Historians and Climate Change & Civil Wars Environmental Impact Response Paper read the three secondary sources that were to be assigned for our climate ch

Historians and Climate Change & Civil Wars Environmental Impact Response Paper read the three secondary sources that were to be assigned for our climate change class (attached below). Written by historians, these articles examine how historians can incorporate climate change into their work. Once you read the articles, you will write a one-page response paper that summarizes the three articles and examines the arguments that they make. Pick Your NPR Station
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Here & Now Compass
What Migrants Displaced By The Dust Bowl
And Climate Events Can Teach Us
October 20, 2018 · 8:46 AM ET
FRANCESCA PARIS
In this November 1936 photo from the U.S. Farm Security Administration, a mother, originally from Oklahoma stands with
her five children near Fresno, Calif., where she works as a cotton picker. The Dust Bowl led to a massive migration of
Midwestern farmers out of the region, many of whom traveled to California in search of jobs.
Dorothea Lange/AP
The World Bank predicts climate change could create as many as 143 million “climate
migrants” by 2050. The result would be a mass migration twice as large as the number
of refugees in the world today.
GOATS AND SODA
The Refugees The World Barely Pays Attention To
Though the size of potential displacement is unprecedented, the relationship between
migration and climate has played out on a smaller scale throughout the history of
North America, say historians Nathan Connolly and Ed Ayers.
Connolly, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, points to long-lasting droughts
from the 12th and 13th centuries that caused relocations of indigenous communities in
the American West. Archaeological records show periods of drought that lasted
decades, starting as early as the 11th century.
For Native American populations heavily reliant on crops like maize and consistent
rain, those droughts pushed entire populations to leave their homes. Connolly says
empty villages in the southwest, now tourist attractions, are a product of those
migrations.
“You’re talking about thousands of people who are forced to move and relocate,
oftentimes abandoning whole cities or civilizations,” says Connolly.
Dust Bowl migrants of the 1930s
Centuries later, drought, economic depression and devastating dust storms created the
perfect conditions for migration in the 1930s, away from the southern Plains states
and towards the west, says Connolly.
Facing millions of dollars of crop losses per day in the Dust Bowl, millions of residents
from Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Missouri had no choice but to move or starve.
They packed their bags, with many traveling west to California.
The state of California resisted, citing the 1933 Indigent Act to turn back poor
migrants along the state’s major points of entry. John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of
Wrath, written in 1939, depicted this vilification of climate migrants through its story
of a poor family of tenants driven out of the Dust Bowl and mistreated in California.
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Ayers, a professor at the University of Richmond who co-hosts the Backstory podcast
with Connolly and others, says Steinbeck’s novel is a useful glimpse at how climate
change migrants may be received in the future, but the book doesn’t paint a complete
picture.
“One reason we have Grapes of Wrath is that it was about white people moving,” he
says. “We don’t really have representations of people of other ethnic backgrounds who
have been displaced and moved.”
1947 hurricanes created twice-displaced black families
The idea that certain subgroups may be particularly vulnerable to climate change also
has roots in the mid-20th century, when a series of hurricanes hit the Atlantic Coast.
The strongest storm, Hurricane George, hit Fort Lauderdale in 1947, where a group of
recently displaced, primarily black residents were the most at risk, says Connolly.
NATIONAL
Impossible Choice Faces America’s First ‘Climate Refugees’
He says that racial segregation statutes implemented after World War II already had
forced thousands of African-Americans to relocate throughout the South. In one case,
a black community of second-generation railroad workers in Miami was forcibly
moved across town in 1947 to make room for an all-white school and firehouse.
The black families watched as their houses were pulled onto a flat-bed truck and set up
in a new community. The next month, Hurricane George pummeled the city.
“It turned all of those unfounded homes, homes without foundations, into
matchsticks,” says Connolly. “Because they were just lying in the dirt. It was the total
obliteration of people’s livelihoods.”
He says the same story played out in other cities, as recently displaced AfricanAmerican families with few roots in their communities bore the brunt of hurricanes.
Connolly says there’s a clear parallel to climate migration of recent decades, including
Hurricane Katrina’s impact on New Orleans.
