Learning from the past

Dalhousie master's student Robin Greene. (Nick Pearce Photo)

Having felt the heat, mountain peasants are adapting to climate change in the Andean highlands of Peru, one of the most vulnerable ecosystems in the world. They’re experimenting with different, hardier strains of corn and potatoes that require less rainwater and growing them at higher altitudes.

They are coping much like farmers did in another part of the world, in another century.

Dalhousie master’s student Robin Greene is studying the peasantry of the Apennine mountains of northern Italy to discover how they managed when climate change struck at the tail-end of the 16th century. But unlike the Andes where it’s getting hotter, the Apennine region circa 1590 to 1660 saw temperatures drop significantly. Plunged into a “mini ice age,” winters became harsher and colder, and summers became cooler.

“There was a noticeable difference (in climate). “There was talk of ‘great winters’ when the rivers froze and the snow was very deep,” explains Ms. Greene, 22, who recently received a $17,500 grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to aid in her research, part of the emerging field of environmental history.

As a field of study, environmental history aims to bring understanding between the natural world and human populations through the centuries. 

She’s already made one trip to Italy, had the chance to walk the landscape and see some of the homesteads—some decrepit and abandoned, others renovated into rustic retreats—that the people she’s studying would have lived in.

“It was very surreal—things are so different now but you can still feel the history,” says Ms. Greene, from rural Cape Breton.

Another trip is planned for the spring, when she plans to study census records and crop yields, comb through birth and death records and search for that elusive first-person account (elusive because most of the peasants were illiterate.)

At the time, 400 or so years ago, the people worked mixed farms. They grew a few crops, things like spelt and oats, harvested chestnuts, kept a few livestock and looked after sheep, raising them for their wool. Their lives were marked by poverty and back-breaking labour, says Ms. Greene. 

Like the mountain peasants of the Andres, she suspects the farmers diversified their crops and tried out different things. Even so, she expects the records will point to some very lean, hungry winters. 

“I’m very interested in the lives of people and how they were affected by something they couldn’t control,” she says. “Plus, it’s wide open—this hasn’t really been studied before.”