Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (34 page)

In the words of historian Daniel Dupre, “The Panic of 1819 is not just a tale of banks and currency, of debtors and creditors and sheriff’s sales; it is the story of an emotional upheaval and shattering of a collective expectation of progress and prosperity.”
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The raw statistics are brutal
enough. In the crash year 1819, imports dropped 55% and exports more than 40% as business nationwide ground to a halt. In the West, newspapers likened the subsequent depression to the “Famine of Egypt.” In Kentucky, debtors overflowed the jails and filled the town squares. Court records from the period are conspicuously missing from frontier towns of that state, raising the possibility they were later destroyed to hide community shame at the wave of criminal default brought on by the Panic. Some bankrupt men were driven to suicide, while others hid in churches or escaped into the wilderness with their families, hoping to restart their lives beyond the reach of debt collectors.

A ghost map of early nineteenth-century Missouri would show dozens of towns—with hopeful names such as Missouriton, Washington, and Monticello—founded during the heyday of the boom, only to be abandoned in the crash.
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“Last year we talked of the difficulties of paying for our lands,” wrote one speculator, “this year the question is, how to exist.” Bankrupt land investors in the West and South ultimately forfeited hundreds of thousands of acres back to the federal government, stalling westward migration for more than a decade. Meanwhile, in the eastern cities, John Quincy Adams reported “enormous numbers of persons utterly ruined; multitudes in deep distress; and a general mass disaffection to the government.”
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Outside Baltimore, the indigent set up shantytowns, as would become a common sight in the American cities of the 1930s. In Boston, the streets “present[ed] a dull and uncheery spectacle—silence reigns, [with] gloom and despondency in every countenance.”
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The Panic of 1819 had succeeded to the unrelenting misery of “hard times.”

The eruption of Tambora was thus responsible for far more than a single summerless year in New England. By precipitating violent short-term fluctuations in the price of grain in the transatlantic region, the Tamboran weather of 1815–18 was a primary cause of the United States’ first major economic depression.
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The collapse of the European market for American commodities in 1818, combined with a currency crisis, crippled every sector of the U.S. economy and brought an abrupt end to the so-called Era of Good Feelings that followed the end of the war with Britain. The financial meltdown of 1819–22—when the U.S.
population stood at barely ten million—might not have equaled the Great Depression of the 1930s in scale, but it was the young republic’s
first
depression and, by many measures, the most wrenching national economic crisis of the nineteenth century. The Tambora period and its aftermath introduced shell-shocked Americans to the nasty vicissitudes of both climate and commerce. It dealt a body blow to republican optimism, the effects of which reverberated well into the 1820s.

Furthermore, from an environmental viewpoint, the legacy of the mid- to late 1810s—endless cold weather followed by proverbial “hard times”—challenged Americans’ Jeffersonian faith that the country’s future lay in the sunny conjunction of an improving climate, expanding agriculture, and economic growth. The coincidence of hard times with the return of good weather after 1818 was especially demoralizing. A frustrated Committee on Manufactures in Washington wondered at the paradox of financial collapse in a country where “the sea, the forest, the earth, yield their abundance; the labor of man is rewarded; pestilence, famine, or war commit no ravages; no calamity has visited the people; peace smiles on us: [and] plenty blesses the land.” In the Panic of 1819, the American public experienced the apparent historical decoupling of climate and prosperity, a signature of industrial modernity. While the Year without a Summer made beggars of the Europeans, it was the
return
of normal weather in 1818 that threw the dependent American economy into disarray.
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The United States had suffered the first rude shock of nineteenth-century economic globalization.

