free download - University Press of Colorado

ten
Global Environmental Change,
Resilience, and Sustainable Outcomes
Charles L. Redman
It is increasingly clear that change is as “normal” a condition as stability when
considering the condition of social-ecological systems. It is equally clear that
knowledge of those systems must rely not just on the characteristics of the elements
of the systems but equally on an understanding of the interactions among
those units and the interactions of that system with forces and entities external
to it. Moreover, there is deepening recognition that the world is extremely complex,
that even the best scientific research on it comes with great uncertainty,
and that many processes that govern it behave in a nonlinear fashion. All of this
makes understanding and managing the world around us and our place within
it extremely challenging, yet doing so remains fundamentally important to our
collective future. We all must face living with the dangers of sudden environmental
change. The chapters in this volume provide a new perspective on this
problem by analyzing how past societies attempted to understand the hazards
they faced, mitigate their impacts, and each in its own way avoid disasters.
Each chapter is an analysis of regional archaeological data to learn about social
responses to the threat and actuality of environmental hazards engendered by
sudden and not so sudden but significant environmental change. Despite their
limitations, archaeological data provide a new and potentially useful source of
insight into how human groups adapt to the threat of environmental changes
and how they respond to environmental changes that do occur.
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