Hot and dry: stability and simplicity in dormancy and austerity

With climate change at the forefront of the popular imagination, understanding how heat shapes human experience of place can provide insight into how human systems have persisted and can persist as temperatures rise. Exploring the human-environment interactions that shape human experience in different types of hot places complicates the perception of heat as being hopeless and dreaded. Dormancy and austerity are human articulations of characteristics of the natural environment in hot dry places, characteristics that are reflected as well in stable and simple social systems. When expectations for the human experience incorporate fundamental aspects of life in a specific climate, the innovations of history and necessity rise to the surface and provide a road map for sustaining viable societies as temperatures change and rise.