Keywords

The contributors to this volume have ranged widely across many different themes, but all have been concerned with past societal resilience, how we understand it today, and what this understanding might mean both for the way in which the contemporary world confronts significant environmental and climatic challenge, and for how the history of societal responses to past environmental challenges can be—should be—written. We place our analyses within a broader context, that of the increasing globalization of climate- and environment-related policy-making, and of increasing societal and technological complexity and thus of increasing systemic fragility (or brittleness). From our historical case-studies we have attempted to highlight, where possible, general patterns underlying past responses to environmental challenges, whether failures or successes, and to establish the extent to which systemic mechanisms such as feedback loops, cascades, tipping points and cycles are key underlying characteristics of societies understood through the lens of a complex adaptive systems approach. Where such shared mechanisms can be identified, we suggested that they might provide invaluable help in pinpointing and understanding vulnerabilities not just within historical systems but also in the modern world, and thus contribute to the formation of a more resilient future.

Our various case-studies indicate that how societies in the past were able to respond to stress depended on three key sets of conditions: their complexity (the degree of interdependency across social relationships and structures), their institutional and ideological flexibility, and their systemic redundancy, all of which together determine the resilience of the system. Such conditions did not exist in isolation but combined and recombined in innumerable historical configurations. By examining particular historical case-studies we can detect both shared general patterns, show how each case is subtly different from the next and suggest how that leads into different or diverging developmental pathways.

Several of the chapters addressed these issues and showed that resilience and the potential for a society to maintain cohesion and cultural continuity through periods of system-challenging stress has costs. The distribution of the costs of resilience, and the degree to which this might be built into any system, have varied across time and cultural milieu. In the contributions that follow we present cases where we can observe both top-down and bottom-up responses to significant environmental challenges and the ways in which different sectors of society responded or reacted (and with either positive or negative outcomes); the differential costs of resilience when a state, or a society or a specific sector within a society is faced with substantial economic and political challenges; and the nature of state and society-level responses to stress factors and both planned as well as unintended consequences.

One key element that has become clear is that effective future planning needs to take account not only of a given environmental state, but also that of the dynamics underlying it—what are the various potentials for change or transformation that inhere within a particular context? By the same token, planning needs also to consider the fact that socio-economic inequalities and imbalances need to be addressed as part of any response to an environmental challenge, both at a local/regional as well as at a national and international scale. Resilience consists of multiple contributing factors, including both institutional and systemic frameworks as well as agents’ perceptions and their potential to generate socially and culturally viable responses. An idealized response, divorced from the realities and struggles of day-to-day lives, is destined to fail, or to massively underprivilege a substantial sector of a population—with consequent medium- and long-term consequences for the resilience of the society as a whole to respond adequately to existential challenge. In the past, the burden of resilience has often fallen disproportionately upon those least able to bear it, for example, a factor which remains still a significant problem in policy thinking.

Likewise, how we write about past resilience, or its absence, can play a significant role. Historians and archaeologists need to nuance their interpretation of the past in order to understand the whys and wherefores of past human responses and thus contribute to undermine both environmental and social-economic or cultural determinism and bring into focus the range of potential adaptive pathways—an approach that can offer significant important information in thinking about contemporary adaptation strategies in confronting climate. This requires a refusal to engage in an apocalyptic rhetoric of shock and despair or of sensationalist claims about collapse and catastrophe. But it also demands the active intervention of the historian (for example) in the thought-world of her or his audience or readership, whether the general public or a specific target group such as policy-makers and planners, permitting all of these to attribute meaning to the histories they have experienced within the context of their own lives and experiences.

Yet at the same time attempting to make the lessons of the past accessible in the context of planning for the future brings with it the problem of how the future is supposed to look since, as we have now seen, ‘anticipatory knowledge’ always objectifies the future. Does reflecting on possible futures create greater awareness of the observers’ agency, does it chiefly suggest modes of enhancing efficient action, or does it in fact narrow the horizons for alternative ways of building resilience into a system? Given the fact that we are all, always, constrained by the possibilities inhering in our own historically-determined symbolic universe, this is a real issue that needs to be confronted, and some of the contributions to this volume have suggested appropriate strategies for addressing the question.

Our contributors show, collectively, that both critical history and interdisciplinarity are the two essential and inseparable ingredients required to understand the nature of past human responses to environmental and climate challenges. They also show that separating but integrating agency and structure are crucial to understanding the causal relationships underpinning or concealed by the outcomes we can observe in our various types of data, historical, archaeological and palaeoenvironmental. Collaboration between the social or humanistic and the natural sciences can make a key contribution, both in understanding what the primary requirements are for our own survival as a species, as well as in determining how effectively we can respond to the challenges we face and at what level—local, national, hemispheric or global. As one of the editors concluded in his contribution: only a history which is a dialogue of the old and the new can open our minds to move in the direction of true ecological justice, which might be our hope for survival and flourishing.