By Irene Friesen Wolfstone
Updated June 2025
Concept Map 1-Spiraling Story of Climate and Culture
©Wolfstone. Design: Z. Valiary and S. Thompson Designs, Inc.
Introduction
In studying climate change denialism, I found that deniers tend to take the first step toward accepting climate change when they learn that climate change events have occurred in the past (Wolfstone, 2014). This finding surprised me and continues to remind that recurring change evokes less fear than unprecedented change, and that knowledge of past climate change events has potential to reduce fear and anxiety about climate change. This learning motivated me to learn the names and stories of past climate change events. In school, we learn the names of empires, but not the names of the climate change events that caused their decline and collapse.
ReMembering cultural memories is a condition for cultural continuity. In this paper, I focus on reMembering past climate change events. I draw on Harald Haarmann’s theory of cultural knowledge construction. Haarmann is a culture scientist and linguist who brilliantly integrates cosmology, cultural memory, shamanism, gender, climate change events, ecology, and symbiotic relationality with Land. He identifies three dimensions of cultural memory:
The past… contains the instructions of previous generations about the functioning of community life. The knowledge of this cultural heritage is activated for the purpose of making culture operate in the present, and this knowledge, in turn, nurtures human intentionality to make plans for the future (Haarmann, 2009, p. 212, emphasis mine).
Cultures, recognizing that they and their projects are perishable, protect their ongoingness by creating stories, songs, symbols, and ceremonies to transmit ancestral knowledges.
In ancient Rome, the importance of memory was embodied by Minerva, goddess of remembrance. After the Roman Empire collapsed during the Migration Period climate change event, the Latin language fell out of use. The result was loss of literacy. In the current climate change event, it is difficult to imagine the loss of literacy; however, despite our digital devices, knowledge has already been lost by Modern humans who view the past as backward and cannot name a past climate change event or adaptation.
Transdisciplinary perspectives
Climate literacy integrates knowledges of the past with climate science. In this paper, I draw on the research of historical climatologists, critical anthropologists, and culture scientists who study past climate change events and their impacts on ancient cultures.
Historical climatologists use several methods to produce a chronology of past climate change events. The Bond chronology is based on the study of North Atlantic ice rafting data (Bond et al., 1997). The Heinrich chronology, also based on ice rafting data, applies only to studies of the northern hemisphere. The Dansgaard–Oeschger chronology is based on Greenland ice core data. Using the Bond chronology, I created a spiraling timeline of climate events in the Holocene Epoch by aligning the onset of climate events with the top vertical axis (see Concept Map 1). Each revolution of the spiral represents a climate change event. Then, using culture studies, I mapped the rise and decline of advanced cultures to the chronology of climate events. The spiral configuration enables us to analyze the events with a new perspective by thinking across the spiral to detect patterns in culture decline and regeneration.
Past climate change events occurred at approximately 1000 years intervals. I propose three terms to describe a climate cycle:
- Period of degeneration refers to the ecological and cultural crisis due to climate change that lasts up to 400 years and may be named a “dark age” (Chew, 2007). “Dark Age” is a contested term, so I enclose it in quotation marks. On Concept Map 1, the period of degeneration is signified by grey shading. According to environmental sociologist and system thinker S. C. Chew (2007, 2008), markers of degeneration include pandemics, famines, reduced prosperity, mass migrations, invasions, intolerance, and loss of literacy. If the decline in a culture’s systems is irreversible and its ancestral knowledge is no longer effective for survival in their Land, then the culture may collapse (Haarmann, 2020, p. 19).
- Recovery is the gradual transition to regeneration. First, the Land recovers from the traumatic effects of climate change. Then, cultures recover from the traumatic effects of climate change. Adaptive cultures renew their relationship with the Land and revitalize. An innovation or new knowledge may provide a catalyst for cultural revitalization. Hybrid cultures may emerge where mass migrations resulted in permanent resettlement in close proximity to a host culture.
- Period of regeneration refers to the period of recovery, regeneration, and flourishing after the period of degeneration in a climate event. On Concept Map 1, it is signified by yellow shading. Some cultures reach a stage of flourishing in which basic needs are readily met, allowing the culture to invest in innovation, arts, and grand architecture.
Climate change events are global in scope and impact; thus, this paper takes a transcultural perspective.
