A Death Toll Large Enough to Cool the Planet
So many farmers died in the Americas that the forest grew back, and the regrowth pulled enough carbon from the air to change the climate. You can measure it in ice cores.
In 2019 a team at University College London published a finding in Quaternary Science Reviews that I have not been able to put down since I read it.
They were studying the Little Ice Age, the cooling that gripped the northern hemisphere from roughly the sixteenth century. They wanted its cause.
They found it in the Americas. When Europeans arrived in 1492 the hemisphere held around sixty million people, farming at scale. Within a century roughly fifty-six million of them were dead, about nine in ten. So much farmland went back to forest, so fast, that the regrowth pulled enough carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to measurably cool the planet.
Sit with the shape of that. The dying was on a scale that shows up in ice cores. It is legible in the geological record. You can measure it in the air.
Every civilisation tells a story about itself, and the Western one is the most successful ever assembled. Europe emerged from darkness, found reason, built science, explored, democratised, abolished slavery, advanced rights. There were errors, and they were corrected by the self-improving machinery of liberal democracy. The arc bends. The graph goes up.