Senior Seminar in Environmental Studies
Amherst College
October 19, 2010
The Environmental and Cultural Origins of Norse Greenland’s Collapse
by Alex Coburn
 Introduction:
 Historical background of the Norse collapse (expand upon introduction in
literature review) – 986-1450
 Driving question of the paper: what led to the extinction of the Norse settlements
in Greenland after 450 years of relatively stable existence?
 Thesis: While climate change certainly hindered the progress of medieval Norse
civilization in Greenland, the true driving force behind the society’s collapse was
the irresponsible and inefficient way in which the Norse dealt with their natural
environment and resources, especially in the face of the changing climate and
depleted landscape that emerged during the last century of their existence. Much
of this irresponsibility and inefficiency can be attributed to the inflexibility, Eurocentricity, and hierarchical organization of Norse culture, which discouraged
them from abandoning their unsustainable and insecure pastoral economy in
order to shift to a more practical and regionally-suited marine-based economic
structure, like that of their neighbors, the Inuit.
 The Role of Climate Change
 The evidence for climate change
 McGovern’s climate models (McGovern 1980, 266-268)
 Patterson et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sciences (2010)
 The effects of a changing climate on Norse economy and civilization
 Effects on pasture land, and number of viable pasture days in the late
spring/summer/early fall
 Effects on hay production in Norse ‘infields,’ and increased # days
livestock must be kept inside and fed hay (longer winters) (i.e. increased
hay demand, decreased supply) (McGovern 1991, 86)
 Effects on seal resources (McGovern 1980, 269)
 Increase in sea ice blocking trade routes to Europe, as well as routes to
North America for lumber (vital for construction) (Diamond, 267)
 ‘conventional scholarly wisdom’ that climate change was primarily
responsible for the collapse of the Norse (McGovern 1991, 77) (Gladwell,
2+4) – “environmental determinism”
 Transition: why climate change wasn’t uniquely responsible for the
demise of the Norse – flourishing of Inuit culture through the same climate
changes
 Resilience of wild animal populations (Berglund, 115)
Senior Seminar in Environmental Studies
Amherst College
October 19, 2010
 Long-term effects of Norse pastoral economy on Greenland’s environment.
Was this economic structure sustainable, practical, or efficient? What
resources did they exploit (to what extent), and which did they neglect to take
advantage of?
 Introduction describing the Norse economy – pastoral food resources (livestock
via pasture land and hay) vs. wild food resources (caribou and seal) (Berglund,
110)
 Effects of deforestation (birch, willow) a) on soil (Thomson et al., 738) and b) on
human/capital resources (required them to sail to Canada to acquire timber for
construction, and thus use up boat resources)
 Livestock overgrazing – were the grass species of Greenland adapted to the
grazing of livestock? Fragility of Greenland’s landscape, given the climate.
Effects of overgrazing on soil – examples of soil erosion and desertification of
many former pasture lands (Amorosi et al., 496) (Amorosi et al., 499)
 Turf cutting for construction – (Gladwell, 2); (Diamond, 2005)
 Landscape amnesia – the inability for a society to recognize self-inflicted
environmental damage because of the long spans of time in which they happen
(often longer than the scale of a human lifetime)
 Cultural factors that led to these economic and environmental decisions (i.e.
preventing adaptation or abandonment of destructive ‘old ways’)
 Why didn’t they behave rationally? The ‘substitute’ concept in (natural resource)
economics, predicting that a substitute resource will become the primary resource
once the former primary resource reaches a certain cost threshold (because of
scarcity, future scarcity, etc.)
 But cultural factors prevented the Norse from switching to substitute
resources (i.e. marine resources like fish, ringed seals) or from gaining
expertise from Inuit to switch to those resources
 Euro-centric culture, reliance on Europe, unwillingness to diverge from European
cultural norms/practices, even in this harsh new landscape
 Treating Greenland’s environment as if it were equivalent to that of
Norway (Gladwell, 2); (Diamond)
 Symbolic status of cows, despite their high resource requirements
(Gladwell, 2)
 Heavy investments of resources in church construction (timber, turf, boats
for walrus-hunting instead of timber-fetching) (Gladwell, Diamond)
 Distrust of Inuit (McGovern 1991, 94)
Senior Seminar in Environmental Studies
Amherst College
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October 19, 2010
Unwillingness to learn from their more efficient economic structure and
resource uses (McGovern 1991, 94)
Reports of violent interactions and potential raids by Inuit (McGhee, 23)
 Hierarchical political structure of Norse society encouraged maintenance of
status-quo economic system, and also yielded proportionally more resources to
cultural leaders and decision-makers, who would have felt less urgency than
others to change their culture / economic system (McGovern 1980, 272).
 Power / motives of church (Berglund, 118) – conservative ideological
system imposed by the Roman Catholic church (Barrett, 176)
 Final point: biological vs. cultural survival
 Conclusion
 Recap of thesis
 Difficulty for a society like the Norse to:
 A) foresee environmental changes as they are happening, given the long
span of time over which they happen (Amorosi et al., 498)
 B) impose large-scale changes to the economic structure upon which
they’d relied for nearly 500 years
 C) abandon their cultural survival for the sake of biological survival
 Lessons for today – how does the Norse society forewarn us about our
environmental/natural resource decisions?
 Our own landscape amnesia; difficulty changing economic infrastructure;
unwillingness to abandon cultural comforts (e.g. cows in Norse society as
big cars in America) for the sake of long-term economic sustainability
Bibliography

Diamond, Jared (2005) Collapse: Why Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Viking
Penguin, New York, NY.

McGovern, Thomas H. (1980) Cows, Harp Seals, and Churchbells: Adaptation and
Extinction in Norse Greenland. Human Ecology, Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 245-275.

McGovern, Thomas H. (1991) Climate, Correlation, and Causation in Norse Greenland.
Arctic Anthropology, Vol. 28, No. 2, pp. 77-100.

Berglund, Joel (1986) The Decline of the Norse Settlements in Greenland. Arctic
Anthropology, Vol. 23, No. ½, pp. 109-135.
Senior Seminar in Environmental Studies
Amherst College
October 19, 2010

McGhee, Robert (1984) Contact between Native North Americans and the Medieval
Norse: A Review of the Evidence. American Antiquity, Vol. 49, No. 1, pp. 4-26.

Amorosi, Thomas; Buckland, Paul; Dugmore, Andrew; Ingimundarson, Jon H.;
McGovern, Thomas H. (1997) Raiding the Landscape: Human Impact in the
Scandinavian North Atlantic. Human Ecology, Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 491-518.

Thomson, A.M., Simpson, I.A., Brown, J.L. (2005) Sustainable Rangeland Grazing in
Norse Faroe. Human Ecology, Vol. 33, No. 5, pp. 737-761.

Gladwell, Malcolm (2005) The Vanishing. The New Yorker, January 3, 2005.

Barrett, James H. (2003) Contact, Continuity, and Collapse: The Norse Colonization of
the North Atlantic. Brepols Publishers, Turnhout, Belgium.