Migration and Climate Change

From Prehistoric Cultures to Contemporary Management in Organizations

Jamila Alaktif, Stéphane Callens

• Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119751137
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Demografía

This book aims to provide a better understanding of how human cultures interact with climate change over an extended period of time. It is an analysis of the past and present, ranging from the first human migration to contemporary organizational management using an approach developed by Michel Foucault, defined as: the research, the practice, the experience, by which the subject operates on themselves the transformations necessary in order to have access to the truth. This book consists of two parts. The first part focuses on climate change and the substantial effects it had on the first human cultures. The second part explores the role of organizations and the development of new frameworks for action in more recent times of anthropogenic climate change.

PART 1
The First Cultures in a Context of High Climate Instability

1
Migration and Creativity: What Roles do They Play During Climate Change?

1.1. A necessary evil

Understanding climate change, as a global phenomenon, involves referring to history in order to grasp its consequences in the present. Contemporary paleoanthropology advances creativity as a decisive characteristic in the hominization process. Paleoanthropologists, like Yves Coppens, have highlighted the role of creativity in the development of the genus Homo in the face of the many climate changes of the Quaternary. A significant climate volatility, that of the Ice Ages, contributed to the formation of human cultures, which were capable of better adaptive properties than natural selection alone.

This raises questions about the possible interactions between climate volatility and major transformations of cultures and religions. The methodological challenge is that of a global history that can reconcile the concerns of the present with questions about the emergence of human cultures. The developer of the idea of the greenhouse effect, Joseph Fourier, was in the audience of Auguste Comte’s first class, developer of a cultural evolutionism based on three states of human thought. The theory proposed by Comte was that of cultures that are first fetishist, then metaphysical and finally positivist. The concerns of that present time were then those of distinguishing oneself from the previous century, that of the Enlightenment, described as “metaphysical”. A few years later, Boucher de Perthes exhumed stone tools that had undergone several episodes of glaciation, producing an immense expansion of the times of natural and human history.

1.1.1. The methodological challenge of a global history

Climate history has often been weakened when considered in a short time scale from a climate point of view, such as the last millennium in the work of Emmanuel Le Roy-Ladurie [LER 09]. While paleoanthropologists highlight a link between climate change and creativity, the work of climate historians over the past millennium does not seem to point to much evidence shedding light on this issue of creativity and climate change. At most, the importance of certain major tragic events for the emergence of new formulations can be pointed out. The great famines of the 17th Century in Europe were the result of wars in a cold weather climate. An arrival into a warmer and wetter period brought the great Irish famine of 1846 and the questioning of protectionist policies in England. In addition, situations of so-called “necessary evil”, such as the 1 million deaths from famine in Ireland, which redefined England’s economic policies by ensuring a century of great prosperity, make it difficult to formulate an assessment of the relationship between climate and cultures through simple historical scholarship.

Kant’s opuscule on the Idea of a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose was an attempt to meet the methodological challenge of a global history by confronting the question of situations deemed “necessary evils”. The central concept introduced by Kant is that of “socializing associability”: the excesses of individualism contribute to precipitating the emergence of a final state of happiness and peace by accelerating the establishment of a “civil society enclosure” that transmutes the initial destructive raw form of creativity into art work [KAN 09]:

“It takes the greatest want of all to bring men to the point where they cannot live alongside each other in wild freedom but within such an enclosure as the civic association provides. These very same inclinations afterwards have a very good effect. It is like the trees in a forest that, since each seeks to take air and sun away from the other, compel each other to seek both and thus they achieve a beautiful straight growth. Whereas those that develop their branches as they please, in freedom and apart from each other, grow crooked and twisted. All culture and art that adorn mankind, the most beautiful social order, are the fruits of associability that is self-compelled to discipline itself and thus through a derived art to fulfil completely the germs of its nature.” [KAN 09]

Kant’s opuscule concludes with the idea that only a global history can provide a sound assessment of public action. The posterity of Kant’s work has been multiple, but one of the most legitimate is the sociology of Norbert Elias in the 20th Century [ELI 39]. Elias points out how better self-control has historically been achieved through the dissemination of behavioral models from the development of large royal courts, as was the case for Western European countries, for example. Europe was ravaged in the 16th and 17th Centuries by civil wars, which permanently damaged social relations [ELI 39]. The context in which Kant wrote can be understood through contemporary investigations into the aftermath of civil wars, where there may still be a high level of social violence in interpersonal relationships, or, on the contrary, a positive development of civil society (e.g. contemporary Chile), or a combination of both.

