A New Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations

Every conscious being on this planet should read this book because it is a history of how our species has radically changed the environment on this planet. If the accumulative facts on how humans have and continue to alter the environment we need to survive doesn't rise to the top of your priority list, then... what?

At last! I have stumbled on an explanation of human history that makes sense of the rises and falls, the wars, the conquerors, the plagues and the shopping habits of our specie. This is a grand overview of our impact on the planetary environment since the rise of agricultural societies about 12,000 years ago. Seeing the past through a green lens fills in missing pieces in the picture painted by standard historical texts. Starting with the microcosm of Easter Island where Polynesian settlers created one of the most advanced cultures of its day, only to devolve to cannibalism and failure after deforestation destroyed their soil, Ponting step-by-steps through the collapse of one society after another. He has assembled the archaeological data amassed in the modern era to establish his case that agriculture has been a disaster for humans and the planet. Consider that a Bushman, forced to live on the African desert, works less than half the hours of his agricultural counterpart, and enjoys a higher nutritional level than half of the world today. Or the reality that every agricultural economy in the past has crashed, repeatedly, with food production devastated by depleted, eroded soil, or salinization and waterlogging after irrigation. The author clearly establishes that fertile soil is the most critical and least replaceable resource in our tool kit. When one lays Ponting's assessment beside a current picture of world agriculture, with topsoil disappearing at one hundred times the rate of recovery, our future looks iffy. After this reading I am left wondering how we can ever achieve a meaningful "balance" given our past record. The planet supported about 4 million humans when we were all gatherer/hunters. Note that this puts us almost 6 billion over the top today, supported on a raft of petrochemical soil amendments. Perhaps we should beat our plowshares into swords?

Clive Ponting's book provides a very good introduction to the subject. It is well written and serves as an excellent starting point, introducing the important questions and providing thought provoking conclusions.Comments that the book is inaccurate regarding Easter Island are illogical. As Ponting points out, the very first Europeans to arrive on the island found a society already devastated by the environmental degradation that it failed to prevent. The diseases inadvertantly spread to the Easter Islanders through this first European contact were not a primary cause of the downfall of the island civilization.

Clive Ponting's subtitle is slightly misleading, as this book is less about the history of civilization's collapse than a history of civilization's influence on the environment. This is a thorough and interesting study of how humans have changed or damaged their natural surroundings from the earliest hunter-gatherer days through the modern post-Industrial world. It seems that any modification of the environment has unintended and unexpected consequences down the road. Of course in the past few had the time or the vision to anticipate these consequences, and we are now living with the results of centuries of pollution, salinization, and general degradation. This is not a polemic but a well-argued study which asks us to consider whether our effect on the natural world has been more for good or ill. It is a good precursor to ideas later developed further in Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, among others.

If you are politically active in any sphere -- environmental, feminist, race, labour issues -- and as a result you do a lifetime of research and reading and discussion, you often feel a sense of despair when attempting to explain your point of view to anyone who hasn't covered the same ground. Waving a booklist several pages long doesn't seem like a good way to win hearts and minds. So you wish for a book you could recommend that would really provide the broad overview, the minimal foundation of your own understanding.For the automobile critic it's probably "Asphalt Nation." For the media critic it might be "Manufacturing Consent". Environmental economists have various basic texts to draw on, but at present I nominate Ponting as the best compromise between accessibility and comprehensiveness.In one fairly brief volume he manages to summarize the technological and economic history of the human race, the central importance of food production throughout that history, and the implications of prior human experience for today's human experience. Ponting's chapter on the age of European expansion might be the best concise survey essay on colonialism that I've read. That one chapter alone is worth the price of admission, and offers a capable answer to the frequently asked question "Why can't the Third World make capitalism work?"Without ranting, without apparent passion, Ponting calmly documents the astonishingly consistent historical record of blundering, self-deception, short-sightedness, and deliberate criminality that has led the G7 nations to the peak of world power. He has been criticized by some readers for insufficient attention to political or social-justice issues, or for insufficient outrage at some of the crimes he documents. I find his detached narrative viewpoint to be a valuable attribute of the book; it calms the reader and makes it possible to read with interest what would otherwise be a bloodcurdling narrative, and a horribly depressing one.If I had to give just one book to a person who asked "but what's wrong with GNP accounting," or "what do you mean, 'unsustainable'" or "what does overconsumption mean?" I think I would now, unhesitatingly, recommend Ponting. It is ideal as a text for any high-school or undergraduate level class in economic history. It is ideal as the founding volume of any curious person's libary of environmental literature. It makes a handy reference work for anyone looking for a relevant statistic about population, fish stocks, the conquest of the Americas, epidemic diseases, and a host of other topics.Ponting punctures cherished myths with the casual unconcern of a writer whose only concern is fact. GHW is perhaps the single most powerful anti-smugness medication (in one compact dose) that I could prescribe for any G7 resident.If you have only one chance to convince a dear friend that environmental issues are real and urgent; if you have only one title on environmental issues in your upcoming class