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Ice
Age of Innocents The fairy tale as told by the Brothers Grimm, has an ominous beginning. The scene opens in the sleeping quarters of the home of a poor woodcutter and his wife. Fearing they will be unable to continue to feed their children as food is becoming critically scarce, the parents of two young children discuss when and how their children are to be abandoned, in the black forest of Germany. Left on their own with a meager hunk of bread, the children wander deep into the forest leaving bread crumbs to mark where they have been, which are naturally eaten up by the birds. Near starvation, the children encountered a small bird leads them to a gingerbread cottage made of candy and luscious sweets, the diabolical home of a wicked witch who intended to lure the children into her oven to bake them up for dinner. The witch is tricked into falling into her own trap and tumbled into the oven. She is justifiably barbecued. The children scour the cottage and find a wealth of jewels hidden in the house and they joyfully return home carrying their fortune. Finding their mother had passed away, they share their newfound wealth with their father and live happily ever after. Well, not exactly. The story of Hansel and Gretel believed to have its origins in the 14th century. It is not a fairy tale. It is believed to have come from the second of two very significant climatological events in history. The first, event was the Medieval Warm period between 900 to 1300 AD, and then, followed by the The Little Ice Age from the dawn of the 14th century and lasted for 500 years into the 19th century, that triggered a multitude of disasters that drastically altered the physical, social and religious climate of the times in Europe and North America. During the warm period, the temperature rose and held at 4 degrees above normal. It was a time of great creativity and prosperity. Agriculture boomed so did the population. There was enough food and water for both the wealthy and the poor. Swamps dried up, mosquitoes and malaria virtually disappeared. Vineyards began to thrive in England much to the dismay of the French who were formally the only producers of fine wine. The Vikings were able to navigate the Northern waters and colonized Newfoundland and Greenland and created trade routes to the Gulf. They fished for cod and raised crops and cattle on the newly fertile land. Also during the warm period, there was a tremendous building spree, when most of the castles and gothic cathedrals were built including Westminster Abby, and such national treasures as the leaning tower of Pizza were built in the balmy weather. Peasants lived very differently in the warmth. They were able to fend for themselves and feed their families. Agriculture expanded and it was a time of great optimism and productivity. The early church flourished and proclaimed that all was well. The pact between God and Man remained solid and unbroken. God was pleased. In 1280 there was a massive eruption of volcanoes on Iceland that was one of the factors that altered ocean currents and began the decline in temperature that ushered in the Little Ice Age, and everything changed. In 1314 trading ships brought the black plague which became much worse as the temperature dropped. Weakened from a lack of food, villagers huddled together in small houses. The rats ventured inside carrying their fleas also trying to avoid the cold. The Christian Penitents who believed that God brought the plague and the cold weather, unwittingly carried it from town to town infesting all they came in contact with, demanding that citizens repent for their sins. One third, of the population A staggering 25 million people perished. In China the orange crop froze and in 1315 a drenching rain and intense storms fell on Russia and Ireland washing away crops. Farmlands were decimated and the soil became unusable. Even a few degrees drop in temperature was devastating to the peasants as crops failed, they began to starve. It was a time in history when children were reluctantly abandoned to the woods and left out in the cold to die for a lack of food. Thus the origin of the story of Hansel and Gretel. Famine was widespread. In six years 1.5 million died of starvation and disease. Consequently, the crime rate rose and grave robbing became one of the few sources of income. The laborers who built the great cathedrals could not continue in the unforgiving weather and work stopped. Unemployment became commonplace and many who were once prosperous joined the ranks of the peasants. A mere drop of few degrees in temperature had a tremendous physical and emotional impact on all of society as the rains began to turn to ice. In 1481 Pope Innocent the 8th blamed the cause of the cold climate on the cursing of witches and 50,000 men and women were burned at the stake. The cool wet summers led to outbreaks of an illness called St. Anthony’s Fire. Whole villages would suffer convulsions, hallucinations and gangrenous rotting of the extremities and even death. The grain stored in cool damp conditions may have developed a fungus called ergo blight which fermented into a drug similar to LSD. Some historians claim that the witch hysteria in Salem was indeed the result of ergot blight. In 1653 a titanic river of ice encroached upon small villages in the alps. It was believed that the glaciers were possessed by the devil and a priest was sent to exorcise the glacier. It didn’t work and kept advancing. The 4,000 marauding Vikings who had settled in Greenland and who had terrorized half of Europe watched their livestock perish during the harsh winters and the codfish headed for warmer waters as the ocean was choked with ice. The Vikings had shared Greenland with the Inuit Eskimos, whom they treated with great distain and they refused to learn from them how to survive in such an unforgiving climate. In 50 years, The Vikings completely died out from starvation, victims of their own arrogance. The impact of the Little ice age on the European and North American forests was unusual. The warmth seeking Beech trees died out and were replaced by oak, then pine. That disequilibrium has remained today as it takes nearly 300 years to recover from major climate changes. On the positive side, it is believed that Antonio Stradavari the 17th century violin maker, found such a species of slow growth oak from which he constructed his renown violins, the tone of which has never been duplicated. In the harsh winters The British celebrated the freezing of Thames with a series of frost fairs in 1609 when Henry VIII kicked it off by roasting an ox on the Thames. The frost fair of 1814 began on 1 February, and lasted just four days. An elephant was led across the river below Blackfriars Bridge. This was to be the last frost fair. The climate was growing milder. The question we are faced with today is who is responsible? We have deduced that witches do not cause cold weather, nor are they possessed by the devil. We understand that fermented grains can cause hallucinations and do not create evil witches, and the devil has nothing to do with glaciers advancing and receding. We learned that other cultures whom we may consider too primitive to respect, have a great deal to teach us about surviving natures unanticipated forces. There is no doubt that we are deeply affected by even the smallest of fluxuations in the weather. Why, just in the past week, one need only experience the wrath of streams of grumpy customers and homeowners as they traveled from store to store vying for the few remaining sump pumps in existence in Massachusetts! We now know that as we pave over every available piece of land, our water sheds no longer protect us from floods of our own making. Certainly, nature has her own ways regardless of any human intervention, interference or divine pleadings. It is more than apparent that in times before the expulsion of fossil fuels and co2 from our gas eating modes of transportation, into the atmosphere, that nature, all on her own without much help from us, could create both blessings and havoc, prosperity and premature death among her human inhabitants. In the years that followed The Little Ice Age, we discovered that The events of the 900 years that saw the earth heat and cool respectively is certainly a testament to natures own course. I do not think on this crucial Earth Day, that we wish to continue to contribute to the extraordinary power of her wrath in any way. It is also apparent that the chemicals and the toys of our convenience have to go, among many other products that pollute an earth that can already create much destruction on her own. There is no plausible or reasonable argument against finding energy saving alternatives rather than contributing to natures awesome power to destroy. We humans have a remarkable ability to suppress our historical memories and those of our ancestors. It is fitting at times such as these to take seriously the lessons that came from such hardship, lest we find ourselves trapped as were the Vikings, by our own arrogance, or fce a future of warming, a melting of the ice caps that would indeed affect our cities and coastline in a way that medieval times never experienced. And it has already begun. In closing this verse from Percy Shelley’s Poem “Mont Blanc” seems most appropriate: Is there,
that from the boundaries of the sky
Branchless and shattered stand; the rocks ' drawn down So be it.
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