Eva Dale 0:00 From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host, David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work being done by faculty and staff in the College of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University. From departments as wide ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, physics, emergent materials, mathematics and languages, among many others, the college always has something great happening. Join us to find out what's new now. David Staley 0:33 Joining me today over Zoom is Sam White Professor of History, The Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. His specialty is environmental history, and his research focuses on how we can use both natural and human records to reconstruct past climate variability and extreme weather and how societies coped with them. He is lead editor of The Palgrave Handbook to Climate History, co founder of the Climate History Network and steering committee member of the Past Global Changes, Climate Reconstruction and Impacts from the Archives of Society working group. Welcome to Voices Dr White. Sam White 1:13 Thank you, I'm glad to be here. David Staley 1:14 Well, so, I introduced you as an environmental historian, as one who uses both natural and human records to reconstruct past climate variability, and I wonder if you just sort of start with, sort of the methods of the environmental historian, I associate historians, going into archives and looking at dusty, you know, paper and those sorts of things. That's not exactly the way you work. Sam White 1:36 No, so there are really two main differences in how we might go about things in environmental history. One is to consider a wider category of events and changes in human history, those that really involve our interactions with the natural world. So this can involve, for instance, the past human impacts in the natural world, everything from the use of fire and deforestation in ancient times, all the way down to anthropogenic global warming or air and water pollution in the present era. It also, I think, involves a different focus on how we learn about the past, and in this respect, environmental history can be very interdisciplinary, can involve working with types of sources, types of methods that aren't usually used in history, and oftentimes this is done in collaboration with other researchers in the natural sciences. I think one way to think about this is that history is a kind of detective work. If you think about it, the detective tries to get a sense of some episode in the past and why it happened by looking at all the traces that it has left in the presence all the evidence that we can gather. This could be written records. It could be physical remains, but it could also, in some cases, be what isn't present, right? The dog that didn't bark, the records that aren't there or the traces that haven't been left. Now with this historian, they're usually interested in those traces insofar as they've come down to the present day in written records, the kind we might find in archives or things that have been later published and put in libraries or personal collections, what have you, but mostly focused on those written records with environmental history. The tricky part, the interdisciplinary part, comes in thinking not just about how the past has left those written records, but how it might have left all kinds of physical records, how changes in past temperature or pollution might have left traces in sediments at the bottom of lakes or in the rings of trees or in the layers of ice cores, and then finding the right way to put those two different kinds of traces, written and physical, together to give a complete picture of the past, and especially of our past relationship with the environment and environmental change. David Staley 3:51 Well, let's talk about the ways that you've practiced that. So I'd like to talk about your first book, which is called The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire. Tell us, tell us about the thesis of this book. Sam White 4:03 Sure, so the argument of this book is that the Ottoman Empire, that was the Empire in the eastern Mediterranean throughout the early modern period, actually down to the early 20th century, that it underwent a major crisis at the end of the 1500s and into the 1600s. Now this was already well known when I started writing the book, but the explanations were unclear. I originally had all sorts of theories taken from other authors or from bits of evidence I had read related to cultural change, to social change, to changes in military technologies and the way those created instability in the power of the empire in that region, but when I actually started drilling down to the evidence, one thing kept coming out, and that was a terrible drought and famine at the end of the 1500s. This wasn't something that I'd come into the research expecting to find, but it was written all over the evidence. So in other words, I wasn't reading between the lines, I I was just the one reading the lines. And I think actually it was previous researchers who weren't looking for environmental factors, who were reading between the lines, were reading in social, economic and cultural theories. Not that those were wrong, but they really weren't the principal story coming out of the evidence. Now, the difference in my research and earlier research too, was that just as I was doing this, new research was coming out from paleoclimatology, the study of past climates reconstructed from their physical traces. And in particular, there were studies coming out looking at the width of tree rings, old tree rings hundreds of years old throughout the eastern Mediterranean. And what those seem to suggest was that the period at the end of the 1500s was experiencing some of the worst droughts, probably in the last 600 years or more. So the physical evidence and the