Humans and the environment: tension and co-evolution

JOACHIM RADKAU

‘When the world was half a thousand years younger', wrote Johan Huizinga in the opening of his The Autumn of the Middle Ages, ‘all events had much sharper outlines than now.

The nature that surrounded humans, from which they lived and which at times threatened them, was still very concrete in all its diversity; it would not have occurred to anyone to invent for it the abstract label ‘environment'. And it was full of energy and life. In northern climes - whether in western Europe or East Asia - people were happy about spring; in regions of the south, which had periods of drought, they were happy about the rainy period. The more human settlements in the wake of population growth moved away from springs, the more people discovered the vital value of pure water: this discovery, which pervades all cultures, is to this day a leitmotif of environmental policy.

Among the countless testimonies to the culture- and epoch-spanning bond of humans with animals, plants, and bubbling springs, the appreciation for the bee seems especially important. The bee - to the cultivation of which Virgil had already devoted the entire fourth book of his Georgica, and which for Bernard of Clairvaux represented the Holy Spirit - this winged creature exemplary for its diligence and cooperation that seeks out fragrant blossoms and extracts and providently collects their sweet essence, honey; and for all that contemporaries did not yet understand the importance of the bee to the pollination of the blossoms!^[33] With palpable delight, Max Weber quoted the eighth-century Kansuan Verse Inscription of the Brahman prince Sivagana about the season when he built his hermitage, where the buzzing of the bees mixes with an erotic shiver - for Weber a key to understanding happiness and the hope for salvation in the Indian ‘Middle Ages': ‘Swarms of bumble bees are everywhere and more than ever the gleam in the eyes of lovely women tells of their love... Laughingly they hastily avert their half-closed eyes and only the quiver of their brows betrays the joy in their hearts. The wives of the pilgrims, however, see the land lighted with the flowers of mango trees and hear the humming sound of drunken bees.'^[34]

The Egyptian Dhu'n-Nun (died 859), one of the earliest Islamic mystics, discovered nature as God's witness, like pantheists of other religions across the ages. As one of his prayers intoned: ‘O God, I never hearken to the voices of the beasts or the rustle of the trees, the splashing of the waters or the song of the birds, the whistling of the wind or the rumble of the thunder but I sense in them a testimony to Thy Unity.'^[35] Theorists distinguish a half-dozen or more different definitions of ‘nature' and thereby often decide that the concept is random.

The most famous nature contemplations in medieval Europe - Albertus Magnus' tractates De animalibus, De vegetabilibus, and De creaturis - are characterized by a vivid perception, even if formally they are commentaries on Aristotle. According to tradition, Albertus spent many years as a mendi­cant wandering from monastery to monastery, from the North Sea to Italy, and from Austria to Brabant; his writings on nature attest not only to a knowledge of classical literature, but also to a good deal of personal observa­tion.^[39] Today, when even the World Bank's report on agriculture (2008) warns against the worldwide degradation of soils, Albertus' observations in De vegetabilibus about the newly cleared and the fallow land are of particular interest. He praises the fallow land as a way of rejuvenating the aging soil, understands the soil as a living thing - the very thing that even Justus Liebig, the nineteenth-century pope of chemistry, refused to believe. Of course, the teachings of Albertus were not learned speculations, but a mirror of peasant experience of the three-field system that had been spreading in the West since the Carolingian period. The same applies to his warnings against soil erosion on mountain slopes and his recommendation to plough at the same level, not from the top down: this was nothing other than the ‘contour plowing' that the Soil Conservation Service of President Roosevelt's New Deal, alarmed by the Dust Bowl, rediscovered from ancient agrarian cultures.

This basic problem of farming sloping terrain is the same everywhere. A global environmental history can be reconstructed, at least in rough outline, even where a broad basis of field research is lacking, because natural laws come into play - along with basic traits of human nature, which are deeply shaped, though not entirely determined, by evolution and corporeal reality. Moreover, one can identify in humans a ‘second nature' that is formed by ways of life and therefore varies from culture to culture, but which possesses a remarkable resilience against short-term fluctuations.¹¹ The environmental historian therefore has good reason to borrow from the work of anthropologists and to pay special attention to how certain ways in which nature is used simultaneously shape humans. It is by virtue of this, above all, that some basic features of the Middle Millennium emerge, even if a broad foundation of details is missing.

A three-realms model

Reconstructing the human relationship to nature depends not on general but on specific driving forces: not on the natural instincts of human beings, but on the ‘second nature' of a way of life shaped by culture and generation­spanning experience. Strategies of planning ahead can be expected to be more likely in regions of the world with periods of cold or drought, where humans will starve if they fail to make provisions. According to Fernand Braudel, the entire civilized world, looked at from its vital basis, divides into three realms: one governed by wheat, one by rice, and one by corn (maize). Their origins are lost in the darkness of prehistory. It is only in the Middle Millennium that they take on sharper contours for the historian, contours that shed greater light on the dynamic of the relationship between humans and nature. I propose a somewhat modified three-fold classification: first, the great irrigation systems; second, the nomadic realms; and third, the combin­ation of rainfed agriculture and animal husbandry that became characteristic for broad regions of Europe.

