16
A New Practice: Facilitating Sustainable
Agriculture
Niels G. Röling and M. Annemarie E. Wagemakers
When Greenland Became White
How did our ancestors manage their environment? A green history of the world
(Ponting, 1991) and the first conference on how pre-industrial civilizations coped
with climate change (Pain, 1994) offer plausible insights.
One case study presented at the conference concerns the medieval Norse set-
tlements in Greenland. Their agriculture prospered during the 12th century. In
1127, they sent a live polar bear to the Nordic King and received a bishop in
return. But by 1500, Greenland had become white, and the only people still living
there were the Inuit seal hunters. All that remains of the Norse communities are
the ruins of their churches.
A comparative analysis of the strategies of the communities of the two peoples
for coping with the Small Ice Age reveals that the Norsemen were more concerned
with providing for their bishops and building churches than with changing their
way of life or agriculture to accommodate the harsher climate. They persisted in
trying to graze their cattle on increasingly poor grassland. The Inuit, however,
adapted and developed their hunting and fishing in ways that allowed them to
survive through the increasing cold.
Though it seems, at first, that the demise of the Greenlanders was caused by
climate change, closer scrutiny reveals that the climate was not the only factor.
By the time the temperature had plummeted in the 1370s, the productivity of the land
was falling because of overgrazing and soil erosion. But while the Inuit adopted appro-
priate technologies of hunting and fishing, the Norse farmers – constrained by their
rigidly ordered society and Christian culture – tried to maintain the way of life they
were used to. They failed (Pain, 1994).Reprinted from Röling N G and Wagemakers M A E, A new Practice: Facilitating sustainable agricul-
ture. In Röling N G and Wagemakers M A E (eds) Facilitating Sustainable Agriculture © Cambridge
University Press 1998.