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Lessons from the past, policies for the future: resilience and sustainability in past crises

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Abstract

This article surveys some examples of the ways past societies have responded to environmental stressors such as famine, war, and pandemic. We show that people in the past did think about system recovery, but only on a sectoral scale. They did perceive challenges and respond appropriately, but within cultural constraints and resource limitations. Risk mitigation was generally limited in scope, localized, and again determined by cultural logic that may not necessarily have been aware of more than symptoms, rather than actual causes. We also show that risk-managing and risk-mitigating arrangements often favored the vested interests of elites rather than the population more widely, an issue policy makers today still face.

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Funding

This work was supported by funding received from the NSF DBI 1639145.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Princeton University, Princeton, USA

    John Haldon

  2. National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, Annapolis, USA

    Merle Eisenberg

  3. Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

    Lee Mordechai

  4. Max-Planck-Inst. for the Science of Human History, PI, Jena, Germany

    Adam Izdebski

  5. Ohio State University, Columbus, USA

    Sam White

Authors
  1. John Haldon
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  2. Merle Eisenberg
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  3. Lee Mordechai
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  4. Adam Izdebski
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  5. Sam White
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Correspondence to John Haldon.

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Haldon, J., Eisenberg, M., Mordechai, L. et al. Lessons from the past, policies for the future: resilience and sustainability in past crises. Environ Syst Decis 40, 287–297 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10669-020-09778-9

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