The Attacking Ocean (39 page)

Chapter 10 “Wave in the Harbor”

(1)
The
Nihon
is an officially commissioned history, completed in 901 C.E. Its fifty volumes cover the years 858–887. This detailed history is only in Japanese, but a general account of the tsunami of 869 appears in Kenneth Chang, “Blindsided by Ferocity Unleashed by a Fault,”
New York Times
, March 21, 2011.

(2)
Bruce Parker,
The Power of the Sea
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 136–142.

(3)
Junko Habu,
Ancient Jomon of Japan
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) was the source for my description of Jomon, which is surrounded by an enormous literature.

(4)
Habu,
Ancient Jomon
, 72–76.

(5)
All of this was time consuming; witness the experience of California Indians. A California anthropologist, Walter Goldschmidt, found that 2.72 kilograms of pounded acorns processed by a Native American woman became 2.45 pounds of meal. Leaching this sample took just under four hours, about one and three quarter hours per kilogram. Jomon processing would probably have consumed as much time. See Walter Goldschmidt, “Nomlaki Ethnography,”
University of California Publications in American Anthropology and Ethnology
42, no. 4 (1951): 303–443.

(6)
Simon Kaner, “Surviving the Tsunami: Archaeological Sites of Northeastern Japan,”
Current World Archaeology
49, no. 5, 1 (2011): 25–35.

(7)
David Bressan, “Historic Tsunamis in Japan,”
History of Geology
, March 17, 2011. Accessed at
http://historyofgeology.fieldofscience.com/2011/03/historic-tsunamis-in-japan.html
.

(8)
Nobuo Shuto, “A Century of Countermeasures Against Storm Surges and Tsunamis in Japan,”
Journal of Disaster Research
2, no. 1 (2007): 19–26.

(9)
For a discussion of sea defenses and the 2011 tsunami, see Norimitsu Onishi, “Seawalls Offered Little Protection Against Tsunami’s Crushing Waves,”
New York Times,
March 13, 2011.

(10)
The media coverage was enormous. A useful summary that is adequate for our purposes appears at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Tohoku_earthquake_and_tsunami
.

(11)
My account is based on Bruce Parker’s superb analysis:
Power of the Sea
, chaps. 8 and 9.

Chapter 11 A Right to Subsistence

(1)
A blow-by-blow description of the founding of Bangladesh and the 1970 cyclone appears in Archer K. Blood,
The Cruel Birth of Bangladesh
(Dhaka: The University Press Limited, 2002).

(2)
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Bangladesh_cyclone
.

(3)
An excellent summary appears in
Climate Change Case Studies,
May 2009. Accessed at
http://wvasiapacific.org/downloads/case-studies/Bangladesh_Cyclone_Sidr_Response.pdf
.

(4)
M. L. Parry et al.,
IPCC Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

(5)
Golam Mahabub Sarwar,
Impacts of Sea Level Rise on the Coastal Zone of Bangladesh
(Lund, Netherlands: Lund University International Masters Program in Environmental Science, MA Thesis, 2005).

(6)
IRIN Report 11.14.2011:
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=75094
, “BANGLADESH: Rising sea level threatens agriculture.”

(7)
R. Chabra,
Soil Salinity and Water Quality
(Brookfield, VT: A.A. Balkema, 1996).

(8)
IRIN Report 11.14.2011.

(9)
This section is based on Edmund Penning-Rowsell et al.,
Migration and Global Environmental Change CS4: Population Movement in Response to Climate-Related Hazards in Bangladesh: The “Last Resort”
(London: Government Office on Science: Foresight Project on Global Environmental Migration, 2011). Accessed at
http://www.icimod.org/?q=630
.

Chapter 12 The Dilemma of Islands

(1)
Robert McGhee,
Ancient People of the Arctic
(Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 1996), offers an excellent general introduction to the archaeology of the far north.

(2)
Owen Mason, “The Contest Between the Ipiutak, Old Bering Sea, and Birnik Polities and the Origin of Whaling During the First Millennium AD Along Bering Strait,”
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology
17, no. 3 (1998): 240–325. Quote from p. 256.

