Climate Change and Contagion

One of the greatest challenges we’ve ever faced as a species is anthropogenic climate change. Can the history of climate variability and change offer us solutions for the future? Paleoclimatology — the reconstruction of Earth’s past — reveals how shifts in the environment shaped the rise and fall of civilizations. Climate change has often been associated with what seem to be “contagious” risks, from conflict to pandemic disease. Drawing lessons and perspectives from the collapse of empires to the global crisis of the Little Ice Age, Kyle Harper explores the possibilities of navigating future crises by approaching both physical climate and human societies as complex systems.

Harper is Professor of Classics and Letters at the University of Oklahoma, and a member of the Fractal Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Harper is an historian whose work integrates the natural sciences into the study of the human past. He is interested in the role of climate change and pandemic disease in the ancient world, especially in the Roman period. More broadly, he works on the global history of humans as agents of ecological change and asks how we can approach questions about biodiversity, health, and environmental sustainability from a historical perspective.