This story initially appeared on Grist and is a part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Roman Empire fell greater than 1,500 years in the past, however its grip on the favored creativeness remains to be robust, as evidenced by a latest development on TikTok. Women began filming the boys of their lives to doc their solutions to a easy query: How typically do you concentrate on the Roman Empire? 

“I guess, technically, like every day,” one boyfriend said, as his girlfriend wheezed out an astonished “What?” He wasn’t the one one, as an avalanche of Twitter posts, Instagram Reels, and information articles made clear. While driving on a highway, some males couldn’t assist however take into consideration the intensive community of roads the Romans constructed, a few of that are still in use today. They pondered the system of aqueducts, constructed with concrete that might harden underwater.

There are plenty of explanation why persons are fascinated by the rise and fall of historical empires, gender dynamics apart. Part of what’s driving that curiosity is the query: How might one thing so large and so superior fail? And, extra pressingly: Could one thing comparable occur to us? Between rampaging wildfires, a rise in political violence, and the general public’s trust in government at record lows, it doesn’t appear so far-fetched that America might go up in smoke.

Theories of breakdown pushed by local weather change have proliferated lately, inspired by the likes of Jared Diamond’s 2005 e book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. The Roman Empire, for instance, unraveled during a spasm of volcanic explosions, which led to a interval of cooling that precipitated the primary pandemic of bubonic plague. The decline of the traditional Maya in Central America has been linked with a serious drought. Angkor Wat’s downfall, in what’s now Cambodia, has been pinned on a interval of wild swings between drought and monsoon floods. So if minor types of local weather change spelled the collapse of those nice societies, how are we imagined to survive the rather more radical shifts of right now? 

Focusing too intently on disaster can lead to a skewed view of the previous—it overlooks societies that navigated an environmental catastrophe and made it by means of intact. A review of the literature in 2021 discovered that 77 p.c of research analyzing the interaction between local weather change and societies emphasised disaster, whereas solely 10 p.c centered on resilience. Historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists have just lately tried to fill in that hole. The newest entry is a examine that analyzes 150 crises from completely different time intervals and areas, going off a comprehensive data set that covers greater than 5,000 years of human historical past, again to the Neolithic interval. Environmental forces typically play a crucial function within the fall of societies, the examine discovered, however they will’t do it alone.

Researchers with the Complexity Science Hub, a company based mostly in Vienna, Austria, that makes use of mathematical fashions to grasp the dynamics of complicated programs, discovered loads of examples of societies that made it by means of famines, chilly snaps, and different types of environmental stress. Several Mesoamerican cities, together with the Zapotec settlements of Mitla and Yagul in modern-day Oaxaca, “not only survived but thrived within the same drought conditions” that contributed to the autumn of the Maya civilization within the eighth century. And the Maya, earlier than that time, had weathered five earlier droughts and continued to develop.

The new research, printed in a peer-reviewed organic sciences journal from The Royal Society final month, means that resilience is a capability that societies can acquire and lose over time. Researchers discovered {that a} secure society can face up to even a dramatic local weather shock, whereas a small shock can result in chaos in a weak one.