Kant is located for natural history in a teleological tradition that goes back to Aristotle. Nature would have a predefined order from which human history and individual anti-social behavior seem to escape. In the global history proposed by Kant, this natural order is established in the long term, due to a late arrival in the history of humanity of the “enclosure of civil society”. The evils present only make sense on the scale of the human species. An indirect legacy of Kant’s global history is Darwin’s theory of lethal natural selection, which takes up for living processes the idea that great destruction can participate in a creation, an idea that Kant had developed only for social processes.

Kant’s global history differs from Rousseau’s and Adam Smith’s approaches. For Rousseau, civilization spoils an original state of creativity. For Smith, social coordination can be explained, as in Kant’s case, by the dynamics of socializing associability. Kant’s expansion in relation to Smith includes individual and collective disciplines that introduce a civilization process.

1.1.2. Denial or a mandate from heaven

Contemporary global history, based on an initial contribution by Jaspers [JAS 54], uses a list of major cultural transformations. The latter can be regional or optional, unlike an evolutionary mechanism. Testot’s book proposes a list of seven major cultural transformations, although groupings are made at the beginning of the list [TES 17]. The first three major cultural transformations are those of the Paleolithic: the tool, fire and the arts (respectively Lower, Middle and Upper Paleolithic). The next three are those of the productive economy, writing and individual morality. The last three most commonly selected are print, the Industrial Revolution and contemporary climate change. Major climate changes were repeated at a sustained rate up to 14 ka, which marked the end of the Paleolithic and the beginning of isotopic stage 1. In the history of creativity, the main arts were formed during the Paleolithic period (dance, music, visual arts). The second sequence of three major cultural transformations saw only the birth of the performing arts, and the third sequence saw the arts linked to new technologies, such as photography and film. In a large-scale pattern, climate change increased in the Quaternary, while a creative index only took on high values after a series of glaciations, but before the end of the Paleolithic (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1. Climate and creativity. Paleolithic creativity indicator: Level of lithic industry + diversity of productions + ubiquity index. For a color version of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/alaktif/climate.zip

Tylor had called “animist” the attribution of great powers to living nature. The great natural and climatic events were able to remain in this regime until the transition of the first great cities, polytheism and writing. In this caesura, a great sovereign replaced the mountain or cyclone. In the Warring Kingdoms in China, rulers had a mandate from heaven. The sovereign determined the state of disaster and took measures, such as tax relief. However, a variant existed. The first emperor of the Qin dynasty claimed only to have an earthly power affirmed as universal. A similar attitude was found in the Roman Empire. The imperial inscriptions on tablets that marked the respective boundaries of their empires indicated an account of their earthly mandate. When the earth trembled near Vesuvius, Emperor Nero remained impassive, because it was not his role to react immediately. The regime of disaster, denial and mandate from the sky is still seen today in the face of climate change [AYK 15].

1.2. Cultures and climatic gradient

Are major cultural transformations linked to maximum cold/warm temperatures or climate volatility? A first discussion focuses on the respective role of simple climatic extremes (maximum or minimum temperatures, biomass and rainfall) and periods of high climate volatility, i.e. the most significant oscillations of climatic variables. Indeed, since climate volatility is sometimes very low or, on the contrary, perceptible in the course of a human life, transformations of creativity and cultures are expected in this second type of period. However, there are ornate caves and archaeological sites that can be linked to these two types of situations from a climatic point of view. In the Solutrean and Magdalenian periods, Europe was plunged into intense cold. On the other hand, small localized variations in climatic parameters have been enough to make human civilizations disappear: a decline in the monsoon zone put an end to the caesura and made the green Sahara and its culture based on extensive cattle breeding disappear.

A list of major cultural transformations was proposed by Karl Jaspers [JAS 54]. This general nomenclature of cultures and religions of both present and past anatomically modern humans was developed by Yves Lambert [LAM 14]. For Homo sapiens, seven major cultural transformations have been selected, including current climate change. It is necessary to add a first cultural transformation, the tool, which concerns a part of the Homininae, and a second, fire, which concerns a part of the genus Homo. A general picture of these major cultural transformations does not syst...