written evidence converged together to give me a new kind of story. And with that insight in mind, I was able to really reinterpret this Ottoman crisis, look at it in its environmental dimensions, and understand its long term impacts. David Staley 6:02 When you say crisis, what sort of crisis are we referring to? Sam White 6:06 So based on different kinds of records, including tax records, including later work that people did to try to find old villages and whether they disappeared or reappeared, we can estimate that in large parts of present day Turkey, that was kind of the heart of the Ottoman Empire that a third or more of the population probably disappeared between about 1590 and about 1630 and along with that came a huge loss of tax revenue ability to support the army. The Ottoman Empire, which had been so successful in expanding its borders, starts to lose wars, and it suffers from long term political instability, and says trouble raising enough revenue, essentially for the state. David Staley 6:48 And, so, well, and I don't know if this is what you attempt to do in the book, but how much did climate factors weigh into this? I'm obviously not asking you to put a percentage on it, unless you want to do that. Sam White 7:00 So I think there are different ways of looking at this. One is to say, you know, if we looked at the exact way this crisis unfolded, it would not have happened but for the ecological pressures on the Empire and the degree of drought. Now, you have to understand that it's not just the drought itself, but the drought in the context that the Empire was experiencing in the late 1500. So up until that point, up until these major droughts started to hit, the Empire, had been growing fast, both in its territory, its economy, but also its population, and some of the fastest population growth was actually in very arid land, in regions in the southern Balkans and in central Anatolia. So if you think about parts of what would now be like, Bulgaria, Greece, but especially present day Turkey. So these were places where people relied on good spring rainfall every year to grow one good crop of wheat or barley, usually. So when the drought struck, particularly drought in the spring times in the late 1590s that was really just devastating for that agriculture. On top of that, the Empire had built up big systems to provision its major cities, so it tried to transport different foodstuffs from long ways away, into the capital, into the big cities, to its army. And that too created new vulnerability, because it meant that not only were these farmers at risk when the climate changed, but also so were the cities, so were the military, so were the state. And actually what turned out to be the real trigger for the crisis was a big rural rebellion, a rebellion among farmers in what would today be central and southern Turkey, and this rebellion was tipped off by a demand for sheep, which I thought was bizarre. That's been the first interesting piece of evidence that I came across my research. But it turned out that the sheep were in some respects, even more exposed to climate change, even more vulnerable than people. When the weather was consistently cold and dry during this period, it meant that they weren't getting enough fodder. They were exposed to diseases, and because there were these long supply chains trying to bring sheep from distant provinces to the armies and the cities, once diseases broke out, they spread among the sheep and cattle of the Empire, and so people were losing most of their flocks and herds, and these tax demands for sheep, these requisitions being used to support a war that was going on, end up being the trigger for a rebellion and ultimately the crisis. So in that sense, I guess, to go back to the question, it's hard to see the crisis as it was really occur, but for this kind of unusual climate event. On the other hand, the Empire did experience other problems. It may have been vulnerable for other reasons. It's hard to know what the alternative pathways would have been. But certainly, we can't write the history of the Empire as we know it without taking into account these environmental sides. David Staley 9:51 Do you think that's true now for many historical phenomena? In other words, even if we're not an environmental historian, do we need to take into account extreme weather or climate change, or just the environment generally, for any sort of historical account we might write? Sam White 10:06 Any might be too strong a word, but an awful lot, the more we know about past climates, past environmental change, the more we see the role they played in human history. And in a sense that shouldn't be a surprise, even though most of the kinds of changes we're talking about in the past are a lot slower, a lot smaller than the kind of changes we're experiencing now. Nevertheless, people were also usually more vulnerable. If you, you know, think about most of human history, people are mostly subsistence farmers or small farmers. Very often they're living on small margins, and very often they're living in states and empires that are often at war with each other, and so there are heavy demands on their resources and a lot of risk for violence and political instability. So it's not surprising that as we learn more about past climates, about past environmental change, we can see their role in history. We shouldn't take that to mean that the kinds of natural climate variability that we see in past centuries really compares to present global warming. What we're going through right now, the way we're changing the environment, the way we're changing the climate, is really unprecedented, but there is a parallel nonetheless, because those past societies were more vulnerable David Staley 11:17 Well, and let's talk about the ways in which you exemplify this in your own work, I'd like to talk about your most recent