The great irrigation systems

For the period 200-1000 ce, John R. and William H. McNeill have empha­sized that ‘the spread of rice paddies in southern Asia affected more persons than any other single transformation of the age'.1² In all of world history, the ^{[40] [41] great irrigation systems are virtually the archetypal example of how a form of agriculture shapes all of society, political administration, ways of thought, and not least the relationship to the environment. In his Steps to an Ecology of the Mind, a cult book of environmentalism, Gregory Bateson offered a fascinating account, based on years of first-hand experience on Bali, of how the social constraints of terrace farming, along with all of its religious rituals, ‘become so much a second nature of the Balinese that the individual Balinese... has continual anxiety lest he make an error.’[42]}

Karl August Wittfogel became famous and infamous for his theory of the ‘hydraulic society’ - also known as the ‘Asiatic mode of production’. In his Communist phase, he theorized that large irrigation systems had early on compelled a collective mode of production, while in his later anti­Communist phase, he propounded the view that these irrigation systems represented the historical roots of totalitarianism. Wittfogel’s tendency toward ecological determinism has been rightly criticized: history has shown that it is by no means true that irrigation systems compel a centralized bureaucracy. History is replete with examples of local management of irrigation systems, even in China; in fact, it raises doubts as to whether even in Egypt, the classic land of irrigation, a successful overseeing of hydraulic systems from a distant centre using pre-modern means of communication was at all possible.

Elinor Ostrom also looked at hydraulic societies and found in them examples of a successful communal management of the environment.^{[43] [44]} For Huizinga, water management was the very foundation of the cooperative structures in the Netherlands: ‘A country divided by watercourses such as ours must needs have a considerable measure of regional autonomy’; only the combined energy on the ground was able to maintain the dykes and canals.1⁵ But if irrigation systems do not compel bureaucratic centralism, they do offer an incentive for ambitious rulers along rivers surrounded by arid regions to enlarge their sphere of power and tax revenues by expanding these networks into the desert.

And for that very reason, such systems become ecologically fragile: the high rate of evaporation in hot areas leads to an increasing salinization of the soil unless the salt is immediately washed away again by adequate drainage. From the time of the Sumerians until today, the universal rule around the world has been that human efforts are focused initially on irrigation only, while drainage is neglected. While every farmer in regions around the world where rainfed agriculture was combined with pasture farming knew that he had to regenerate the fertility of his land with fertilizers, and was able to distinguish well-fertilized from poorly fertilized fields, soil salinization tended to be an insidious process that was not clearly comprehended, and where the countermeasures were often not understood or not available because of a lack of water.^[45] Hence we encounter early on an environmental degeneration of the modern kind: an ecological instability inherent in a method of production.

This seems to be contradicted by the oldest and - in the West - the most famous example of a large-scale irrigation society: Egypt. In all of world history it offers the most impressive case of a sustainable agrarian economy across five millennia, until the construction of the Aswan Dam (completed in 1971) that robbed the Nile Valley of nutrients. But at its core this was natural, not artificial, irrigation, even if the water of the Nile was distributed into thousands of canals; the tides of the Nile also took care of drainage and prevented soil salinization without the need for special human efforts. The situation was different in Mesopotamia, and there we find indications that soil salinization already troubled the Sumerians and prompted them to switch their cultivation from wheat to the more salt-resistant barley.^[46] Yet high cultures continued in Mesopotamia for millennia afterwards: it would appear that the irrigation systems there became overextended and increas­ingly ecologically fragile only under the ‘ Abbasids.¹⁸

Even Andrew M. Watson - who identified a major innovative boost in the early Islamic world after the Arab conquests when the water wheel (noria) was widely adopted and became the foundation of multifarious garden cultures - believes it is evident that

at its peak the new agriculture was exceedingly fragile... The fertility and moisture of the soil had to be protected by techniques that were often very labour-consuming and which might not be effective in the face of climate changes; water tables, on which some irrigation works depended, had to be maintained by preventing excessive runoff of rainwater and by husbanding groundwater.

The overall impression of Near East agriculture in later centuries, Watson argued, pointed at ecological decline.^[47] For the rising Ottoman Empire, the fact that large-scale irrigation projects did not take off in core regions until the most recent times may have been unexpectedly fortunate, although champions of agrarian progress long lamented this.

Be that as it may: we should be careful with sweeping stories of decline. It would seem that in India, as far as we can tell at the moment, larger irrigation systems emerged only in the Gupta period (320-550 ce) and thereafter. But at all times, village irrigation systems prevailed in India, and all in all there are no signs of an ecological crisis.^[48] In warm and humid Southern China as well, Mark Elvin has spoken of an ‘agrarian revolution' in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in the form of a rapid expansion of wet­rice farming on terraces.^[49] On occasion he has characterized all of Chinese agricultural history as ‘3000 years of unsustainable growth';^[50] however, clear signs of an ecological decline in China are evident only over the last three centuries, at the earliest,^[51] not over three millennia. And today, under the banner of a return of ‘permanent agriculture', the careful return of ‘night soil' - human waste - is being rediscovered as a centuries-old basic principle of Chinese agriculture, and described as ‘turning waste into treasure'.

Zhong Gongfu has described the ‘mulberry dike-fish pond ecosystem' of Chinese wet-rice farming in the Pearl River delta as the model of an inherently sustainable agricultural economy.^[52] The small fish that swam in the irrigated rice paddies not only provided food for the peasants and fertilizer for the fields, they also ate the insects that carried the malaria pathogen. But they did not eat all of the insects: swamp fever was also part of Chinese history, though not with the intensity that one would have expected from a country of irrigation cultures in a warm climate. Ibn Battuta, who made it all the way to China on his travels, was told that life in the warm south was much more dangerous than in the north because of virulent fevers. One can infer from this that Chinese expansion southward was long impeded by malaria. Wet-rice farming could develop fully only after the inhabitants had evolved a kind of immunity against malaria - or had become accustomed to life with malaria and to premature death.

Among the ancient American cultures, the famous - and to this day exemplary - cultivated terraces of the Inca^[53] stand in contrast to the extensive slash-and-burn economy of the Maya, which was not consistent with their urban concentrations. Studies of soil archaeology at Lake Patzcuaro in the highlands of Mexico point to soil degradation already during the Aztec period. Much like Marvin Harris, for whom Aztec cannibalism had a very practical cause in a lack of protein, Elizabeth Dore has given this blanket verdict: ‘In spite of the prevalence of scholarship and myth about a pristine pre-Conquest America, there is increasing evidence that pre-Columbian people were systematically incapable of sustaining the ecosystems upon which their societies depended.'^[54] To this day, the history of irrigation systems, especially of terrace farming, is exceedingly ambivalent from an ecological perspective: stabilization and destabilization lie close together here. Next to planting trees, terraces are the best countermeasure to soil erosion; but if the peasant communities that are necessary for their upkeep - which is very labour-intensive - decay, a veritable chain reaction of eroding topsoil can be set off.

