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01/10/2005: "Where They Went Wrong"

Lately I’ve been thinking about that Norse colony in Greenland where everyone starved to death even while they were adhering to their non-sustainable lifestyle right up to the bitter end. We covered this in the entry on December 29 in Greenland Paradise Lost. There must be a real story in how that played out, a story now likely lost to the ages. Here’s how I imagine it happened. I picture a series of wise, farsighted leaders, like our Abe, Teddy, and Ike. They recognized that the resources on which their little society depended were being depleted. It would not have been hard. In the case of the Greenland Norse, the problem was their inflexibility towards maintaining the standard of living enjoyed by their immediate ancestors in an environment to fragile to sustain it. Specifically, they equated livestock with wealth, and livestock required clearing of forests. They also chopped down forests for fuel, structures, and cultural objects. They also could see that their Inuit neighbors had a different lifestyle, and that it was not declining. In particular, Inuit consumed the plentiful fish of Greenland that the Norse distained to the point of starvation. Thus the root of their failure was cultural inflexibility. I imagine that they set in motion programs that might have saved them. I can then imagine the resistance that would arise from those who had gained wealth pursuing the old ways. This resistance would have been based on exactly the same issues on which Dittohead resistance to environmentalism is founded: fear of economic impact (in other words, greed), coveting of the lifestyle of earlier generations who were not faced with limits, (in other words, envy), and a feeling that the laws of man and God alike ordained their right to a particular way of life (in other words, entitlement). Tomorrow let’s have some fun with how this might have played out.