Tag: disaster

Bronze Age Collapse

the worst disaster in ancient history, even more calamitous than the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.

The thing about bronze is that it requires long supply lines. To make a bronze sword in Greece, you might need tin from Cornwall and copper from Cyprus. Except for a small area in Asia Minor, tin and copper deposits don’t co-occur. The Bronze Age was therefore a time of international trade and travel. Art from the Middle East turned up in Norway and Afghanistan, that sort of thing.
2023-02-11: Evidence for a climate factor in the collapse

Here we examine the collapse of the Hittite Empire 3200 BP. The Hittites were one of the great powers in the ancient world, with an empire centered in a semi-arid region in Anatolia with political and socioeconomic interconnections throughout the ancient Near East and Eastern Mediterranean, which for a long time proved resilient despite facing regular and intersecting sociopolitical, economic and environmental challenges. Examination of ring width and stable isotope records obtained from contemporary juniper trees in central Anatolia provides a high-resolution dryness record. This analysis identifies an unusually severe continuous dry period from around 1198 to 1196 (±3) BC, potentially indicating a tipping point, and signals the type of episode that can overwhelm contemporary risk-buffering practices.

Build NYC Back Smarter

great piece on the challenges and opportunities for increasing resilience.

Financial, political, and practical collaboration will be vital to creating an infrastructure commensurate with the challenges ahead. The investments necessary won’t come top-down from the federal government in our current political climate. Nor can we rely exclusively on the DIY, bottom-up efforts of community groups and individual citizens to build the infrastructure of the future. Both national leadership and community stewardship will be necessary, mediated by the policies, investments, and interventions of states and cities. To build back smarter will require a shift in understanding what infrastructure means, how it performs, and how – when it’s well designed, resilient, and responsive – its public benefits extend outwards across multiple and nested scales of citizenship, from community, to state, to nation, to planet.

The resilient community

The talking heads will soon turn their attention to this. Will we get thorium reactors, one per block? Vertical farming?

The resilient community has broad applicability beyond just improving the ability of those of us in developed economies to preserve wealth and a quality of life despite severe system shocks. It can also be applied to the problems of counter-insurgency in semi-modern urban environment (to radically update a process that was built for the last century) and provide the potential for organic development in underdeveloped areas of the world.