Fifteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

Climate and culture are entangled in a spiraling archaeology of regeneration. It is my hypothesis that climate change events are followed by a Dark Age marked by mass migrations, cultural collapse, intolerance, and reduced literacy. A Dark Age ends when there is a paradigm shift that creates the conditions for new cultures to emerge in a period of regeneration. These new cultures retain sub-strata of old cultural knowledge, including cosmologies, where that knowledge is useful and effective. I draw evidence from six climate change events in the Holocene to support this hypothesis. Using the term ‘Dark Age of Intolerance’, I describe the Dark Age that followed the Little Ice Age and hypothesize that this Dark Age has not yet ended insofar as there has been no paradigm shift from darkness to light, from death to flourishing, from intolerance to acceptance of plurality. I argue that settler colonialism was a mass migration of humans, diseases, plant, and animal species from Europe to colonized continents. The dark forces of intolerance continue to manifest as genocides, religious extremisms, racism, rape culture, monoculture, species extinctions, and degraded landscapes. Using the spiral to represent timespace allows us to disrupt linear time upon which capitalism depends and to address the loss of cosmology so that we can begin imagining new cultures that value natality and flourishing.