“So much of the displacement and hardship [from Katrina] is what we should call an
unnatural disaster,” he says. “When poverty and lack of appropriate infrastructure
meets challenges of nature, it creates extraordinary human crises.”
The future of climate migration
It’s difficult to estimate how many people will become climate migrants in the next few
decades, but the conditions for climate displacements have been taking root for
decades, according to Ayers.
THE TWO-WAY
Mapping The Potential Economic Effects Of Climate Change
“Migration — voluntary and involuntary — is sort of creating, so to speak, a perfect
storm,” he says, “where people are moving to where the greatest vulnerabilities lie.”
Jesse Keenan, a professor at Harvard, says Americans increasingly are moving to the
Southeast: Economic activity in its Sun Belt states, and the relative affordability of real
estate along the coast, has pushed up population numbers in the region.
“We’ve had a lot of retirees who have built coastal properties,” he says. “And they’re so
new we haven’t had cultural memories of why we didn’t build there in the first place.”
A recent study from the University of Chicago finds that climate-change-induced
migration in the next 50 years is expected to increase population in the West by more
than 10 percent, with most of the new migrants arriving from the South and Midwest.
As a report from the U.N. forecasts drastic effects of climate change in the next few
decades, Connolly says looking back at smaller snapshots of climate displacement may
help us begin to envision the migration that could occur, and the places those migrants
will leave behind.
“Places like South Florida … Louisiana, the Gulf Coast, these places are going to be
drastically compromised,” says Connolly. “I hope that we’re not talking in historical
terms about the place that used to be Florida, or the place that used to be Louisiana.”
climate refugees
dust bowl
climate change
Opinionator
A Gathering of Opinion From Around the Web
DISUNION
The Civil War’s Environmental Impact
By Ted Widmer
November 15, 2014 2:30 pm
Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
The Civil War was the most lethal conflict in American history, by a wide
margin. But the conventional metric we use to measure a war’s impact – the
number of human lives it took – does not fully convey the damage it caused. This
was an environmental catastrophe of the first magnitude, with effects that endured
long after the guns were silenced. It could be argued that they have never ended.
All wars are environmental catastrophes. Armies destroy farms and livestock;
they go through forests like termites; they foul waters; they spread disease; they
bombard the countryside with heavy armaments and leave unexploded shells; they
deploy chemical poisons that linger far longer than they do; they leave detritus and
garbage behind.
As this paper recently reported, it was old rusted-out chemical weapons from
the 1980s that harmed American soldiers in Iraq – chemical weapons designed in
the United States, and never properly disposed of. World War II’s poisons have
been leaching into the earth’s waters and atmosphere for more than half a century.
In Flanders, farmers still dig up unexploded shells from World War I.
Now, a rising school of historians has begun to go back further in time, to
chronicle the environmental impact of the Civil War. It is a devastating catalog.
The war may have begun haltingly, but it soon became total, and in certain
instances, a war upon civilians and the countryside as well as upon the opposing
forces. Gen. William T. Sherman famously explained that he wanted the people of
the South to feel “the hard hand of war,” and he cut a wide swath on his march to
the sea in November and December 1864. “We devoured the land,” he wrote in a
letter to his wife.
Gen. Philip H. Sheridan pursued a similar scorched-earth campaign in the
Shenandoah Valley in September and October 1864, burning farms and factories
and anything else that might be useful to the Confederates. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant
told him to “eat out Virginia clear and clear as far as they go, so that crows flying
over it for the balance of the season will have to carry their provender with them.”
But the war’s damage was far more pervasive than that. In every theater,
Northern and Southern armies lived off the land, helping themselves to any form of
food they could find, animal and vegetable. These armies were huge, mobile
communities, bigger than any city in the South save New Orleans. They cut down
enormous numbers of trees for the wood they needed to warm themselves, to cook,
and to build military structures like railroad bridges. Capt. Theodore Dodge of New
York wrote from Virginia, “it is wonderful how the whole country round here is
literally stripped of its timber. Woods which, when we came here, were so thick
that we could not get through them any way are now entirely cleared.”
Northern trees were also cut in prodigious numbers to help furnish railroad
ties, corduroy roads, ship masts and naval stores like turpentine, resin, pitch and
tar. The historian Megan Kate Nelson estimates that two million trees were killed
during the war. The Union and Confederate armies annually consumed 400,000
acres of forest for firewood alone. With no difficulty, any researcher can find
photographs from 1864 and 1865 that show barren fields and a landscape shorn of
vegetation.