ReMembering Eight Climate Change Events in the Holocene
In writing the following synopses of eight climate change events in the Holocene Epoch, I highlight periods of degeneration and regeneration. Each synopsis includes probable cause, duration, and cultural impacts, including adaptations and maladaptations. They reflect my areas of interest: belief systems, cultural knowledge construction, and food security. I draw on climate case studies of Danube, Harappa, Egypt, Mayan, and European cultures. I begin with the 9.4 kiloyear (KY) event because the story of glacial Lake Agassiz is written into the geographical formation of the Land where I live, reminding me that climate change events are have global impacts.
9.4 KY Climate Change Event
The 9.4 Kiloyear (KY) climate change event involved massive amounts of water. Melting ice sheets in North America formed glacial lakes Agassiz and Ojibwa, which drained suddenly into the Atlantic, causing global sea levels to rise rapidly. In West Asia, Euxine Lake rapidly flooded with salt water from the Mediterranean Sea and formed the Black Sea. This catastrophic event is remembered as The Great Flood in mythic narratives, including the Epic of Gilgamesh and the biblical flood story (Ryan, Pitman, et al. 1997). The narrative impact of the ancient flood in myth indicates “the long-lasting aftereffects of a traumatic experience that shaped the cultural memory of people” (Haarmann, 2013, p. 87).
8.2 KY Climate Change Event
The 8.2 KY climate change event, also known as Bond 5,was an abrupt climate event that began ~6200 BCE. The period of degeneration was marked by aridity and severe droughts. In Anatolia, the Neolithic settlements of Çatalhöyük and Hacilar were abandoned (Ryan, Pitman et al. 1997). Desertification of the Sahara compelled mass migrations to North Africa’s great river valleys.
In the period of regeneration, Neolithic agriculture expanded. In eastern Europe, the matristic and peaceful Danube culture developed craft specializations in weaving and pottery decorated with signs and symbols representing their cosmology (Gimbutas, 1982, 1991). Its Vinča script predates the Egyptian script. The organization of the Danube culture was based on the egalitarian oecumene system of governance and economy, a model that predates Athenian democracy (Haarmann, 2020). In North Africa, the Nabta Playa megalithic calendar in the Nubian desert indicates advanced astronomical knowledge and a flourishing agricultural community with domesticated cattle (Wendorf & Malville, 2001).
5.9 KY Climate Change Event
The 5.9 KY climate change event (also known as Bond 4)began ~3900 BCE and was an intense aridification event. During the period of degeneration, the Danube culture was over-run by invaders from the kurgan culture in the Pontic region starting ~3500 BCE. Kurgan culture is an informal term that refers to the pastoral cultures of Samara and Yamna that buried their dead in mounds known as kurgans. The invaders imposed their Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language on the Danube culture. The Danube culture’s Vinča script fell out of use; consequently, its literacy declined. The invaders imposed their patriarchal cosmology with sky god Dyeus and their patriarchal organization on the matristic Danube culture. The invasions had a devastating impact on the Danube culture, but they survived the 5.9 KY climate change event (Gimbutas, 1982, 1997; Haak et al, 2015).
In North Africa, the Neolithic Subpluvial ended the alternating humid/arid periods and the Sahara Desert reformed. Due to aridification, Nabta Playa in the Nubian Desert was abandoned; however, the astronomical cultural knowledge of its people reappeared later in the Nile region.
In the period of regeneration, a cosmological transition in Europe and West Asia introduced the Great Mother deity coupled with a male god who is her son/lover according to the season. This transition reflected the seasonal consciousness of Neolithic agrarian cultures and the emergence of the masculine in cultural cosmologies (Baring & Cashford, 1991).
Egyptian culture emerged in the southern Nile region. The Egyptian Old Kingdom built pyramids that integrated the astronomical knowledge found earlier at Nabta Playa (Malville & Wendorf, 1998; Wendorf & Malville, 2001). Cultural memories of the Sahara’s intermittent wet and dry periods spurred adaptive innovations in grain storage to improve capacity to provide food during prolonged dry periods (Baer & Singer, 2018).
In Asia, the Harappan culture flourished in the Indus Valley, building the planned cities of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa and designing irrigation systems to support agriculture in village communities. The Harappan culture was organized on the egalitarian oecumene model (Maisels, 1999).