Post-panic, the United States moved quickly to improve its competitive position in the global market. Just as the extreme weather disaster of 1816 set off a wave of transport infrastructure construction—including the Cumberland Pike and Erie Canal—to better connect the country’s agriculture with its points of sale, response to the 1819–22 depression focused on the rationalization of currency and depersonalization of credit. No more signing extravagant, unbacked bills for friends, family, and creditors, à la Thomas Jefferson. Instead, a new Hamiltonian era of national credit and currency evolved under a more stably administered national bank—until Andrew Jackson arrived to tear it all down again in the 1830s.
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In all this, however, one truth about the Tambora emergency in the transatlantic zone should not be lost sight of. Without an international market in grain to ship food supplies from Baltimore, Constantinople, and Odessa to the capitals of western Europe, millions more people would surely have starved to death in the European subsistence crisis of 1816–17.
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The crippling depression that subsequently afflicted the United States represents the economic “downside” of this market response to a short-term international food emergency. By 1818, Tambora’s pall of gloom had passed, as abruptly and mysteriously as it had come. And yet its destructive impact—both ecological and economic—endured many years. During the subsequent “hard times” of 1819–22, American farmers abandoned their golden wheat fields in the West, while warehouses full of grain—so recently in desperate demand—were left to rot unsold in the port of New Orleans.

THE RETURN OF CLIMATE PESSIMISM

For all their differences, Thomas Jefferson and the Comte de Buffon shared the Enlightenment dream of geo-engineering—of a global climate moderated and perfected through agricultural science. Little did they realize, however, that a massive global experiment in climate engineering was just underway in their lifetimes through the industrial application of fossil fuels. Fast forward two centuries since Tambora’s eruption, we find a world in which cheap energy has brought enormous wealth and comfort to the populations of many countries and pulled untold millions out of poverty. But carbon-driven modernity has come at great ecological cost. Carbon waste—unregulated and unpriced—continues to alter the essential chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans. As a result, farmers of the twenty-first century face regional changes in weather patterns at a scale and pace human beings have not seen since the first emergence of agriculture ten thousand years ago.

The weather of our third millennium, as altered by humankind, is in fact heading in the opposite direction to that foreseen by Jefferson and Buffon. Instead of a managed, ameliorative warming of the colder
regions of the Earth, we now have a runaway climate system increasingly prone to unpredictable extremes of drought, flood, and storms—something like the Frankenstein’s weather of 1816–17. Summers are increasingly hot rather than cold, but the net negative impact on agriculture is the same: declining yields and escalating prices on world commodity markets. For more than a century before the birth of Jefferson, American farmers had worked to adapt their agriculture to the prevailing weather regimes across the United States. Now they face the daunting task of maintaining their crop yields in a deteriorating, unstable climate, exactly the predicament the nation’s agricultural system faced in the Tamboran decade of the 1810s.

Debates over American climate—epitomized by the Jefferson-Buffon exchange—took center stage in the political life of the early republic. Moreover, the 1816 weather disaster furthered the sciences of climate and meteorology in the United States, at least in terms of its status as a professional discipline and office of government. It is no coincidence that the earliest meteorological journal kept by the Army Medical Department dates from July 1816, in the midst of a national weather emergency. In 1817, as a response to general concern over climate deterioration, the federal Land Office likewise ordered its twenty regional branches to begin systematic records of temperature and precipitation. The following year, the army followed suit under the supervision of the surgeon general. A new, federalized era of meteorological data gathering had begun.
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Ironically, however, as American meteorology became more professionalized, weather awareness receded among the general population. The earlier certainties of an ameliorating climate had vanished post-1816, to be replaced by lukewarm doubt and indifference. By 1825, the author of the national
Meteorological Register
reported a mere muddle of opinion on this once galvanizing issue: “some [contend] that as the population increased and civilization extended the climate became warmer, others that it became colder, and others that there was no change.”
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The daily preoccupation with weather conditions and seasonality—a hallmark of the Jeffersonian age—ebbed as an ever-decreasing fraction of the population lived and worked on the land and the United States
developed into the metropolitan-based manufacturing society Jefferson foresaw with such clear-eyed loathing. After 1820, climate change likewise faded from the transatlantic conversation. The United States did not need a moderate climate—or the promise of one—to attract investment and build industries in the new era. Undergirding this industrial development, a modern financial system evolved that, for the most part, insulated ordinary Americans from the vicissitudes of weather and crop yields.
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One consequence of the long decline of American rural life has been a profound climate illiteracy among the political class, which reflects that of the citizenry at large. So the American public was ill-prepared when, in the mid-1980s—two hundred years after Jefferson’s famous dinner with the Comte de Buffon—climate change returned as a live issue in American politics. As in the age of Jefferson, climate change continues to be a subject peculiarly fired with controversy, passion, and no small amount of ignorance. Twenty-first-century Americans, like their predecessors in the early republic, take climate very personally. As this chapter has shown, climate pessimism has never been popular in the United States, whose citizens long ago embraced Jefferson’s sunny optimism at the expense of the icy prognoses of the Comte de Buffon. To suggest that the American climate is bad or getting worse is, in this historical sense, unpatriotic.