When the armies discharged their weapons, it was even worse. In the
aftermath of a great battle, observers were dumbstruck at the damage caused to
farms and forests. A New York surgeon, Daniel M. Holt, was at the Battle of
Spotsylvania Court House in 1864, and wrote, “Trees are perfectly riddled with
bullets.” Perhaps no battle changed the landscape more than the Battle of the
Crater, in which an enormous, explosive-packed mine was detonated underneath
Confederate lines and left 278 dead, and a depression that is still visible.
Still, the weapons used were less terrible than the weapons contemplated.
Chemical weapons were a topic of considerable interest, North and South. A
Richmond newspaper reported breathlessly on June 4, 1861, “It is well known that
there are some chemicals so poisonous that an atmosphere impregnated with
them, makes it impossible to remain where they are by filling larges shells of
extraordinary capacity with poisonous gases and throwing them very rapidly.” In
May 1862, Lincoln received a letter from a New York schoolteacher, John W.
Doughty, urging that he fill heavy shells with a choking gas of liquid chlorine, to
poison the enemy in their trenches. The letter was routed to the War Department,
and never acted upon, but in 1915, the Germans pursued a similar strategy at
Ypres, to devastating effect.
But the land fought back in its way. Insects thrived in the camps, in part
because the armies destroyed the forest habitats of the birds, bats and other
predators that would keep pest populations down. Mosquitoes carried out their
own form of aerial attack upon unsuspecting men from both sides. More than 1.3
million soldiers in the Union alone were affected by mosquito-borne illnesses like
malaria and yellow fever. An Ohio private. Isaac Jackson, wrote, “the skeeters here
are – well, there is no use talking … I never seen the like.” Flies, ticks, maggots and
chiggers added to the misery.
The army camps were almost designed to attract them. Fetid latrines and
impure water bred disease and did more to weaken the ranks than actual warfare.
Some 1.6 million Union troops suffered from diarrhea and dysentery; Southern
numbers were surely proportional. Rats were abundantly present on both sides,
carrying germs and eating their way through any food they could find.
Probably the worst places of all were the prisoner camps. A Massachusetts
private, Amos Stearns, wrote a two-line poem from his confinement in South
Carolina: “A Confederate prison is the place/Where hunting for lice is no disgrace.”
Some Alabama prisoners in a New York prison made a stew of the prison’s rat
population. (“They taste very much like a young squirrel,” wrote Lt. Edmund D.
Patterson.)
Smart soldiers adapted to the land, using local plants as medicines and food
and taking shelter behind canebrakes and other natural formations. In this, the
Southerners surely had an advantage (a Georgia private, William R. Stillwell, wrote
his wife facetiously of Northern efforts to starve the South: “You might as well try
to starve a black hog in the piney woods”). But the better Northern soldiers
adapted, too, finding fruits, nuts and berries as needed. A Vermont corporal, Rufus
Kinsley, making his way through Louisiana, wrote, “not much to eat but alligators
and blackberries: plenty of them.” Shooting at birds was another easy way to find
food; a Confederate sergeant stationed in Louisiana, Edwin H. Fay, credited local
African-Americans with great skill at duck-hunting, and wrote his wife, “Negroes
bring them in by horseback loads.”
Nevertheless, the Northern effort to reduce the food available to Southern
armies did take a toll. In the spring of 1863, Robert E. Lee wrote, “the question of
food for this army gives me more trouble than anything else combined.” His
invasion of Pennsylvania was driven in part by a need to find new ways to feed his
troops, and his troops helped themselves to food just as liberally as Sherman’s did
in Georgia, appropriating around 100,000 animals from Pennsylvania farms.
While the old economy was adapting to the extraordinary demands of the war,
a new economy was also springing up alongside it, in response to a never-ceasing
demand for energy – for heat, power, cooking and a thousand other short-term
needs. As the world’s whale population began to decline in the 1850s, a new oily
substance was becoming essential. Petroleum was first discovered in large
quantities in northwestern Pennsylvania in 1859, on the eve of the war. As the
Union mobilized for the war effort, it provided enormous stimulus to the new
commodity, whose uses were not fully understood yet, but included lighting and
lubrication. Coal production also rose quickly during the war. The sudden surge in
fossil fuels altered the American economy permanently.