4.2 KY Climate Change Event
The 4.2 KY climate change event (also known as Bond 3) began abruptly ~2200 BCE and may have been triggered by massive volcanic eruptions. During the period of degeneration, lakes and rivers dried up in a prolonged cold drought that lasted 100 years and up to 300 years in some regions, compelling mass migrations. In Eastern Europe, the Danube culture suffered another wave of invasions by the kurgan culture and collapsed. The impact of those invasions is embedded in Greek mythology. According to classicist Jane E. Harrison (1912), the earlier Titan pantheon was overwritten by the Olympian pantheon, which assimilated and demoted the earlier layer and elevated Zeus (PIE, Dyeus), who murdered his pregnant lover Metis by swallowing her and birthed their daughter Athena from his head, symbolizing the attempt by emerging patriarchy to steal the power of regeneration. Peering behind the myths of matricide, rape, abduction, and murder in Olympian mythology reveals an older matricultural layer of Titan mythology that was violently destroyed (Graves, 1955). The notion of a male god giving birth from his head may be a precursor to monotheisms and the Hebrew creation myths in which a male god creates the world with words, not with gestation.
Egypt’s Old Kingdom declined and entered a “dark age” known as First Intermediate Period,marked by moral degradation, plundering, squalor, epidemics, and mass deaths (Weiss and Courty et al. 1993; Weiss, 1997; Diamond, 2005; Chew, 2007; Baer & Singer 2018).
In Asia, a prolonged drought contributed to sudden decline in the cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro. The Harappan culture adapted to the climate event by de-urbanizing and moving its city populations to rural food production areas. Eventually climate conditions weakened its irrigation systems and reduced its capacity to supply food and water, compelling a mass migration to another river valley (Maisels, 1999; Diamond, 2005;Haarmann, 2007; Chew, 2007; Baer & Singer, 2018). In northern China, nearly all Neolithic cultures experienced disruption in the 4.2. KY climate change event. Cultures that specialized in rice farming collapsed earlier than cultures that adapted by switching to millet farming and by moving populations to prepare uncultivated areas for farming (An, Kirleis, & Jin, 2024).
In the period of regeneration, Egyptians reinvented their culture as the Middle Kingdom. In the Second Intermediate Period, Egyptians adapted to a political problem by decentralizing to smaller kingdoms. After 200 years, they re-united as one kingdom and revitalized their culture once more as the New Kingdom, which flourished, produced monumental architecture, and expanded into an empire.
Bronze Age Collapse Climate Change Event
The Bronze Age Collapse climate change event (also known as Bond 2)began abruptly ~1200 BCE with rapid cooling. This period of degeneration is commonly known as the Greek “Dark Age” despite its global scope. It lasted 400 years. Prolonged drought is indicated by depopulation, de-urbanization, and mass migrations. Egyptian records indicate violent invasions by the Sea People whose identity remains uncertain. The sea invaders plundered most Mediterranean cities between Troy and Gaza. The Hittite, Akkadian, and Mycenaean cultures collapsed. When the Mycenaean culture collapsed, its Linear B writing system fell out of use, palaces were destroyed, and monumental architecture ceased (Chew, 2007). The Egyptian New Kingdom was destabilized.
In the recovery phase, the invention of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet introduced an innovation in literacy that catalyzed knowledge construction and was adapted by other cultures, including the Greeks. In the period of regeneration, the fields of philosophy, medicine and science emerged, and academies of learning were established from Asia to Europe. Canaanite merchants based in Lebanon developed trade networks in the Mediterranean using innovations in shipbuilding and sea navigation. The Roman republic expanded to become the Roman Empire with highly centralized political and economic systems. After Rome conquered Egypt in 30 BCE, the worship of Isis spread throughout the Roman empire due to Rome’s policy of religious syncretism-a strategy for keeping peace between neighbouring provinces.
In West Asia, Christianity emerged as a second Abrahamic monotheistic religion. In Asia, Buddhism and Confucianism formalized as non-theistic philosophical religions rooted in shamanic traditions.
Migration Period Climate Change Event
The Migration Period climate change event affected regions differently. In Europe, the onset is ~300 CE when warming resulted in soil erosion and crop failures. The warm, dry period was followed by a global cool period from 536 to 660 CE caused by volcanic eruptions. The end date of the period of degeneration is debated and ranges from 660 to 1200 CE (Chew, 2007).