(3)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrier_island
.

(4)
Owen Mason et al.,
Living with the Coast of Alaska
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). I drew on chaps. 9 and 10 in writing descriptions of Shishmaref and Naknek. For the former, see also Orrin H. Pilkey and Rob Young,
The Rising Sea
(Washington, DC: Island Press, 2009), 7–16.

(5)
For early settlement of the Pacific, see Patrick Kirch,
On the Road of the Wind
s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Patrick D. Nunn,
Climate, Environment and Society in the Pacific During the Last Millennium
(Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2007), offers a general description of environmental change in the Pacific, which I drew on for these sections.

(6)
Tuvalu:
http://www.tuvaluislands.com
. See also
http://www.islandvulnerability.org/tuvalu.html
.

(7)
Kiribati:
http://www.kiribatitourism.gov.ki
. For climate change, the government’s official climate change site is useful:
http://www.climate.gov.ki
.

(8)
Alliance of Small Island States:
http://aosis.info
.

(9)
Xavier Romero-Frias,
The Maldive Islanders: A Study of the Popular Culture of an Ancient Ocean Kingdom
(Barcelona: Nova Ethnographia Indica, 2003).

(10)
Quoted from Pilkey and Young,
The Rising Sea,
20–21.

(11)
Pilkey and Young,
The Rising Sea
, See also Adam Hadhazy, “The Maldives, Threatened by Drowning Due to Climate Change, Set to Go Carbon-Neutral,”
Scientific American,
March 16, 2009. Accessed at
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=maldives-drowning-carbon-neutral-by-2009-03-16
.

(12)
See the United Nations Development Program for the Maldives:
http://www.undp.org.mv/v2/?lid=171
.

Chapter 13 “The Crookedest River in the World”

(1)
Mark Twain,
Life on the Mississippi
(Boston: Osgood, 1883), chap. 1, 1.

(2)
The literature is diffuse and specialized. See Janet Rafferty and Evan Peacock, eds.,
Times River: Archaeological Syntheses from the Lower Mississippi River Valley
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008). The chapter by Carl P. Lipo and Robert C. Dunnell, “Prehistoric Settlement in the Lower Mississippi Valley,” 125–67, is especially relevant. Poverty Point: Jon L. Gibson,
The Ancient Mounds of Poverty Point: Place of Rings
(Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2004).

(3)
Tristram R. Kidder, “Climate Change and the Archaic to Woodland Transition (3000–2500 Cal B.P.) in the Mississippi River Basin,”
American Antiquity
71, no. 2 (2006): 195–231.

(4)
This historical passage is based on John McPhee,
The Control of Nature
(New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990), 31ff, also 58ff. For an entertaining and often sparkling history of the Mississippi valley before the Army Corps of Engineers: Lee Sandlin,
Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild
(New York: Vintage Books, 2008).

(5)
McPhee,
The Control of Nature
, 57.

(6)
McPhee,
The Control of Nature
, 58.

(7)
A. Baldwin Wood (1879–1956) as an inventor and engineer. His highly efficient, low-maintenance pumps drained, and still drain, much of New Orleans and have also been widely used elsewhere, including in the drainage of the Zuiderzee in the Netherlands.

(8)
Discussion of Morgan City based on McPhee,
The Control of Nature,
78ff.

(9)
Inevitably, Hurricane Katrina has generated an enormous popular and academic literature. A fascinating film review essay is worth reading to get the flavor of the controversies. Nicholas Lemann, “The New New Orleans,”
New York Review of Books
, March 24, 2011. A recent very solid account: James Patterson Smith,
Hurricane Katrina: The Mississippi Story
(Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2012).

(10)
Migration: Susan L. Cutter et al., “The Katrina Exodus: Internal Displacements and Unequal Outcomes” (London: Government Science Office: Foresight Migration and Global Environment Project, 2011), Case Study 1.

(11)
Lehmann, “The New New Orleans,” 47.

