Mid Sweden University

This paper contributes to recent studies exploring the longue durée of human impacts on island landscapes, the impacts of climate and other environmental changes on human communities, and the interaction of human societies and their environments at different spatial and temporal scales. In particular, the paper addresses Iceland during the medieval period (with a secondary, comparative focus on Norse Greenland) and discusses episodes where environmental and climatic changes have appeared to cross key thresholds for agricultural productivity. The paper draws upon international, interdisciplinary research in the North Atlantic region led by the North Atlantic Biocultural Organization (NABO) and the Nordic Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies (NIES) in the Circumpolar Networks program of the Integrated History and Future of People on Earth (IHOPE). By interlinking analyses of historically grounded literature with archaeological studies and environmental science, valuable new perspectives can emerge on how these past societies may have understood and coped with such impacts. As climate and other environmental changes do not operate in isolation, vulnerabilities created by socioeconomic factors also beg consideration. The paper illustrates the benefits of an integrated environmental-studies approach that draws on data, methodologies and analytical tools of environmental humanities, social sciences, and geosciences to better understand long-term human ecodynamics and changing human-landscape-environment interactions through time. One key goal is to apply previously unused data and concerted expertise to illuminate human responses to past changes; a secondary aim is to consider how lessons derived from these cases may be applicable to environmental threats and socioecological risks in the future, especially as understood in light of the New Human Condition, the concept transposed from Hannah Arendt's influential framing of the human condition that is foregrounded in the present special issue. This conception admits human agency's role in altering the conditions for life on earth, in large measure negatively, while acknowledging the potential of this self-same agency, if effectively harnessed and properly directed, to sustain essential planetary conditions through a salutary transformation of human perception, understanding and remedial action. The paper concludes that more long-term historical analyses of cultures and environments need to be undertaken at various scales. Past cases do not offer perfect analogues for the future, but they can contribute to a better understanding of how resilience and vulnerability occur, as well as how they may be compromised or mitigated.

The offshore islands of the North Atlantic were among some of the last settled places on earth, with humans reaching the Faroes and Iceland in the late Iron Age and Viking period. While older accounts emphasizing deforestation and soil erosion have presented this story of island colonization as yet another social–ecological disaster, recent archaeological and paleoenvironmental research combined with environmental history, environmental humanities, and bioscience is providing a more complex understanding of long-term human ecodynamics in these northern islands. An ongoing interdisciplinary investigation of the management of domestic pigs and wild bird populations in Faroes and Iceland is presented as an example of sustained resource management using local and traditional knowledge to create structures for successful wild fowl management on the millennial scale.

The circumstances that have given rise to the Anthropocene concept require that we reassess our assumptions about human agency and human effects on the earth system. Human activities, and thus human choices, clearly lie at the root of the great environmental predicament of our age, which is not primarily an ecological crisis, though its ramifications are far reaching within ecological systems. Rather, it is a crisis of culture. If the humanities "are a unique repository of knowledge and insight into the rich diversity of the human experience" from which we learn to make sense of our "responses, motivations and actions" in the face of challenges, then it is risky to omit humanities knowledge from scientific assessment and consultation processes informing environmental policy.

The complete article is available for free viewing on the Future Earth site: bit.ly/1QoHPeC .

Walrus-tusk ivory and walrus-hide rope were highly desired goods in Viking Age north-west Europe. New finds of walrus bone and ivory in early Viking Age contexts in Iceland are concentrated in the south-west, and suggest extensive exploitation of nearby walrus for meat, hide and ivory during the first century of settlement. In Greenland, archaeofauna suggest a very different specialized long-distance hunting of the much larger walrus populations in the Disko Bay area that brought mainly ivory to the settlement areas and eventually to European markets. New lead isotopic analysis of archaeological walrus ivory and bone from Greenland and Iceland offers a tool for identifying possible source regions of walrus ivory during the early Middle Ages. This opens possibilities for assessing the development and relative importance of hunting grounds from the point of view of exported products.

Inscribing Environmental Memory in the Icelandic Sagas (IEM) is a major interdisciplinary research initiative examining environmental memory in the medieval Icelandic sagas. The initiative brings together teams of historians, literary scholars, archaeologists and geographers, as well as specialists in environmental sciences and medieval studies, to investigate long-term human ecodynamics and environmental change from the period of Iceland’s settlement in the Viking Age (AD 874-930) through the so-called Saga Age of the early and late medieval periods, and well into the long period of steady cooling in the Northern hemisphere popularly known as the Little Ice Age (AD 1350-1850). In her 1994 volume inaugurating the field of historical ecology Carole Crumley argued in favor of a “longitudinal” approach to the study of longue durée human ecodynamics. This approach takes a region as the focus for study and examines changing human-landscape-climate interactions through time in that particular place. IEM involves multiple frames of inquiry that are distinct yet cross-referential. Environmental change in Iceland during the late Iron Age and medieval period is investigated by physical environmental sciences. Just how known processes of environmental change and adaptation may have shaped medieval Icelandic sagas and their socio-environmental preoccupations is of great interest, yet just as interesting are other questions concerning how these sagas may in turn have shaped understandings of the past, cultural foundation narratives, environmental lore, local ecological knowledge etc. Enlisting environmental sciences and humanities scholarship in the common aim of framing and thereby better understanding nature, the IEM initiative excludes nothing as “post- interesting” or “pre-interesting.” Understanding Viking Age first settlement processes informs understanding of 18th century responses to climate change, and 19th century resource use informs understanding of archaeological patterns visible at first settlement a millennium earlier. There is much to gain from looking at pathways (and their divergences) from both ends, and a long millennial scale perspective is one of the key contributions that the study of past “completed experiments in human ecodynamics” can make to attempts to achieve future sustainability. IEM is a case study of the Integrated History and future of People on Earth initiative (IHOPE) led by the international project AIMES (Analysis, Integration and Modeling of the Earth System), a core project of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme; the initiative is co-sponsored by PAGES (Past Global Changes) and IHDP (The International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change). This talk brings together two of the main coordinators from IEM’s sponsoring organizations, NIES and NABO, to reflect on the particular challenges, innovations and advances anticipated in this unprecedented undertaking of integrated science and scholarship, a new model for the scientific framing of nature.