Log In


Reset Password
News Education Local News Nation & World New Mexico

Climate change is here to stay

Adaptation should be our focus, says speaker

Climate change still calls the shots in the Four Corners, so it’s up to inhabitants to adapt, just as they have for 2,000 years.

The foregoing is the message Eric Blinman, director of the Office of Archaeological Studies at the Museum of New Mexico, will present Thursday at the San Juan Basin Archaeological Society meeting at Fort Lewis College.

The public is welcome at the presentation, which will begin at 7 p.m. in the lyceum at Center of Southwest Studies.

“Climate has set the stage for the complex cultural history in the Southwest for the past 2,000 years,” he said in a telephone interview last week.

Conditions never remained static, at least archaeologically speaking, he said.

“In the past 2,000 years, there’s been no period of stable climate of more than 200 years,” he said. “Change is inevitable.”

Drought is a powerful force, Blinman said. Parched conditions brought an end to Chaco Canyon as a central point of population.

The panorama across the Southwest, including the Four Corners, was in flux as mobile hunter-gatherers, and more sedentary corn-based farming societies responded to changes in rainfall and temperature, he said.

Cultures came and went – occupying, only to later abandon, regions where conditions had become inhospitable, he said.

Hunter-gatherers, for example, would fill in when farming societies found conditions untenable and moved on, he said.

“Expanding and contracting territories was constant,” Blinman said. “There was movement in, movement out.”

The shifting panorama illustrates a marvelous 2,000-year story of fragility and flexibility, he said. But the story is so nuanced that he brings maps to his presentations.

“No society completely fell apart,” he said. “It was a question of adapting, of figuring out how to survive.”

Which brings us to the early 21st century as we face prolonged periods of aridness, he said.

Climate change is inevitable, and history shows all cultures were powerless to resist, he said. The lesson to be learned can be summed up in one word – adaptation.

“Climate change doesn’t tell us what to do,” he said. “But it tells us what we can do.”

daler@durangoherald.com



Reader Comments