Every mineral that had an industrial use was extracted and put to use, in
significantly larger numbers than before the war. A comparison of the 1860 and
1870 censuses reveals a dramatic surge in all of the extractive industries, and every
sector of the American economy, with one notable exception – Southern
agriculture, which would need another decade to return to prewar levels. These
developments were interpreted as evidence of the Yankee genius for industry, and
little thought was given to after-effects. The overwhelming need to win the war was
paramount, and outweighed any moral calculus about the price to be borne by
future generations. Still, that price was beginning to be calculated – the first
scientific attempt to explain heat-trapping gases in the earth’s atmosphere and the
greenhouse effect was made in 1859 by an Irish scientist, John Tyndall.
Other effects took more time to be noticed. It is doubtful that any species loss
was sustained during the war, despite the death of large numbers of animals who
wandered into harm’s way: It has been speculated that more than a million horses
and mules were casualties of the war. But we should note that the most notable
extinction of the late 19th century and early 20th century – that of the passenger
pigeon – began to occur as huge numbers of veterans were returning home, at the
same time the arms industry was reaching staggering levels of production, and
designing new weapons that nearly removed the difficulty of reloading. The
Winchester Model 66 repeating rifle debuted the year after the war ended, firing 30
times a minute. More than 170,000 would be sold between 1866 and 1898. Colt’s
revolvers sold in even higher numbers; roughly 200,000 of the Model 1860 Army
Revolver were made between 1860 and 1873. Gun clubs sprang up nearly
overnight; sharpshooters become popular heroes, and the National Rifle
Association was founded by two veterans in 1871.
History does not prove that this was the reason for the demise of the passenger
pigeon, a species that once astonished observers for flocks so large that they
darkened the sky. But a culture of game-shooting spread quickly in the years
immediately after the war, accelerated not only by widespread gun ownership, but
by a supply-and-demand infrastructure developed during the war, along the rails.
When Manhattan diners needed to eat pigeon, there were always hunters in the
upper Midwest willing to shoot at boundless birds – until suddenly the birds were
gone. They declined from billions to dozens between the 1870s and the 1890s. One
hunt alone, in 1871, killed 1.5 million birds. Another, three years later, killed
25,000 pigeons a day for five to six weeks. The last known passenger pigeon,
Martha, died on Sept. 1, 1914.
That was only one way in which Americans ultimately came to face the hard
fact of nature’s limits. It was a fact that defied most of their cultural assumptions
about the limitless quality of the land available to them. But it was a fact all the
same. Some began to grasp it, even while the war was being fought. If the fighting
left many scars upon the land, it also planted the seeds for a new movement, to
preserve what was left. As the forests vanished, a few visionaries began to speak up
on their behalf, and argue for a new kind of stewardship. Though simplistic at first
(the world “ecology” would not be invented until 1866), it is possible to see a new
vocabulary emerging, and a conservation movement that would grow out of these
first, halting steps. Henry David Thoreau would not survive the war – he died in
1862 – but he borrowed from some of its imagery to bewail a “war on the
wilderness” that he saw all around him. His final manuscripts suggest that he was
working on a book about the power of seeds to bring rebirth – not a great distance
from what Abraham Lincoln would say in the Gettysburg Address.
Another advocate came from deep within Lincoln’s State Department – his
minister to Italy, George Perkins Marsh, a polymath who spent the Civil War years
working on his masterpiece, “Man and Nature,” which came out in 1864. With
passion and painstaking evidence, it condemned the unthinking, unseeing way in
which most Americans experienced their environment, dismissing nature as little
more than a resource to be used and discarded. Marsh was especially eloquent on
American forests, which he had studied closely as a boy growing up in Vermont,
and then as a businessman in lumber. With scientific precision, he affirmed all of
their life-giving properties, from soil improvement to species diversification to
flood prevention to climate moderation to disease control. But he was a
philosopher too, and like Thoreau, he worried about a consumerist mentality that
seemed to be conducting its own form of “war” against nature. In a section on “The
Destructiveness of Man,�…
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