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While it would seem patently obvious that geography and climate provide an indispensable framework for understanding the drama of history, historians have been wary of invoking anything remotely smacking of environmental determinism. This is in no small part because 80 years ago a Yale geographer "went too far" and argued that geography and climate were the primary factors determining history. Ellsworth Huntington created a hierarchy of civilizations based upon climactic advantage or disadvantage: cool climates stimulate civilizational energies, while tropical climates enervate. Huntington's Civilization and Climate (1924) argued that a favorably "bracing" climate enabled northern Europeans (and by extension their North American transplants) to develop the most advanced civilization in history. According to Harvard economic historian David Landes, Huntington "gave geography a bad name." The idea that geography, and especially climate, influenced history became contaminated with a determinism that to most American scholars had the odor of racism.
It would be an exaggeration to say that historians entirely neglected climate in the decades after Huntington. The French Annales school took very seriously "the history of man in relation to his surroundings." Fernand Braudel's celebrated notion of longue durÉe and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate Since the Year 1000 (1971) are the most prominent Annales examples in this regard. In 1980, the Journal of Interdisciplinary History devoted an entire issue to a symposium on climate and history, but the call to consider climate afresh went largely unnoticed in historical circles. Prominent among the contributors to that symposium was American historian David Hackett Fischer, who noted that Huntington's determinism was never really refuted; it was merely ridiculed for failing "to fit the metaphysical framework of social science in the mid-twentieth century." Indeed, one of the uglier scenes I have ever witnessed at a professional historical meeting occurred in the mid-1990s when a senior world historian attempted to resurrect a version of the environmental argument, only to be treated rudely by younger historians who found his rhetoric too Huntingtonesque to be palatable. Ridicule, Fischer reminds us, is not a valid form of refutation.
No matter how they may have been misused, geography and climate are far too important to banish altogether from mainstream historical understanding. In recent years, the growing interest in world history and revival of macrohistorical analysis has helped to rehabilitate climate and other environmental factors in scholarly work, as witnessed by such important books as Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), Landes's The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998), John R. McNeill's Something New Under the Sun (2000), and Felipe Fernandez-Armesto's Civilizations (2001).
A welcome addition to this literature is Brian Fagan's The Little Ice Age—a short book that tackles the important question of how climate affects history. Fagan, one of the world's leading archaeological writers and an avid yachtsman, expands his earlier Flood, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations (1996) to provide a series of fascinating reflections on the extraordinarily subtle but constant effects that short-term climate changes have on human societies. Drawing upon recent advances in the field of climate studies, he illustrates how such things as tree-ring and ice-core data are providing us with a vastly more detailed and precise picture of climatic events than we could ever gain simply from a close reading of traditional textual sources. For the first time, we can study climate and temperature of the past millennium in "fine-grained detail." And when we do, our understanding of the history of Europe is enhanced.
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