catastrophe

CATASTROPHE

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Guest article posted earlier.  Scroll down.
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Catastrophe by David Keys is one of those unassuming books that barely captures your attention to begin with, but after you’ve read it you kick yourself repeatedly in the butt for not having paid it more mind and reading it a heck of a lot sooner. The fun part isn’t so much the mega-volcano erupting in 535 AD that blocked out the global sunlight for a year and a half, although let’s make no bones about it-that part is pretty cool because it points out how pathetic and puny we are and prone to a similar catastrophe any day now between today and whenever, but rather the global changes that took place because of that eruption. Empires rose and fell, dynasties toppled, famines occurred everywhere and the modern states we see today saw their embryos formed.

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Through a rather large number of written records, plus with tree ring and ice core evidence, we know that 535 saw a massive event which deposited a butt load of crap into the atmosphere. For twelve to eighteen months after that the sun was barely visible and delivered almost no heat. If effect, a nuclear winter. Odds are this was not an asteroid or comet but a super volcano. There are no records of tsunami’s from a ocean impact and no land craters. So, once again, those bastards in Indonesia seem to be the culprit. With no heat and light from the sun, crops failed. Famine started, and the entire world went to war as refugees invaded and fought and tried to get a few meals. Hey, what’s to lose? You are going to starve to death soon, you might as well go to war. Now, I’m not saying this was a global famine. One area had grain stored, another area just got their crop in, there was herding here, etc. The weather went haywire that year globally, and stayed that way from five to fifty years. You could still eat some places, other places needed a die-off to readjust to the new normal of less food. Some places went from agriculture to pastoralist. Some area saw power transfer from valley’s to the mountains. Everything changed.

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The weather disruption in east Africa caused the bubonic plague to expand from its regular geographic pool. The increase in moisture saw plant growth which allowed the rodent carrying the fleas to go further afield ( the little guys are very territorial ). The fleas then transferred to a new host which was normally not present, and then on to the rats that usually get all the blame for the Black Death. The chain of hosts went from a low reproduction variant to a higher and higher one, from a territorial variant to those living in much more crowded conditions. From specialized eaters to those that could survive off any food source. In other words, the plague got easier and easier to spread. The rats hopped on board trade ships and soon it spread like wildfire. And the population had almost no immunity. Unlike the later European outbreaks with a third to a half mortality rate, this time it could wipe out nine tenths on occasion. One event in England gives you an idea of the geopolitical repercussions. Celtic natives were on the west side of the British Isles, and the Anglo-Saxons on the East. A forest separated them, and the Celts, being a bit unforgiving that these asshats had invaded their home, refused to have anything to do with them. Absolutely no trade or intermingling occurred. Well, the plague hit the west first as they did plenty of trading with others including the Mediterranean countries ( the rats went up the Red Sea and then up the Roman canal to the Egyptian port ). Seriously weakened, they were unable to stop the east from invading. By the time the plague hit the east coast, the Celts were pretty much wiped out and the Anglo-Saxons wrote the history books about how grand and wonderful they were.

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China didn’t have the plague to worry about, but crop failures and famine were devastating. Into the power vacuum of the southern collapse stepped the north, and as a result the modern day China was formed. The death and destruction allowed the countries unification. Japan and Korea had similar events transpire, an eventual unification through crop failures. In Mongolia, the steppes had widespread grass failure due to drought. Horses allowed a wonderful military advantage up to that point, being both transportation and food on the hoof, a logistics gift from the gods. But horses can’t survive off of dead plants. They ingest far less protein from dead rather than live food. Cows, on the other hand, because of their digestive system design, can handle this feat with barely a murmur. As a result of a ecosystem wide drought, the mountain dwellers invaded the grasslands and forced out the horse soldiers who were drastically weakened. They headed west and the whole Slavic thing got started, with the back and forth of invaders and refugees, and pushing the barbarians into Italy as they had no where else to go.

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In South America, power was transferred to the highlands as drought wiped out the lower and coastal valley’s. Which is why you had those terraced agricultural settlements so darn high up in the cold ass mountains. That was where the water was. A lot of different areas saw power shift to the mountain dwellers, who had been marginal players. A low lying valley seeing a drought saw collapse. They had all their eggs in one very productive basket, at least up until the drought. The mountain dudes could move up and down the slopes, into alpine valley’s, closer to the glaciers. They had options. And the Peruvian farmers were quite smart about things. They planted their potatoes in raised beds, which not only allowed their tubers to keep from freezing but kept the water from pooling around them and rotting the food. Then they threw on the canal plants that had fixed nitrogen from the atmosphere on to the beds for fertilizer.

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Now, I’ll acknowledge that a super volcano event is a low probability event ( although, as earthquake activity picks up prior to such events, and we’ve surely seen a heck of a lot more tremors, this might not be as low a probability as we’d like ). You can’t count on it to wipe out your stupid prepping strategies. But if it did happen, at Yellowstone or in southeast California or Naples Italy or a few other places, you can be sure that you would see several things. First, your crops fail at least for a year or three if not longer. Your neighbors try to eat you. Then, after you’ve used up most of your ammo, the waves of refugees from hundreds if not thousands of miles away start arriving. They fight you for food, and bring in plague. Think mountain living, and preemptive, offensive warfare. Much better than living in a semitropical climate. Northerners will be moving in and disease will be rampant. Or not. Who knows? Other than times will be interesting.

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