Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1998, Page 144

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HUMAN RESPONSE TO ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
IN NORTH ATLANTIC INSULAR SITUATIONS
learn from the native North Americans but they did not
take that chance. To understand it we must tum our at-
tention to the ideological rather than material aspects of
the Norse presence in Greenland. Decisive was their Eu-
ropean culture tradition reinforced by Christianity.
However, also some more practical aspects should be
considered. The Norse were farmers and agriculture has
such a strong impact on human mentality that there was
no question of abanđonment of agricultural land if there
was no other similar locality available.
The extinction of the Norse Greenlanders, then, was
due to the Christian ideology of farmers who tried to
continue with their cultural tradition against any odds.
Human impact on local environment is a
factor that has been recognised for a long
time by geographers and biologists. Their
studies concentrated usually on negative re-
sults of human activity, e.g. draining bogs,
cutting peat, overgrazing meadows, remov-
ing turf for construction purposes, intro-
ducing new species of plants and animals,
etc. Some of these changes result from pre-
meditated actions while others are just side-
effects of human presence in the landscape.
Obviously enough, human beings are
subject to many natural constraints, even if
they are, at the same time, very active geo-
morphological agents. Most of environ-
mental determinants are of a very stable
character when considered from a human
point of view. People can adapt to them
rather easily by slow gathering of know-
ledge of how to effectively extract energy
from a given environment. There are, usu-
ally, various possible adaptation solutions/
strategies which in conflict situations may
cause fierce competition.
However, the subject of this volume is
the dynamics of nature leading to more or
less substantial changes in environment.
Not all of these changes must be taken into
account when studying the history of
mankind. These that are measured by the
millennia (e.g. eustatic raising of the Scan-
dinavian Peninsula) are invisible from the
human perspective although their results
may be realised after many generations.
Also events of a locally catastrophic char-
acter (e.g. floods, hurricanes, earthquakes,
landslides, etc.) may be omitted because
their results are relatively easy to overcome
even though their momental impact may be
extremely dangerous. Thus rejecting both
extreme ends of the scale we are left with
some middle-range processes that develop
steadily or, at least, that are statistically dis-
tinct in a few generations’ perspective.
And, obviously, climatic fluctuations offer
the best example for discussion of human
response to environmental change.
Responses to the middle-range changes
may be of a various character which de-
pends very much on the type of environ-
ment. However, this volume is concentrat-
ed on insular situations that limit very
much the spectrum of possible choices. The
further limitation is that we speak of spe-
cific situations of islands that are relatively
isolated in the ocean - like Faroes, Iceland
and southern Greenland. They were rather
quickly settled by immigrant inhabitants.
All these circumstances offer laboratory-
like conditions for studying interactions be-
tween culture and nature.
I will concentrate here on the farming
populations leaving aside native North-
American peoples. Their hunter-gatherer
subsistence strategy makes them rather
flexible and mobile and allows relatively