Chapter 14 “Here the Tide Is Ruled, by the Wind, the Moon and Us”

(1)
Guntram Riecken, “Die Flutkatastrophe am 11. Oktober 1634—Ursachen, Schäden und Auswirkungen auf die Küstengestalt Nordfrieslands,” in
Flutkatastrophe 1634: Natur, Geschichte, Dichtung
, 2nd ed., ed. Boy Hinrichs, Albert Panten, and Guntram Riecken (Neumünster: Wachholtz, 1991), 11–64. Quote from p. 35.

(2)
Quotes in this paragraph from Riecken, “Die Flutkatastrophe,” 11–12.

(3)
Quoted from
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burchardi_flood
, where a general account of the disaster may be found, with primary references.

(4)
This passage is based on Audrey M. Lambert,
The Making of the Dutch Landscape: An Historical Geography of the Netherlands
(New York, Academic Press), 94–102.

(5)
Based on Lambert,
The Making
, 210–12.

(6)
William the Silent, Prince of Orange (1533–1584), was a wealthy nobleman who rebelled against the Spanish. The Dutch revolt triggered the Eighty Years’ War that ended in independence for the Republic of the Seven United Provinces in 1581, which ultimately became the Netherlands. He was assassinated in 1584.

(7)
Quoted from Lambert,
The Making
, 213.

(8)
Lambert,
The Making
, 213–15.

(9)
Lambert,
The Making
, 215–17.

(10)
Lambert,
The Making
, 218, 220.

(11)
This passage is based on Lambert,
The Making,
239–41.

(12)
A. G. Maris, M. Dendermonde, and H. A. M. C. Dibbits,
The Dutch and Their Dikes
(Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1956), 66.

(13)
Lambert,
The Making,
266–69.

(14)
www.deltawerken.com/Zuider-Zee-flood-(1916)/306.html
.

(15)
For the British disaster, see Hilda Grieve,
The Great Tide: The Story of the 1953 Flood Disaster in Essex
(Colchester: Essex County Council, 1959). A summary of the Netherlands story appears at
www.deltawerken.com/89
.

(16)
This account and quote based on personal observation,
www.deltawerken.com/23
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oosterscheldekering
.

(17)
Account based on personal observation.

Epilogue

(1)
Digital databases: Even at this early stage in research, the digital information in the databases is sufficient to identify elevations of individual land parcels the size of a small house lot, so the data is far more accurate than any earlier assessments. Cynthia Rosenzweig et al.,
Climate Change and Cities
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

(2)
J. L. Weiss et al., “Implications of Recent Sea Level Rise Science for Low-Elevation Areas in Coastal Cities of the Conterminous U.S.A.,”
Climate Change
105 (2011): 635–45.

(3)
Dan Cayan et al.,
Climate Change and Sea Level Rise Scenarios for California Vulnerability and Adaptation Assessment
(Sacramento: California Natural Resources Agency, 2012).

(4)
Weiss et al., “Implications,” 635–45.

(5)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/30/hurricane-sandy-cuomo-bloomberg-climate-change_n_2043982.html

(6)
Orrin H. Pilkey and Rob Young,
The Rising Sea
(Washington, DC: Island Press, 2009), 4.

(7)
The definitive study is Foresight’s
Migration and Global Environmental Change
(London: Government Office on Science, Foresight Project on Global Environmental Migration, 2011).

(8)
Mike Davis,
Late Victorian Holocausts
(New York: Verso, 2001), chap. 11, describes Chinese famines and their consequences. Brian Fagan,
Floods, Famines, and Emperors
(New York: Basic Books, 2009), chap. 6, summarizes what is known of ancient Egyptian famines.

Author’s Note

Geographical place names are spelled according to the most common usage. Archaeological and historical sites are presented as they appear most commonly in the sources I used to write this book. Some obscure locations are omitted from the maps for clarity. Interested readers should consult the specialist literature.

The notes tend to emphasize sources with extensive bibliographies to allow you to enter the more specialized literature if desired.

The B.C.E./C.E. convention is used throughout this book. The “present” by international agreement is 1950 C.E. Following routine practice, dates before twelve thousand years ago appear as years before present.