book, A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe's Encounter with North America. Ad it sounds like maybe you're giving us a different or an alternative account for how we think about the colonization of the Americas? Sam White 11:36 Yes, in a way. So the popular understanding of early American history is often something that's shaped by what we learn in school, and I mean in elementary school, in middle school, when we often learn about the pilgrims and we learn about the early colonies and their dates and their history. And I have to admit, this was largely my perception going into some of this research, too. It hadn't been a particular specialty of mine until I decided to go into this project. And so my vision of colonial history was sometimes still, whether I like to admit it or not, shaped by those childhood lessons. There's a problem, though, and that is that colonial history really is just not a story for children. It's not a happy story. It's really much more like a horror story. For more than a century, for the whole gap between Columbus and 1492 to the pilgrims, and really decades beyond, we have a story of mostly failure and death. We have a story of colonies that end in disaster, end in conflict, or simply disappear without a trace. And to tell that story, we need to really rethink the childhood narrative that we receive in school. And one of the reasons that I want to argue for this kind of horror story of early American history was uncertainty about the climate and unusual variability in the climate during this first century and more settlement of European colonization in today's United States and Canada. David Staley 13:04 So how does your book maybe change the way that we think about the story of colonization in the Americas? Sam White 13:11 So I think it helps us understand the early colonial history in several new ways. It helps us appreciate our own national history from the current perspective of climate change and environmental change that we're experiencing. It takes us back to an era when the future was so uncertain, when the environment was so uncertain, and when climate was changing, although not in the same way it's changing now we're talking about natural changes due mostly to volcanic eruptions. It also helps us rethink the contingency, the uncertainty, in early colonial history. It's sometimes hard to unknow, to unlearn the outcomes that we know. It's hard not to take for granted that this would eventually become, for instance, mostly English speaking country, that the English would eventually displace the Spanish and French. Looking back from the 16th century, we can see how uncertain that was and how much it owed to chance and also to climatic factors. Finally, it does just allow us to appreciate the narrative of each colonial effort, of each attempted invasion, of each conflict that it engendered, and then disasters that occurred. With the benefit of new evidence from archeology, from climatology, as well as good new basic, you know, archival work and historical work that's been done over the past generation or more, we can really understand each one of those stories better, even ones that we might have thought we already knew, like the story of Jamestown or the story of the Lost Colony of Roanoke, not to mention dozens of other early French and Spanish colonies that aren't so well known among American readers. David Staley 14:46 Well, you've already gestured to this at a couple of points, but as I introduced you, you study extreme weather and how societies coped with it. I wonder if you have any insights into our current moment, and especially. About how we may or may not be coping with extreme weather. How are we coping? Sam White 15:04 Well, on the whole, not too well, I think we can say that. Then there are, you know, two sides of this, of course. One is efforts towards mitigation, that is to say, trying to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions in order to slow future climate change. And on that level, we've experienced a number of difficulties. Obviously, we were locked into behaviors, into infrastructures, into industries that rely on fossil fuels that produce greenhouse gas emissions. And there's also the broader problem of trying to coordinate our efforts, both individually, nationally and globally. It's very hard, truthfully, for any one individual to make a difference, this is something that we all need to do together. And so it brings up the classic problems of any collective action problem, if any problem of trying to get everybody around the world to coordinate on doing what we know we need to do. Then there's the side of it that's also adaptation, assuming that we're not going to meet those mitigation goals, that climate is going to continue to change, and in fact, it's going to change at an accelerating rate. There's the question of how we adapt our lifestyles, how we adapt our infrastructures, our industries, our economies, in order to meet those changes that we predict, and this, too, is surprisingly difficult. There's a great deal of uncertainty, not about the total amount of climate change in which the science is improving day by day, but often in what that will mean for us, what that will mean for our particular towns, our local environments, not to mention prospects for businesses and jobs in the coming years. So it's very difficult in some cases, to all coordinate on making those changes that we know we need to do. Eva Dale 16:43 Did you know that 23 programs in the Ohio State University, College of Arts and Sciences, are nationally ranked as top 25 programs, with more than 10 of them in the top 10. That's why we say the College of Arts and Sciences is the intellectual and academic core of the Ohio State University. Learn more about the college@artsandsciences.osu.edu David Staley 17:08 The Early Modern Ottoman Empire was thrown into crisis. Is there a possibility