A Broader Picture

I’m a podcast devotee, leaning toward podcasts focused on social justice, especially from a historical perspective. When I discovered the Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery podcast, I couldn’t wait to dive in. I was late finding out about it so I began listening in April of 2022.

Because I listen to other history podcasts, I’m grateful for the wisdom and invaluable depth Sarah and Sheri add to the historical narrative. I’ve now caught up with the Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery podcast, and recently received and begun reading the book, So That We And Our Children May Live.

Wow.

I didn’t even get past the preface before I was blown away by the intersections between widely different impacts of the Doctrine of Discovery.

In the preface, Sarah writes about the impact of colonization. On page 21, she includes this fact: “European colonization resulted in the deaths of almost 90 percent of Indigenous people of the Americas…Their deaths occurred on such a large scale that it led to an era of global cooling.” She goes on to document that the planet’s average temperature dropped by .15 degrees Celsius.

I’d heard of this global cooling on a podcast, but I had not heard why the climate had cooled. RadioLab podcast had an episode about a mystery regarding the patterns of tree rings (called Fellowship of the Tree Rings, released July 14, 2023) In studying core samples from very old trees from the Florida Keys, scientists found trees that had some rings so narrow they could barely be distinguished from one another and other sets of rings that were quite widely spaced.

They began comparing the tree ring data to other data, including weather data, and also to the findings of researchers studying shipwrecks. As shipwrecks were discovered, they were tested to find the date of sinking. The shipwrecks most often happened during the same years when tree rings were very close together. Adding weather data to the exploration helped point to hurricanes stressing the trees, creating rings so closely spaced it was hard to differentiate one ring from the next.

There were very few shipwrecks or hurricanes during the years of the wide tree rings.

They explored reasons for the lack of hurricanes during those years, a period of about 75 years in the late 1600s through the early 1700s. There was a global climate cooling during that same period of time. Radiolab reported the cooling at around one degree Celsius. This cooling is known as the little ice age. Other sources have reported it differently, including .15 degrees cooling, as Sarah noted in her preface

One theory was that the cooling was caused by lower levels of solar flare activity on the surface of the sun. This happens cyclically, and occurred during that same time period. But we are currently in a similar cycle of lower solar flare activity, and we are experiencing stronger and more frequent hurricanes, as well as global warming. This would suggest that human activity can make more impact on the climate than a lowering of solar flare activity.

The Radiolab podcast did not suggest any other reasons why the climate cooled during that time period, which puzzled me. It did associate the cooling with two historically significant events.

One of those was a significant increase in piracy.

The other was the movement of enslaved stolen peoples to the Caribbean and the Americas for the production of sugar.

When I read Sarah’s preface regarding the global climate impact of the genocide of Indigenous Peoples on this continent, I was both astounded and humbled. What if the destruction of the Peoples Indigenous to this land was the reason the climate cooled enough to make it easy to bring enslaved people across oceans to the islands and continents in the west? It is horrifying.

Reading Sarah’s preface in light of that podcast about the 75 years of calmer seas and the moving of enslaved people to the Americas and the Caribbean, made the already huge impact of the Doctrine of Discovery even more insidious. 

Not only were 90 percent of Indigenous people killed by diseases and violence brought by Europeans, but also, the disease and violence causing loss of life on an unthinkable scale led to overgrowth of vegetation on lands managed by those Indigenous Peoples in the Americas. The overgrowth sequestered carbon which allowed the climate to cool, greatly reducing the number of hurricanes for about 75 years. Thus it was easier for ships filled with stolen souls to be enslaved on the lands so recently depleted of their native populations.

The harm grew exponentially.