But patriotic or not, Buffonian climate pessimism now enjoys its modern revival, in drag, as global warming. The twenty-first-century climate emergency, as we all know, involves not lack of heat but too much, while higher volumes of water vapor destabilize the carbon-charged atmosphere. A new era of Frankenstein’s weather—heat waves, droughts, wild storms, and floods—are increasingly part of the fabric of American life. Cascading extreme weather events, of ever-greater size and frequency, now loom as a serious threat to the agriculture and prosperity of the nation—its Jeffersonian core. No longer an historical footnote, climate pessimism has returned in full, bounding and ferocious, like the dog who will have its day at last.

EPILOGUE

ET IN EXTREMIS EGO

So near to us in geological time, 1815–18 was—in human terms—a remote age of small farms and horses. Railroads and steamships lay a few decades in the future, the mass-produced automobile a century away. Cocooned within our own advanced food and transport infrastructure in the developed world, it is easy to lose sight of the significance of animal mortality on a preindustrial world. The cold conditions and lack of grain in Europe during the 1816–18 climate crisis meant untold losses in livestock and the death of countless thousands of horses. The decimation of Europe’s preindustrial transport system prompted one young German nobleman, Karl von Drais, to tinker with alternative modes of locomotion. The result: a “velocipede,” a crude prototype of the modern bicycle.
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This historical vignette from the Tambora period tells us three things. First, that this book has contained almost nothing on the perhaps irrecoverable history of Tambora’s impact on the world’s animal and biotic populations. Second, that the downstream effects of an ecological crisis on the scale of Tambora evolve over many decades (a commercial, mass-produced bicycle wasn’t developed until the 1890s). And third, that these long-term impacts of drastic climate deterioration are felt not only in the physical world—in human and animal suffering—but in the world of ideas and technology, where sudden environmental dislocations act as an extraordinary stimulant.

The eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 was a natural disaster with a long dragon-like tail. As a geological act of global climate sabotage, its explosion was responsible, in ways direct and indirect, for a Shakespearean shelf’s worth of human tragedies: from transcontinental famines, to a global cholera epidemic, to an exponential growth in the Chinese opium trade, to the first “great” depression in U.S. history. But there are parallel stories of human progress also arising from the Tambora crisis. Among those examined in this book have been the first speculative steps toward Ice Age theory; a golden age of Arctic literature, science, and navigation (despite the body count); a great leap forward in the sciences of agriculture and meteorology (the first weather map!); and the tentative emergence of a modern, liberal idea of the state, in which government’s responsibilities expanded, in the minds of many, to include the welfare of its citizens in times of crisis. In terms of progressive idea generation, we can only wish that our current climate emergency will do the same, that the pressures of painful adaptation to increasing extreme weather conditions will produce grand solutions to climate change itself. And soon.

Many such solutions have already been proposed, one of which bears directly on the subject of this book, namely geo-engineered moderation of the world’s warming climate. Since Nobel Prize–winning earth scientist Paul Crutzen brought new publicity to the idea in a 2006 article, a flurry of scientific papers has considered the possibility of imitating the cooling impact of volcanic eruptions on global temperature by artificially injecting massive volumes of sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere.
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