of a similar sort of crisis for us today? Sam White 17:16 So I think we need to consider the resilience of our systems in order to make that kind of prediction. In the Ottoman Empire, it wasn't just that the Empire was hit by one drought, and that that drought had certain immediate impacts. What really brought the empire into crisis was that its systems of politics, its fiscal systems for the state, in other words, how it gathered revenue and paid it out, even its ecology, you might say, the way in which people lived off the land and moved resources around and relied on each other, all of those were vulnerable. And it only took one big shock. And it was a big shock, one of the biggest droughts in centuries, but nevertheless, just one shock to start to destabilize that system, and problems tended to cascade through the system. So for instance, as populations declined or agricultural revenues might have declined, in one province, people faced higher demands on than taxes that they had to meet or requisitions. And so people would begin to flee, and that would meet the people who were left behind even more vulnerable. Then fleeing populations would add to the economic and political instability in different provinces or cities where they fled, not to mention that they might have spread epidemic diseases that brought the population down more and that would decrease tax revenues, spreading the instability to the state and its political actors. So it's the way in which these problems cascaded through the system, its lack of resilience, as much as the original environmental shock that really help us understand the crisis. Now this does have lessons for our present situation as well. We have to think not just in terms of what types of natural disasters might be worse or more frequent under global warming, but whether they could present the kind of problems that cascade through systems. We saw this in some ways with the covid pandemic. It didn't just cause illnesses and deaths, but by changing our behavior, by affecting different aspects of our lives, of our economy. It tended to have impacts too that cascaded throughout a larger system. Fortunately, it didn't create the kind of crisis that we've seen in, say, the Ottoman Empire or other case studies that I've looked at, but it does remind us the way in which our economic systems, our political systems, are interlocking, as well as the way in which we rely on stability in the natural world, in ways that we often don't appreciate. David Staley 19:33 How did you end up as an environmental historian? Sam White 19:38 So it was not at all what I originally imagined actually going back to grad school, I kind of imagined myself more as a social or economic historian. It was really just the role of environmental factors in explaining the histories, the outcomes that I was trying to explain, and sometimes, when you're a researcher, one thing just leads to another. You have to follow the evidence, follow the ideas where they take you. David Staley 20:01 So why history as a I don't know, as opposed to, you know, physics or music or something like that? Sam White 20:07 So I guess I have to admit, the long and short of it is that I originally wanted to go work for the State Department and even studying for the Foreign Service exam, and then I was turned down for a high level clearance and security clearance. And so I'm, apparently more dangerous than I look. And seeing as I was not going to do that, I thought I could go into teaching. Taught a bit at a community college and decided to go get my PhD. Just decided it was the subject that interested me, and then the career that interested me. David Staley 20:37 Well, I know you teach classes in environmental history. I'm particularly interested in one class you teach that's titled Big History, and I want you to tell us about this course, but first of all, tell us what is meant by Big History. Sam White 20:50 Sure.So Big History is an idea that started with a Australian historian, David Christian, who found that as he expanded his courses from national histories to world histories, the questions kept getting bigger, and he ended up with a course that situated history within the widest possible frameworks, frameworks of the history of the universe since the Big Bang, of cosmic history, of evolutionary history, of planetary history and human history. So in other words many histories have to arbitrarily pick a starting point and define their subject matter and try to close off everything around it. Big History is the attempt to tell not everything, but the whole thing, to start from the beginning and to end, in fact, with the end of complexity in the universe. Now along the way, Big History does also tell a coherent narrative, and it's a narrative of the emergence of complex systems within a universe trending ever towards entropy. So a lot of listeners will probably have heard of the second law of thermodynamics. They'll know that- David Staley 21:51 Remind us what that is, though. Sam White 21:52 Sure, sure. So the second law of thermodynamics states that closed systems tend towards entropy, to greater disorder over time. So, rooms tend to get messy. Books in a library tend to get disordered. We expect, for instance, a egg might roll off a table and splatter on the ground. We wouldn't expect a splattered egg on the ground to suddenly suck up all the heat and vibrations from the surrounding environment and jump back up on the table, whole again. In order to get order, you have to put work into it. In order to keep a room clean, you're going to have to clean it up yourself. In order to keep the books on the library, in order, you're going to have to reorder them every once in a while. And this involves taking energy from the environment, taking free energy. So basically the second law of thermodynamics states that, you know, left to themselves, things will tend to