Why are the environmental histories of such varied regions as the Islamic world, China, Japan, and Mesoamerica so important? Are such long-ago transformations relevant or meaningful today?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers will vary but correct responses should include: The story of the last few centuries of the first millennium C.E. suggests an important point about how history happens. In the past, the search for patterns that help to explain it, and that make it easier to write textbooks about it, has driven historians to grotesque oversimplifications: seeing history as a continuous story of "progress" or decline; or representing it as a kind of swing between revolutions and counterrevolutions, or between decadence and dynamism, or between dark ages and rebirths. The reality, it seems, as we get to learn more about the past, is much more subtle and intriguing. At one level, the slow growth of compatible changes—what historians' jargon sometimes calls "structures"—gradually gave the world a new look. Simultaneously, and often with contradictory effect, random or short-term changes stimulate, impede, interrupt, or temporarily reverse those trends, and—sometimes—permanently deflect or end them. So both continuity and discontinuity tend to be visible in the story, pretty much all the time. A picture that omits either is almost certain to be distorted. In these respects, history is rather like climate, in which many cycles of varying duration all seem to be going on all the time, and where random or almost-random changes frequently intervene. With increasing intensity in recent years, historians have struggled to match changes in the human record to knowledge of how these cycles and changes have interacted since the end of the Ice Age.