The nomadic realms

Nomadism is a way of life all its own, which produced a distinctive type of person and reached its historical climax in the Middle Millennium, before the storms of nomads were crushed by the artillery fire of sedentary powers - or the leaders of the nomadic hordes themselves became rulers of sedentary cultures, like the Mughals in Northern India. In contrast to what used to be believed, nomadism is not a mere continuation of prehistoric hunting and gathering: rather, it presupposes the breeding of riding animals as well as sedentary cultures to trade with or plunder.

But what did the nomads mean for their environment? To this day, the question to what extent deserts and steppes are natural in origin or owe their spread in part to their nomadic inhabitants is one of the greatest mysteries of environmental history. Precisely because our knowledge is so fragmentary and many findings are equivocal, the issue is vulnerable to politics and ideologies. Like few other landscapes, the desert tempts observers into ecological determinism; but there are also multiple possible stories about the impact of nomads on their environment.

To the French colonizers of North Africa as well as to Walter Clay Lowdermilk, who came out of the Soil Conservation Service of the New Deal and whose doctrines became the gospel of the Zionist settlers in Palestine, the matter was clear: nomads, children of the desert, transform all regions they invade into a desert by destroying irrigation systems or letting them decay. Similar verdicts are found to this day, particularly focusing on overgrazing.^[55]

The ideological content of such verdicts has been criticized, however, and others point to the fragility of many irrigation systems and the ecological merits of nomads, who by their very mobility avoided the overgrazing of arid regions. The geographer Horst G. Mensching, who gathered clues to the history of desertification and nomadism in North Africa, has been left with the impression, in part on the basis of aerial photographs, that the wandering pasture farming of the Arab nomads, who conquered large areas of North Africa after the collapse of Roman rule, ‘caused far less damage' compared to classical irrigation farming ‘and rather helped to regenerate the ecosystem of the steppe, since excessive overgrazing did not take place'.^[56]

But if the traditional notion that the nomads were the misfortune of the lands they overran is open to challenge, for it reflects all too obviously the partisan perception of sedentary cultures, this does not mean that the exact opposite is true. Modern ethnologists who study nomadic populations are often fascinated by the care with which these people treat their animals and pay attention also to the pasture plants. The benefits of mobility were lessened during the time of the great nomadic conquests, for the ecological conditions of the steppe go along with a thin settlement, not a concentration of power. Power concentrations stood in tension with the ecology of their living space. Since the sparse steppe vegetation was quickly overgrazed by the mass of riding animals, nomads were forced into a heightened mobility: there was a convergence between aggressiveness and ecological constraints.

A stable balance between humans and nature does not fit into this overall picture. That applies not only to the warriors of a Chinggis Khan and Timur. Even for the Mediterranean region, John McNeill, on the basis of field research from the Atlas to the Taurus range, concluded: ‘Instability is an inherent condition of pastoralism.'^[57] And one should not forget in all of this that the nomads who made global history were, strictly speaking, often only semi-nomads. Babur (1483-1530), the first of the Mughal rulers, who in India longed to return to the gardens of Samarkand and cried with homesickness when he cut a melon, professed himself in his memoirs a passionate lover of nature - both wild and garden nature.^[58]

European combining of rainfed agriculture with animal husbandry

After the intensive, garden-like economy of irrigated terraces and the nomad­ism of the mounted peoples, the combination of farming and animal hus­bandry that became characteristic for central and western Europe reminds one of the Hegelian resolution of thesis and antithesis in the synthesis; but we should beware of constructing an ecological harmony in Europe. Georges Bertrand highlights the ‘triologie agraire' of French agriculture: ‘ager, saltus, silva (field, pasture, forest)'; in his view, a true ecological balance between the three was achieved only with the introduction of legumes - which regenerate the soil's nutrients - by the agrarian reformers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.^[59] However, the three-field system, the precursor to the later crop rotation, had spread in western and central Europe already in the Middle Ages.

If the origins of the Western Sonderweg that proved very successful in the course of the modern period go back to the Middle Ages, it would undoubt­edly be mistaken to date a superiority of the Western economic system already back to that period. In fact, the British agrarian historian Michael M. Postan believed he could detect evidence that agriculture over the course of the High Middle Ages in England as well as in other European regions had slid into an ‘ecological trap': not only through its expansion into unsuitable marginal zones, but also through the exhaustion of the soil. Animals were needed to provide fertilizer, but their pasture was the forest - the watered pasture was only an invention of the early modern period - and it was being pushed back by reclamation.^[60]

But this condemnation of traditional agriculture reflects the view of modern agrarian reformers, and is not based on broad field research. Joan Thirsk has argued vigorously against the ‘Postan orthodoxy', which saw crises everywhere: she asserts that in equal measure one can discover in the peasant world of the Middle Ages a broad spectrum of flexibility. The diversity of this economic system - from extensive animal husbandry to intensive horticulture - supposedly stabilized it against crises, whether they were caused by weather or population growth. Decline in one sector could have gone hand in hand with growth in another.^[61] No doubt, here, too, there is not only a single master story!