get more disordered. If you want to keep them ordered or make them more orderly, you're gonna have to put work into it. This applies to Big History in the sense that the universe started off in a very orderly way, and this is what we learned from going all the way back to the Big Bang, but on its way to becoming more and more disordered, a process that will spread out over many, many billions and billions of years, we think. It produces systems that produce local order. So in other words, a basic example of these complex systems would be a star. A star just starts with a big cloud of hydrogen out there that collapses together and produces this orderly thing that's producing energy as letting it out in the universe. Now, ultimately, the star is only accelerating the whole universal trend towards greater entropy. It doesn't ever reverse the second law of thermodynamics, but locally, it's produced this ordered structure, and a solar system with planets creates the environment in which yet more complex systems can emerge, that is to say, life. Starting with, you know, simple, single cell life, and through the process of evolution, eventually ending up with us. And there is the possibility, perhaps, that we can take this insight also to understanding social systems. Systems like cities, systems like states, the systems like the organization of information, learning and science in human societies. None of these reverse the second law of thermodynamics, but they're ways in which we are using free energy to produce some kind of local order. So in this way, which can seem a little abstract when presented so quickly, Big History does try to put the conventional history that we know, the history of societies, of states, of cities and so forth, into larger and larger frameworks, the framework of life, of planetary history, history of our solar system, and ultimately, the history of our universe. David Staley 24:37 Is it an oversimplification to say that the course is about why there is order? Sam White 24:44 Maybe. It's certainly one aspect of the course, because if we just look around us and, you know, we want to know, well, why are things the way that they are? This is one of the biggest questions that we face. You know, we talk about a chicken and egg problem, sometimes, we don't know about cause and effect, but really, from a cosmic standpoint, it's just remarkable that anything so orderly, so improbable as a chicken or an egg exists at all. This is, in some respects, the first thing that we really want to explain, one of the most basic questions that we need to explain in order to understand anything about the world we live in or our history. There are other sides to Big History too, though, one of them being, of course, whether the systems that we've created, whether our current global economic system, for instance, is ultimately sustainable. Because one other pattern we see in Big History is that as systems become more complex, and there are different ways to measure that complexity, they also tend to become more short lived as well, and they tend to demand more of their environments, especially more energy. So what does that say, possibly, about the kind of, you know, global order that we live in today, our global economic system, or global system of trade and industry? What would it take to preserve it? David Staley 25:54 Well, I'm interested to learn about the project that you're working on right now with some colleagues at the University of Bern. Sam White 26:00 Sure. So right now, I'm working with colleagues in climatology and history and geography to come up with a better way to reconstruct climates of the past few centuries using written records. Now the idea that we can use written records, things like weather diaries or chronicles, or sometimes things like the dates of grape harvests, or the dates that harbors open and closed. The way that we can use those to reconstruct, say, seasonal or monthly temperatures or precipitation. Now, that idea has been around for a little while, but what we're working on now is not only a different method to do this, but you might even say a different logical approach, and it's one called Bayesian. Now, Bayesian logic is one used in a variety of fields, and it's a little complicated to explain here, but I would say that at the heart of Bayesianism is thinking about statistics, thinking about probabilities in terms of the limits of our knowledge, instead of thinking, you know, in conventional terms, there's sometimes called frequentist. It's a way of saying, well, there are things out there that we don't know, and we're looking for information that can help us get the best sense of the most likely state of those things. So this is the approach we're taking to the climate. What we're saying is we can't necessarily know exactly what the climate was in the past, so we had to think about the way that every source of information, every trace left from that past in the present, can help us update our sense of what the most likely state of the climate was. And we're doing this with different kinds of written records. And we've come up with the first article already to show that the method is doable. We can make it work, and we can also manage to combine all sorts of information. We can bring in information from, say, tree rings and climate models, along with these written records to get a final best estimate. The next step will be to see just how good that estimate is, how well it stacks up against other methods of climate reconstruction, and I'm pretty optimistic, if we can make this work. David Staley 28:01 Sam White, thank you. Sam White 28:03 All right, thanks. Eva Dale 28:05 Voices from the Arts and Sciences is produced and recorded at The Ohio State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Technology Services Studio. Sound engineering by Paul Kotheimer, produced by Doug Dangler. I'm Eva Dale.