How a drought led to the rise of skateboarding in 1970s California
sciencedaily.com
"We often look into the past to make associations between climate and society, but as we go further back in time, the evidence for those associations gets thinner," said lead author Professor Ulf Büntgen from Cambridge's Department of Geography. "We wanted to find a more modern example that can show how climate affects human behaviour, where we had lots of data to look at, which is how we ended up studying skateboarding."
🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles: ::: spoiler Click here to see the summary But a new cross-disciplinary study from the University of Cambridge shows that beyond the drought, it was the entanglement of environmental, economic and technological factors that led to the explosive rise of professional skateboarding culture in the 1970s.
Their study, reported in the journal PNAS Nexus, shows how small environmental changes can have profound effects on human behaviour, and stimulate cultural and technical innovation.
The drought resulted in estimated losses of $3 billion in California's massive agricultural sector, and the state's reservoir storage reached a record low in 1977.
The widespread economic prosperity of post-World War II America, combined with radical changes in urban planning regulations, resulted in the construction of more than 150,000 swimming pools in California during the 1960s.
The combination of improved equipment, the influence of surf culture, and empty kidney-shaped pools, among many other factors, led to the rise of what was initially referred to as 'vertical' skating.
"But our study shows that local climate triggers can have unexpected, and major, impacts on human society, and not all of them are negative -- in this case, a drought in California led to the development of a huge industry.
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