For Max Weber, the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages amounted to a restorative return to a barter economy, a regeneration through a recovered contact to the soil; for Marc Bloch, on the other hand, the collapse of the urban culture of antiquity in the early Middle Ages was accompanied by a technological innovation that led directly to modernity: the introduction of the heavy plough pulled by oxen and suited to the heavy soils of northern Europe.^[62] Bloch believed that this technological innovation triggered an entire chain reaction: it was now possible to conquer areas for agriculture into which the light Mediterranean plough had not been able to penetrate; the peasants had to keep animals, and they had to come together, since they needed broad fields for these ploughs and were often able to keep the needed oxen only collectively. For Lynn White, Jr, who followed in Bloch's tracks, the crucial point was the mental effect: the heavy plough ‘had helped to change the northern peasants' attitude towards nature, and thus our own... once man had been part of nature; now he became her exploiter'.^[63] With this insight, White became the founding father of a pessimistic environmental history.

His bold leap from the heavy plough to the ‘great transformation' in the relationship between humans and nature contains a speculative element, however, and requires broad empirical verification. In the background one recognizes specific American experiences. Under the impact of the Dust Bowl, Edward H. Faulkner, the prophet of conservation tillage, published a general attack on the plough in 1943 with the provocative title Plowman's Folly, a polemic whose stridency was never equalled in less erosion- threatened Europe. It was simultaneously a major assault on conventional peasant mentality and habits in dealing with the soil.

Medieval farming was not inherently ecologically stable, but required ecological reserves: not only forests, but on barren soils, also heathlands for heather-sod composting, or marl, the subject of a later saying that it made ‘rich fathers and poor sons', since it tempted farmers into overusing the land.^[64] In sandy regions of northern Germany, heather-sod cutting, which can be demonstrated for the period after around 1000 ce, amounted to a veritable ‘agricultural revolution' that made permanent agriculture possible in the first place.^[65] This situation can be interpreted in two contrary directions: as the early establishment of an economic form with a broad ecological footprint that lacked an inherent sustainability and possessed a tendency toward a colonization of its environment; but also as an economic form which, unlike Asian wet-rice cultures, was prevented from pushing population growth to the utmost limits of the food supply precisely by the fact that it required ecological reserves.

For historians of the forest, the fact that medieval peasants used the forests as pasture was definitive proof that they had systematically ravaged the forests as well as the soil. If the forest pasture reduces the commercial yield of timber from a forest, however, this in no way means that it ruins the forest ecologically. In this regard, modern conservation experiences have led to a thorough revisionism: forest pasture has been ecologically rehabilitated.

Ester Boserup has further rehabilitated the smallholders of the world and established an entire theory on the argument that intensive, garden-like smallholder agriculture could cushion a growth in population, indeed, that it could be strengthened by it. However, that applies only up to a certain limit.^[66] A balance between humans and nature is more or less stable only when it possesses ecological reserves. And a precise balance can be easily upset, whether by crop failures, invasions, or natural events. The combin­ation of farming and animal husbandry possessed its own kind of ecological resilience, especially on heavy soils; however, this took full effect only during the course of the modern period.

Three master stories

To date, there have been three chief approaches to a master story of human­nature interaction that stretches across the millennia: first, the anthropo­logical approach; second, the religious-philosophical approach; and, third, the climatological approach. All three have been applied to the Middle Millennium, and in all three, one must pay heed to the highly hypothetical and speculative element they contain.

The anthropological approach can be seen in impressive large surveys that turned into best sellers, those by Jared Diamond, Tim Flannery, and Marvin Harris^[67] All have three characteristics in common: first, a provocative, revisionist tendency vis-a-vis the old idealized image of the noble savage, which is being revived in the new environmentalist ideal of ecological natives; second, a delight in bold flights through world history without agonizing much about the problems of source criticism; third, a penchant for direct leaps from prehistoric culture to modern civilizations, with a tendency to skip the Middle Millennium or give it merely a cursory glance. The whole point is to illustrate through these daring leaps that a tendency towards the destructive overuse of natural resources has been inherent in human nature since time immemorial: through the dominance of moment­ary cupidity over forethought for a distant future, and through the drive - grounded in the sexual urge - to constantly increase one's own population.

It would be unrealistic not to recognize that such a disposition does in fact exist within humans. This human nature broke through even in a future pope: when the then 28-year-old Enea Silvio Piccolomini confessed to his father in 1443 that he had fathered an illegitimate son, his excuse was nature: ‘In all lovers it arouses this appetite so that the human race will be con­tinued.'^[68] In the Middle Ages, ‘nature' also meant humanity's sexual nature, and it drove humans to multiply without any forward-looking planning with a view towards the limits on resources.

The religious-philosophical approach was made famous above all by Lynn White's Christmas Lecture in 1966, entitled ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis', which became a kind of sacred text of early environmental history. Although White came to his subject from the history of technology and considered various historical causes behind the modern environmental crisis, in the end he sought the fundamental reason in the Judaeo-Christian tradition with the Old Testament God's commandment to humans to exer­cise dominium terrae, though more so in its Western than its Greek-Orthodox incarnation: ‘Especially in its Western form, Christianity is the most anthro­pocentric religion the world has seen.'^[69] This Christianity supposedly estab­lished an exploitative relationship to nature that was unique in the history of the world. Since Christianity - like Islam, which stood within the same tradition - rose to become a world power in the Middle Millennium, the logical conclusion would be that the foundations for the modern environ­mental crisis were laid in that period.

But very shortly after White delivered his famous lecture, Clarence J. Glacken published the fruit of a lifetime of study, unsurpassed to this day: Traces on the Rhodian Shore. It was filled with a wealth of quotes that pointed to old elements of a close bond to nature: for example, the notion of a ‘book of nature', which - alongside sacred scripture - was a source of divine revelation, part of the theological tradition of the Middle Ages.^[70] ‘Is there any more marvellous sight, any occasion when human reason is nearer to some sort of converse with the nature of things, than the sowing of seeds, the planting of cuttings, the transplanting of shrubs, the grafting of slips?' St Augustine had already asked.^[71] Niklas Luhmann scoffed at the debate for and against Lynn White: ‘When the question is put in such a simple and naive way', one could continue the back-and-forth of citations ad infinitum without ever arriving at a conclusion.^[72] Indeed, the only way to make headway is to examine the role of religion in the everyday life of human beings, in the peasant calendar and peasant customs, in the regulation of economic life. However, one can peruse entire piles of books and chapters on the topic of religion and ecology without so much as encountering an awareness of this necessity.