The chaotic period of degeneration, known as the Medieval or Roman Dark Age, was marked by a series of invasions and mass migrations by Huns, Goths, Visigoths, and Vandals. The Roman Empire was destabilized by famines, trade route disruption, loss of literacy, collapse of centralized economic systems, weak leadership, and a cosmological transition imposed by law. Due to prolonged drought, Roman authorities were unable to provide the guaranteed distribution of food that had maintained domestic stability.
Religiousintolerance contributed to the decline of the Roman Empire. After Christianity became the official religion in 380 CE, Emperor Theodosius authorized persecution of pagans (meaning non-Christians), thus ending the Roman Empire’s longstanding policy of religious syncretism. Many Romans resisted the imposition of monotheistic Christianity and clung to their old cosmology and practices even after the temples where they had venerated their deities were destroyed. The change in cosmology reduced Roman citizens’ loyalty to the Roman emperor, contributing to the decline of the Empire (Baring & Cashford, 1991). In 431 CE, the Council of Ephesus restored a limited worship of the Maternal by elevating Mary as Mother of God. This strategy accommodated the Eastern veneration of Mary as Theotokos, Mother of God. Basilicas and churches were built in her name on the sites of former temples to Juno, Cybele, and Minerva.
In 476, the Emperor was deposed and the Western Roman Empire collapsed. The Latin language fell out of use except as the ecclesiastical language of the Roman Catholic Church. The Justinian Plague significantly reduced European populations.
In the Americas, the Mayan culture adapted to prolonged drought by transitioning from city-states ruled by kings to a decentralized governance model that focussed on supplying food and water to smaller communities.
Southern Europe made a language transition from Vulgar Latin to the Romance languages. Europe slowly transitioned to feudalism with decentralized governance and economic systems (Wolff, 2020). Monasteries and abbeys kept literacy alive and supported local communities in surviving a prolonged “dark age” by providing healthcare and food (Chew, 2007).
In the Americas, the Mississippian culture of mound-builders flourished, building urban settlements from the Great Lakes to southern Manitoba. Five nations separated from the Mississippian culture, forming the Haudenosaunee confederacy with a constitution known as The Great Binding Law of Peace (Hill, 2017).
Little Ice Age Climate Change Event
The Little Ice Age (LIA) climate change event began gradually and impacted regions differently. The start date is contested. Baer & Singer (2018) suggest a start date of 1250 based on the decline of Norse communities in Greenland and Newfoundland (p. 6, 56), while Chew (2008) suggests a start date of 1590 (p. 15). I use a start date of 1315 to correspond to the Great Famine. The northern hemisphere experienced two cold periods. The first cold period was from 1300 to 1400 and an even colder period lasted from 1560 to 1850 when the average temperature was 2C lower than normal and glaciers overran towns and farms (Oosthoek, 2015). The end date of 1850, based on glacial retreat, is not disputed. The cause of LIA is not confirmed but consensus is accruing for the Maunder Minimum explanation of reduced sunspot activity.
In Europe, the period of degeneration was marked by mass deaths due to famines, homelessness, pandemics of bubonic plague and cholera, and religious conflict. The Protestant Reformation was not a changing of the gods as in the Migration Period, but a protest against the monopoly of the Roman Catholic Church on matters of religious belief and practice. The Reformers were not welcoming of different religious beliefs and tended to excommunicate those who differed in belief and/or practice, resulting in many schisms in the Protestantism. It seems that extreme intolerance of difference had infected the European mind-set.
Historian Geoffrey Parker (2017) coined the term “peccatogenetic” (from peccatum, the Latin word for sin) for the pervasive attitude that attributed climate disasters to human misconduct (p. 8). Parker notes that many lords and kings prohibited drinking, dancing, theatres, and sodomy in the belief that these behaviours invoked God’s wrath. The search for scapegoats fed the witch craze in Europe in which thousands of people were publicly tortured and executed on trumped-up charges of sorcery that caused adverse weather. The witch persecutions peaked in the coldest decades. In May 1626, a hailstorm in southern Germany “led to the arrest, torture, and murder of 900 men and women suspected of producing the disaster through sorcery (p. 9). Both Catholics and Protestants participated in public witch executions in which poor rural persons, mostly women, as well as Jewish communities, were scapegoated for causing severe weather events (Behringer 1999; Oster 2004; Federici 2014; Camenisch & Rohr, 2018; Leeson & Russ 2018). The public torture and burning of humans indicates the collapse of public order and morality (p. 179) and suggests anomie.
