Resource overexploitation may have been around from the earliest times. There is evidence that early 9th millennium BP villages collapsed around 8500 BP, while new settlements were founded in quite variable landscapes in the same period. One of the largest, over 12 ha in size, was Ain Ghazal in southern Jordan (Rollefson 1992; Redman 1999:107-110). [...]
The energy needed to deliver energy has always been a concern for societies. ‘All our societies require enormous flows of high-quality energy just to sustain, let alone raise, their complexity and order (to keep themselves [ . . . ] far from thermodynamic equilibrium) ... [and] after a certain point in time, without dramatic new [...]
Climatic changes have always played a role in human history. Often, it resulted from large volcanic eruptions, which caused a decline in temperature with serious impacts on food supply. Slow variations in geological evolution and planetary position played a role too, at (much) longer time scales. All climatic changes and their impacts tended to be [...]
India since the 16 th century Several historical accounts reinforce the impression that large populations of humans were living close to the environment’s carrying capacity and went through periods of severe food shortages and associated violence and hardship. One such a tale is about India since the 16th century; another one is on Russia in [...]
The story of Easter Island is, rightly or wrongly, one of the archetypical examples of how a human population on a finite island with a fragile environment can overexploit its environment and as a consequence collapse. There are contemporary events which suggest a collapse narrative, as in the case of another island in the Pacific, [...]
Danish colonisation of Greenland started in 1721, but a Norse colony in west Greenland had already been an outpost of Europeans throughout the period 985–1500 AD. There had been contacts between North American hunters and European farmers. It seems that the Norse community managed quite well for the first 150 years, with a maritime-terrestrial economy [...]
Some 1500 km east of Papua New Guinea, in the Pacific, is the small island of Nauru. It is the smallest independent republic, with nowadays some 12.000 inhabitants on an area of less than 25 km2. The story of Nauru's ‘discovery’ in 1798 by a British captain who gave it the name Pleasant Island and [...]