Xavier de Planhol, the author of - to this day, singular - work about the ‘cultural-geographic foundations of the history of Islam' detected ‘a negative role of Islam everywhere': Islam, itself a religion of the desert, had sup­posedly advanced ‘bedouinization' in an ‘unparalleled way', thereby promot­ing the advance of the steppe and the desert against the forest and the field.^[73] Here he followed the one-sidedly negative view of nomadism, but much within the richly varied material that he presents does not fit this image of monotonous destruction. The Islamic realm, too, contains an abundance of flourishing agrarian and horticultural cultures, yet it gives pause that the realm of Islam to this day constitutes the largest, contiguous blank spot on the global landscape of environmentalism.

The third master story is climatological. In recent decades, influenced by the warnings about current climate change, a ‘how-climate-made-history' notion has come into fashion. It has not been helpful, however, that histor­ians of climate, though profiting from the growth of interest in the issue, found themselves amidst the worldwide controversy between those who claim that we are currently experiencing a historically exceptional global warming and those who deny it. Some historical facts can be exploited by both parties. Still, the history of climate holds the promise of bestowing on the Middle Millennium an internal unity as well as a dramatic cycle, both based on the hypothesis that the warm period in the High Middle Ages was followed by the ‘Little Ice Age'. That medieval warm period lessens the drama of the ‘hockey stick' climate curve, according to which average temperature was relatively uniform over the centuries and rose alarmingly only during the last decades. Still, most historians of climate have been reluctant to combat the alarmist party, because - all things considered - the lasting impression remains: ‘Earth is already almost certainly warmer now than it was during the Middle Ages.'^[74]

The basic problem of this genre is that short-term fluctuations of the weather are perceived much more clearly than long-term climate change, with the result that the sources of the older period, when the environment was grasped only with the senses and not through statistics, deal almost exclusively with weather, not with climate. Especially impressive is the research on ‘catastrophic' soil erosion in northern German loess regions following an extreme wet period in 1342.^[75] At the same time, however, the rice farmers in eastern and southern Asia became more independent from the weather thanks to the expansion of irrigation systems. Another problem is that the effects of climate change are very different in different regions. Given the current state of research, it can be grasped only indistinctly what the ‘Medieval Climate Optimum' in western Europe meant for many other regions of the world. The discussion of present-day climate aims, as a rule, at formulating theses about global development, and neglects regional vari­ation. Likewise, the study of earlier times has tended to generalize on the basis of regional findings instead of paying attention to regional differences.^[76] A noteworthy exception is Ronnie Ellenblum's thesis that, during the Middle Millennium, varying developments of climate took place in different parts of the world. On the basis of a massive corpus of sources in many languages, he has shown that the warm period in medieval Europe coincided with a period of coldness, drought and hunger in large parts of the eastern Mediterranean, which entailed a region-wide decline in the tenth and elev­enth centuries.^[77]

Scenarios for the Middle Millennium: collapse, crisis, resilience, sustainability

Until now, research into environmental history based on written sources has encompassed the Middle Millennium only sporadically. Although the com­munity of environmental historians has expanded enormously, especially since the 1990s, so far it has focused entirely on the last two - or at best three - centuries. One outlier in the existing literature is the magnum opus of John F. Richards on global environmental history from about 1500 to 1800, The Unending Frontier. Its very title suggests, however, that it defines the previous millennium primarily in negative terms: as the period before the great colonial expansion of the Western seafaring powers, before the emerging global economy, when, in spite of the Mongol onslaught, the silk roads, and sea trade in the Indian Ocean, humanity overwhelmingly still lived in narrow boundaries, in small worlds. Global histories written from a modern retrospective generally prefer the world's growing interconnected­ness as their leitmotif; by contrast, to grasp the peculiarity of the preceding age, it would be more suitable to make the autarky of the many small worlds the guiding theme, from environmental to cultural history. Does this apply only to the pre-Columbian era? In their 760-page opus on the pre­modern history of the Mediterranean, Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell argued vigorously against generalizations even about the Mediterra­nean region so densely connected through seafaring since antiquity, espe­cially against widespread blanket statements about ecological decline as a result of deforestation. Against this 'Mediterraneism', which had been taken to an extreme by the idea of ecological determinism, they posited the thesis that the true history even in the Mediterranean had unfolded in small worlds. Xenophon's terse comment, ‘not every piece of land suffers disease at the same time', could be inscribed as a motto over this major work.^[78]

Now, historians whose point is that history unfolds differently elsewhere are always right; but anyone who focuses entirely on differences lapses into a mere accumulation of facts. A global survey of the environmental history of the Middle Millennium must navigate - like Odysseus around Scylla and Charybdis - between this approach and the speculative constructs of eco­logical determinism.

