notably well-read, following the latest literature. He has an unerring sense of important new findings. He notes, for instance, the success of Egypt’s nomarchs (local district heads) in planning for famine. He is also aware of regional differences in the pattern of Maya collapse: outright environmental damage at Copan, warfare (not obviously environment related) in other areas. The Maya collapse coincided with a long and unprecedentedly fierce drought, but oddly the least-affected area was the driest: Northwest Yucatán. Clearly, there is more here than we understand. Fagan’s discourse on the Maya rise and fall sometimes runs far enough beyond present knowledge to qualify as a “just so story” (see p. 150 on...