The little ice age and the Columbian exchange

[Threviel]

I'm reading a book, "1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created", about the columbian exchange and it's effect. In it the author claims that a large contributing factor to the little ice age was that large tracts of land was reforested as a result of indians dying of disease. That did't sound excactly right to me since I remembered that the little ice age started earlier, around 1350 or so.

I read up on it on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_ice_age and that article seems to claim that the little ice age started with the plague and reforestation in the old world. Or at least that the reforestation helped. And that it ended in 1850 or so, just when industrialization started to really take off.

I thought this was interesting. What do you guys think? Anyone got any more details or counter arguments?

[Josquius]

I've certainly heard the thing about the plague and Europeans dying and the wilds reclaiming a lot of land there.
I've never heard the same about N.America. That doesn't really make sense considering that many of the natives weren't big farmers and intense farming Europeans replaced them and elsewhere in the world the population was rising too.

But overall no, the little ice age was just a dip in the natural cycle right? The bottom of the same dip that made the Norse leave Greenland.

[Threviel]

I've certainly heard the thing about the plague and Europeans dying and the wilds reclaiming a lot of land there.
I've never heard the same about N.America. That doesn't really make sense considering that many of the natives weren't big farmers and intense farming Europeans replaced them and elsewhere in the world the population was rising too.

But overall no, the little ice age was just a dip in the natural cycle right? The bottom of the same dip that made the Norse leave Greenland.

Well, according to the book the reforestation was massive in N. America, but also in Central and South America. My thought is that the natives that weren't farmers were often described decades and centuries after the first wave of disease. The author also argued that the introduction of the horse enabled many earlier farming tribes to become nomadic tribes.

[jimmy olsen]

I've certainly heard the thing about the plague and Europeans dying and the wilds reclaiming a lot of land there.
I've never heard the same about N.America. That doesn't really make sense considering that many of the natives weren't big farmers and intense farming Europeans replaced them and elsewhere in the world the population was rising too.

But overall no, the little ice age was just a dip in the natural cycle right? The bottom of the same dip that made the Norse leave Greenland.

Yes they did, what the English settlers found was literally a post-apocalyptic society where over 90-95% of people were dead.

[Barrister]

I've certainly heard the thing about the plague and Europeans dying and the wilds reclaiming a lot of land there.
I've never heard the same about N.America. That doesn't really make sense considering that many of the natives weren't big farmers and intense farming Europeans replaced them and elsewhere in the world the population was rising too.

Well the mesoamericans certainly were big farmers.

The little I've read about areas like the prairies however wasn't that natives were farmers in the way we picture it, but that they 'managed' the land.  In particular they did a lot of burning of the land which kept down trees and shrubs in favour of grasses, which were more advantageous for animals like the buffalo.

[PDH]

The problem with the reforestation idea (other than as something that added to the effects of the Little Ice Age) is that the climate changes began before the Black Death.  The famines of the early 14th century were a result of the weather changing, and the depopulation of the marginal European lands (and the reforestation) began decades before the Plague hit.

Also, the waves of Amerind die-offs can be partially charted through explorer's notes and the like.  It was more like a slow moving problem that did not sweep across the continents, but rather followed exploration.  While the effects were massive, the contact and the diseases that resulted hit at different rates (in part because the virulance of the diseases had the ability to knock out most of a small group in a few days through dehydration/starvation).

I would not say "large contribution factor" but rather a contributing factor.  But then, making a bigger claim is how one gets noticed.

[Caliga]

IIRC most of Kentucky was prairie/oak savannah when the white man arrived.  Now the eastern part of the state is a vast forest, and most of the rest of the state that isn't developed/farmland is also forested.