One scenario that has frequently been applied to the Middle Millennium is that of collapse. Various archaeological findings can be interpreted to suggest that the Maya culture of Tikal, the East African culture of Great Zimbabwe, and the Khmer culture of Angkor were at least in part destroyed by an excessive strain on the environment or by its inadequate management. Around Great Zimbabwe there are indications of soil erosion as a result of deforestation, which may have been caused by the wood needed for smelting works. Most widely discussed and the best researched has been the ‘Maya Collapse', which seems to have happened fairly abruptly in the eighth and ninth centuries and without any destructive conquerors, though it did not mean that the Maya people disappeared. In this case researchers arrived at an ecological explanation long before ecology became fashionable, with the conjecture of a vicious cycle of overpopulation, deforestation, soil erosion, and the overuse of the fragile tropical soils. For all the back and forth in the debate, the ecological explanation has remained quite persuasive to this day, even in the eyes of the geographer Herbert Wilhelmy, who in his major work on the rise and fall of Maya culture searched for clues to the contrary.^[79]

But the fates of Tikal, Zimbabwe, and Angkor are not, on the whole, as typical of their time as presented in the ecologically pessimistic visions of history. Moreover, the findings are ambivalent: the mere sight of buildings crushed by mighty trees suggests that these cities might have been undone, not by a destroyed nature, but by an overpowering one. The sight of the Maya ruins on the Yucatan peninsula overgrown by the jungle led Arnold Toynbee to believe that the ‘forest, like some sylvan boa-constrictor, has literally swallowed them up'.^[80] Gazing upon Angkor, which was presumably abandoned as the capital around 1440, the writer Han Suyin, in her introduc­tion to a book about the ancient city, was seized by the same conviction: ‘The trees came and overgrew stones and heads and suffocated Angkor.'^[81] It would appear that the irrigation system on which the culture of Angkor was based was so unstable under the prevailing geomorphological conditions - the clay-rich soil, the low gradient, the tropical climate - that a weakening of the political organization overseeing its maintenance triggered a chain reaction that caused rivers to silt up and change their courses, thus destroying the entire system. It is not the eventual collapse of Angkor that is phenomenal, however, but the preceding resilience of this culture. What is more, this collapse was not tantamount to a decline of nature - with a loss of forest, water, and biodiversity. Nor did it mean the loss of all the basic resources of life of the population that lived there. In fact, a majority of the people might have led a more pleasant life following the collapse of Angkor's centralized apparatus of power. James C. Scott titled his Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia - a pioneering study of the early environmental history of this part of the world - The Art of Not Being Governed.^[82]

Those authors especially who know of no other historical factors find it easy to turn climate change into the primary actor. For some time now evidence has been accumulating that the ‘Medieval Climate Optimum' was followed soon after 1300 by a century of continuous cooling; however, at the current state of research, the ‘Little Ice Age' takes on clearer contours only from the sixteenth century and, for now, only in central and northern Europe.^[83] Its effects on the Mediterranean are ‘still little understood',^[84] not to mention those on more southern regions of the world, where the label ‘ice age' makes no sense in any case. Visible effects should be expected most readily at the edge of glaciers; and so to this day the end of the Viking settlements is the clearest demarcation of the onset of the Little Ice Age in the Late Middle Ages. But according to the latest findings, even that decline was far less dramatic than Diamond's account in Collapse, and to some extent it seems to have consisted quite simply of a switch to food extraction from the sea after the model of the Inuit.^[85] In recent years the theme of resilience has moved increasingly to the fore: while searching for the impact of climate change, researchers instead made discoveries about the adaptability of nature and culture.

Modern environmental awareness emerged as an awareness of crisis; no surprise, then, that environmental historians also initially directed their zeal at uncovering crises in earlier eras. For example, Robert S. Gottfried, in his The Black Death, described the plague as ‘the most severe environmental crisis in history'.^[86] And yet, there is one thing one must not overlook when identifying environmental crises: compared to today, the forms of life during the Middle Millennium, as varied as they were, on the whole possessed three essential elements of an inherent ecological stability. First, those who caused environmental damage, which was usually contained within a local frame­work, generally belonged to the same social group as those affected by it: this was a major and fundamental difference from today. Second, environmental damage was usually not irreversible, though this point requires closer examination on a case-by-case basis. Third, in typical cases the causal link between cause and effect - so it would appear, at least - was transparent, and one knew what kinds of precautions and countermeasures had to be taken.

Many surveys on forest history that draw on the sources of forest adminis­trations and reflect the self-awareness of modern forestry divide all of history into two major epochs: first the many centuries of predatory exploitation of the forest, the evil time of a haphazard and narrow-minded plundering of the forest by the peasants, followed, beginning in the eighteenth century, by the glorious ‘New Age' of sustainable forestry introduced under the guidance of scientifically trained forestry officials. But is the sustainable handling of natural resources, one that is concerned with future generations, in fact an invention of the modern age that presupposes modern science and a state bureaucracy? One must not confuse the history of concepts with real history; quite the contrary: sustainability becomes a major state programme only when it is clearly threatened. It is no accident that the concept of sustainable forestry was first formulated by a Saxon mining administrator: Hanns Carl von Carlowitz in his 1713 book Sylvicultura oeconomica.^[87] Mining and smelting were the largest wood consumers in the country. Carlowitz, today often acclaimed as the inventor of sustainability, knew very well that his concept was nothing but a transfer of the rules of good housekeeping to forestry.^[88]

The situation was similar in Japan, the only non-Western country that in pre-modern times sought to institutionalize sustainable forestry; and yet its historian, Conrad Totman, has remarked: ‘Rhetoric alone did even less to preserve timber stands than it did to stop erosion because the rhetoricians were the chief lumber consumers... The protective measures were being taken by the principal forest predators as means of assuring their own access to forest yield, not as ways of preserving forest per sc.''6^l State-prescribed sustainability is not an innocent concept; it could function as a battle cry with which major wood consumers, supported by the territorial ruler, pushed the peasants out of the forest. That danger is also contained in the ‘sustainable development' proclaimed at the environmental summit in Rio in 1992.