On Concept Map 1, the thick vertical line veering off the right side of the spiral represents the emergence of capitalism, the Modern economic systems based on the concept of continual progress in linear time. Colonization involved mass migrations of European humans, plants, animals, and diseases to other continents. Mass deaths of Indigenous peoples are attributed to colonial violence and European communicable diseases.
There was no period of regeneration after LIA as the end of The Little Ice Age overlaps with the beginning of Anthropogenic Climate Change. This startling anomaly contributes to (my) pessimism about the future of Modern humans in the Sixth Mass Extinction Event.
Anthropogenic Climate Change Event
Anthropogenic Climate Change (ACC) eventis a human-caused climate event that falls outside the 1000-year climate cycle of spontaneously-occurring climate events. Anthropogenic is an imprecise term in that Indigenous peoples and the Global South do not share complicity in the capitalism, a driver of the human causes of Anthropogenic Climate Change (Whyte, 2017). ACC is anomalous in three ways: a) it is the first climate change event categorized as anthropogenic; b) its start-date overlaps with end-date of LIA; and c) it is co-occurring with anthropogenic Sixth Mass Extinction Event. Climate scientistsAbram et al. (2016) argue for an 1830 start date for ACC based on findings that production of greenhouse gases (GHG) began in the First Industrial Period and accelerated in the Second Industrial Period with the shift to oil and gas fuels. Deforestation and degradation of land by colonizers reduced carbon sinks, contributing to atmospheric CO2. In 1988, scientists warned governments about the dangers of global warming.
In the current period of degeneration, the death toll due to heat waves and severe weather events is increasing year by year. Canadians experience ACC as increased frequency and severity of wildfires. Since 1979, the Arctic has warmed nearly four times faster than the global average annual temperature increase, triggering two tipping points: loss of Arctic sea ice and melting permafrost (Rantanen et al. 2022).
For decades, climate scientists focused their research on changes to climate systems and earth systems; however now the focus of research is shifting to transdisciplinary research of the complex entanglements of human behaviours and climate. The Global Tipping Points Research Initiative at University of Exeter expands climate science to interrogate the impact of human systems on climate systems and earth systems and warns that human factors, particularly apathy and anomie, could trigger a climate tipping point (Lenton et al. 2023). The Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research (PIK) studies planetary boundaries by conducting health checks on the Earth’s life support systems.In Manitoba, the Prairie Climate Centre at University of Winnipeg conducts research on the local impacts of ACC.
We will know that Earth has entered the recovery stage of ACC when the Keeling curve begins to bend (https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/2019/06/04/animation-of-keeling-curve-history-updated-to-include-2019-milestone/). Despite decades of government policy, atmospheric carbon continues to increase. Failure to bend the Keeling curve pushes the planet deeper into the Sixth Mass Extinction Event. I propose that Indigenous cultures are most likely to survive ACC and the Sixth Mass Extinction because they are agentically preparing for their survival by practising six conditions for cultural continuity:
- holding to regeneration as a philosophy and a power
- practicing sharing economies,
- maintaining a reciprocal relationship with Earth as Mother.
- living the cosmology of the Land
- remembering the knowledges of the ancestors
- welcoming difference
These conditions are explored in my research publications.
Summary
Knowledge of past climate change events has potential to reduce fear about climate change and to be a catalyst for adaptive action. Climate events have occurred spontaneously in ~1000-year intervals in the Holocene Epoch. Each climate cycle comprises a period of degeneration and a period of regeneration. In the period of regeneration, the Land recovers from the impacts of climate change, followed by the recovery of human cultures. Climate change events during the Holocene Epoch include:
- 9.4 KY climate change event,
- 8.2 KY climate change event,
- 5.9 KY climate change event,
- 4.2 KY climate change event,
- Bronze Age Collapse climate change event, followed by the Greek “Dark Age”,
- Migration Period climate change event, followed by the Roman/Medieval “Dark Age”, and
- The Little Ice Age climate change event.
Anthropogenic Climate Change is a man-made climate change event that falls out of pattern with naturally-occurring climate change events. Learning about past climate change adaptations expands our imaginations for designing adaptations in the current climate crisis and for agentically joining with Indigenous peoples in living according to Indigenous conditions for cultural continuity.
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