Conference on Global Long Term Human Ecodyamics

Cuny Hunter College, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). This funding will provide support for a workshop to take place at the Research Institute at Eagle Hill Maine, October 15-18th 2009, to bring together over 40 leading scientists (archaeologists, social historians, ethnologists, modelers, and climate scientists) who have for decades been researching the long term interactions between human social/cultural systems and environmental systems. One of the key goals of the workshop is to piece together a global picture of long term climate change and the effects on local social systems. As the PI Thomas McGovern describes it, the objective of the workshop is to connect the many excellent regional research areas with their interdisciplinary teams, case specific models, digital tools and rich data sets, into a genuinely global network that can produce a "transformative upgrade" in the collective scientific understanding of human interactions with local and regional environments, informed by a well integrated long-term perspective on processes and outcomes operation on the annual, decadal, and millennial scale. The organizing team of McGovern, Perdikaris, and Ogilvie have been researching North Atlantic climate and its influence on Norse social/cultural changes. Through this workshop, the North Atlantic research team will connect their perspectives with the perspectives of colleagues working in South America, Mesoamerica, Mesopotamia, Oceania, SW US, Caribbean, North Pacific, and the Arctic in order to create a synergy of research and analyses on a global scale. It is not expected that this workshop will create a definitive statement on human/environmental interactions, but rather will catalyze new perspectives - global perspectives - on research that has been important to creating regional understandings of human adaptation to and interaction with environmental change.