A sustainability that is more or less inherent in a way of life is much more lasting than the kind of sustainability that is recommended to the world at summit meetings and requires forward-looking planning from above. The latter is something that one will search for in vain during the Middle Millennium; the former is something that one can more likely presume to have existed. Let us recall the opening quote from Huizinga: precisely because most people in the old days had their natural resources immediately before their eyes and peasants lived in symbiosis with forest and field, those times had inherent in them a tendency towards a certain sustainability in their dealings with the environment. That sustainability emerges more clearly, the more autonomous villages there were. It is striking that forms of sustainable forestry can be demonstrated earliest in central Europe and in Japan, that is, in world regions in which peasant forest cooperatives are especially well documented.^{[89] [90]}

The thesis about the ‘tragedy of the commons' by the American human ecologist Garrett Hardin has become famous and infamous: the notion that shared goods, which are open to common use without coercion from above, are invariably ruined by human selfishness.^[91] But this thesis is grounded in the logic of the ‘prisoner's dilemma', for it imagines participants as com­pletely isolated individuals. Yet that assumption is entirely absurd with respect to the old villages, where everybody knew everybody else and all were watching one another. A. T. Grove and Oliver Rackham, combative British authors of an ecological history of the Mediterranean region, scoffed at Hardin's thesis: ‘This pernicious notion was invented by an American with no experience how commons actually work.'^[92]

Elinor Ostrom spent decades constructing a position contrary to that of Hardin, and in 2009 she was the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics for her work. Combining empirical knowledge grounded in local history and the theoretical logic of models, she demonstrated that a sustain­able management of natural resources on the basis of village cooperation is most definitely possible.^[93] Her insights are important also for interpreting the findings from medieval environmental history. But what follows from this is not a perfect harmony between humans and nature in those days. In Ostrom's account as well, the sustainable interaction with nature is secured only under certain conditions: the size of the population remains fairly stable, outsiders are kept out of the commons, and some authority guarantees that certain rules are observed. She, too, does not in any way believe that humans possess a natural instinct toward sustainability.

All in all, the impression that emerges is this: while elements of ecological crisis characteristic of the industrial age existed at best in rudimentary form in the Middle Millennium, the relationship between humans and the environ­ment displayed fragile elements already back then - which is why there is reason to pay attention to ecological coefficients in transformation processes of the period. To be sure, given the existing, highly fragmentary state of knowledge, the ambition to write a master story for the entire world, or even merely for individual regions of the world, would be misplaced; most defin­itely we have not only indications of a degradation of the environment, but also signs of a symbiosis of humans and nature and of a co-evolution of culture and nature. That is precisely why environmental history is a fertile field for discoveries and surprises. But for anyone who elevates pristine nature into the yardstick, the entire history of human civilization is simply one of decline.^[94]

Cyclical elements in the history of the relationship between humans and the environment

Instead of a single, large, linear movement in the Middle Millennium, what tends to emerge in environmental history are several cyclical movements. A first, and especially prominent, large cycle, in which world history merges with environmental history, lies in the ebb and flow of the large nomadic expansions: a process that begins in late antiquity and ends in the early modern period. Throughout this entire millennium, the onslaughts of the mounted nomads were a constant threat to the sedentary irrigation cultures of South and East Asia, which, unlike the peasants in the West, did not breed horses, and by interfering with the artful irrigation systems, they also had an ecological dimension. For example, in 1128 a desperate governor of the Northern Song dynasty, in an attempt to ward off the mounted warriors of the Jurchen - who would be followed in short order by the Mongols - opened the dykes of the Yellow River, with the effect that it shifted its estuary watercourses several hundred kilometres southward until the nine­teenth century. For the peasants this meant an ‘ecological catastrophe', but military considerations took precedence over the maintenance of the irriga­tion networks.^[95]

Another cycle was especially evident in central and western Europe. Initially, the expansion of territorial lordship manifested itself around the world in the clearing of forests, and the growing shortage of wood was one of the weakest points of Islamic civilization of that age. But then a profound change took place, and lordship manifested itself increasingly through the protection of the forest. The logging decree in Charlemagne's Capitulare de villis already contains the restriction that forests, ‘where they are needed', must not be excessively logged. At first this was in service to the royal hunt - as were similar restrictions in England after the Norman invasion of 1066 - but later, especially in central Europe, in the interest of the mining and salt works of the territorial rulers, and in western Europe in service to shipbuild- ing.^[96] Beginning in the fourteenth century, Alpine forests were protected against logging to prevent avalanches and flooding.

Hunting and forest pasture did not play the same role in Asian cultures; and in warm countries, vast quantities of wood were not needed as fuel for the winter. Instead, Indian and Chinese rulers for a long time still looked upon forests with suspicion, as the home of wild peoples who escaped subjugation. It has often been maintained that the inhabitants of the West also looked upon the forest as an enemy; but in view of the multifarious uses of the forest for the peasants, this thesis, the product of forest wardens in service to the territorial lords, is not credible. For that reason it is also questionable to what extent the stream of official forest regulations that commenced at the end of the Middle Ages did in fact constitute ecological progress at the time. Forest protection compelled from the top down can bring about the exact opposite. It was therefore crucial that, notwithstanding the many conflicts over the forest, in the end the interests of the lords and the peasants in the preservation of the forest found some common ground and that all those involved were committed to legal regulation in the long run, which meant that the struggle over the forest became a struggle over the law.

A particularly prominent cycle of the Middle Millennium is epidemi­ological and demographic in nature: it arises out of the first documented appearance of a large plague epidemic at the end of antiquity, of smallpox spread both by the Huns and the Arab warriors, the spread of the plague, which reached its catastrophic climax around 1350, and the subsequent gradual development of immunities among the population. This had the result that population growth settled on a permanent long-term trend with the beginning of the modern period, even though waves of epidemics followed for centuries to come. The situation was inverted only in the New World: there it was the conquistadors who introduced infectious diseases that turned into catastrophic epidemics in lands that had once - if Las Casas is to be believed - been crowded with people, ‘like in a beehive'. One can get the impression that the ‘Plague of Justinian', which reached the Mediterranean in 541 via Egypt, meant the definitive end of antiquity^[97] and inflicted a lasting weakness on the Byzantine Empire, which prepared the ground for the Arab conquests. Although population pressure is periodically evident in the Middle Millennium as a dominant factor in the relationship between humans and the environment, on the whole it is much less so than in the modern period.

Whether this applies also to China is a contested issue among scholars. A Chinese ‘Farmer's Lament' from the twelfth century declared: ‘If there's a mountain, we'll cover it with wheat. If there's water to be found, we'll use it all to plant rice... With such labor we exhaust all our strength.'^[98] For Qu Geping, in the 1980s deputy chairman of the environmental protection agency of the People's Republic of China, overpopulation had been China's hereditary evil for millennia, very much in the spirit of Malthus,^[99] while Robert B. Marks countered in a similarly sweeping vein that ‘the Chinese were in fact very much in control of their reproductive capabilities'.^[100]

John R. McNeill has come away with the impression that ‘Chinese society was probably the most epidemiologically experienced'.^[101] This points to a relatively high degree of immunity, but also to the fact that epidemics were a constant companion in Chinese history; in the historiography they do not appear as epochal events. By contrast, the Black Death constituted a pro­found turning point in the consciousness of the Western world. In the policy of public hygiene, which - beginning in Ragusa, modern Dubrovnik - emerged out of the traumatic experience of the great epidemics, we have the earliest roots of state environmental protection. Hygienic and environ­mental problems were concentrated above all in the cities; and the autono­mous city, which existed chiefly in the West, was the primary actor in whatever kind of environmental policy existed from the Late Middle Ages to the nineteenth century.

Conclusion

In the chapter on the Middle Ages in his Environmental History of the World, J. Donald Hughes noted that in those days the world was still full of unspoiled landscape with a biodiversity which today has long since been forgotten. And yet: ‘Elsewhere, the rate at which the humans were altering the face of the Earth was slow but accelerating. It was not proceeding at a steady pace, but it was faster than it had ever been.'^[102] Indeed, broadly speaking, one can detect in the course of the Middle Millennium a gradual acceleration in world history, and not least also in the alteration of the environment by humans, especially in retrospect. Here one realizes that the triumph of the water mill in the West, which was impeded in the East by the water regime of the irrigation cultures, already contained the germ seed of the industrial revolution.^[103] Moreover, beyond individual innovations one can detect in the European Middle Ages the ‘invention of invention': the emergence of an optimistic attitude toward technological innovations, at least among influential elites, in contrast to the tragic outcome of the ancient myths of Daedalus and Prometheus.

Still, all of this becomes meaningful only from modern hindsight. As late as the second half of the fifteenth century, stagnation was observed in wide areas of Europe in mining. Today, as humanity returns to an awareness of the limits to growth, there is reason to appreciate also the medieval limits to growth as a regulating mechanism in the relationship between humans and nature instead of seeing them merely as barriers to be overcome. If one ran up against the limits of wood resources, it by no means meant an ‘energy crisis' at that time, for back then, when most goods were limited, an economy compulsively programmed on growth could not exist yet. It was simply a time in which, as Huizinga reminded us, the world was still very concrete - and which knew growth only as organic, limited growth.

Translated by Thomas Dunlap

FURTHER READING

Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1972.

Behringer, Wolfgang, Hartmut Lehmann, and Christian Pfister (eds.), Kulturgeschichte des Klimas. Von der Eiszeit bis zur globalen Erwarmung. Munich: Beck, 2007.

Bork, Hans-Rudolf. Bodenerosion und Umwelt: Verlauf Ursachen und Folgen der mittelalterli- chen und neuzeitlichen Bodenerosion. Braunschweig: Technische Universitat, 1988.

Campbell, Bernard. Human Ecology: The Story of Our Place in Nature from Prehistory to the Present, 2nd edn. New York, NY: A. de Gruyter, 1995.

Christensen, Peter. The Decline of Iranshahr: Irrigation and Environments in the History of the Middle East 500 B. C. to A. D. 1500. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1993.

Diamond, Jared. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York, NY: Viking, 2005.

Ellenblum, Ronnie. The Collapse of the Eastern Mediterranean: Climate Change and the Decline of the East, 950-1072. Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Elvin, Mark. ‘3000 Years of Unsustainable Growth: China's Environment from Archaic Times to the Present', East Asian History 6 (1993): 7-46.

Flannery, Timothy F. The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People. Sydney: Reed Books, 1994.

Geping, Qu and LiJinchang. Population and the Environment in China. Trans. Jiang Bazhong and Gu Ran, Boulder, CO: L. Rienner Publishers, 1994.

Glacken, Clarence J. Traces on the Rhodian Shore. Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the 18th Century. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967.

Grove, A. T. and Oliver Rackham. The Nature of Mediterranean Europe: An Ecological History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.

Horden, Peregrine and Nicholas Purcell. The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.

Hughes, J. Donald. An Environmental History of the World: Humankind’s Changing Role in the Community of Life. London: Routledge, 2001.

Humphrey, Caroline and David Sneath (eds.), Culture and Environment in Inner Asia. Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Little, Lester K., ed. Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541-750. Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Luhmann, Niklas. Ecological Communication. Trans. John Bednarz, Jr, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989.

McAnany, Patricia and Norman Yoffee (eds.), Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire. Cambridge University Press, 2010.

McNeill, John R. The Mountains of the Mediterranean World: An Environmental History. Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Montgomery, David R. Dirt - The Erosion of Civilization. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007.

Radkau, Joachim. Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment. Trans. Thomas Dunlap, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Wood - A History. Trans. Patrick Camiller. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012.

Richards, John F. The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Scott, James C. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009.

White, Lynn Jr. ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis', in David and Eileen Spring (eds.), Ecology and Religion in History. New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1974.

Medieval Technology and Social Change. Oxford University Press, 1962.

Wilhelmy, Herbert. Welt und Umwelt der Maya. Aufstieg und Untergang einer Hochkultur. Munich: Piper, 1981.