Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis - Hardcover

Williams, Michael

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21 ratings by Goodreads

9780226899268: Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226899268 ISBN 13: 9780226899268

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2002

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Since humans first appeared on the earth, we've been cutting down trees for fuel and shelter. Indeed, the thinning, changing, and wholesale clearing of forests are among the most important ways humans have transformed the global environment. With the onset of industrialization and colonization the process has accelerated, as agriculture, metal smelting, trade, war, territorial expansion, and even cultural aversion to forests have all taken their toll.

Michael Williams surveys ten thousand years of history to trace how, why, and when human-induced deforestation has shaped economies, societies, and landscapes around the world. Beginning with the return of the forests to Europe, North America, and the tropics after the Ice Ages, Williams traces the impact of human-set fires for gathering and hunting, land clearing for agriculture, and other activities from the Paleolithic through the classical world and the Middle Ages. He then continues the story from the 1500s to the early 1900s, focusing on forest clearing both within Europe and by European imperialists and industrialists abroad, in such places as the New World and India, China, Japan, and Latin America. Finally, he covers the present-day and alarming escalation of deforestation, with the ever-increasing human population placing a possibly unsupportable burden on the world's forests.

Accessible and nonsensationalist, Deforesting the Earth provides the historical and geographical background we need for a deeper understanding of deforestation's tremendous impact on the environment and the people who inhabit it.

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About the Author:

Michael Williams is a professor of geography at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Oriel College. He is the author, most recently, ofAmericans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography as well as the editor ofWetlands: A Threatened Landscape and coeditor of A Century of British Geography.

Review:

"This is truly a magnum opus--a great scholarly work. It is great in scope, it addresses one of the major global problems of our times, it is detailed in execution, and it proffers the perceptive and balanced judgments of an eminent scholar at the height of a long career."
(John Dargavel Environmental History)

"In an epic undertaking, Michael Williams has provided a seven-millennium overview of the impact human beings have had on 'their incomparable heritage, a green, global mantle of forest.' .... This is a breathtaking work in the sweep of what it encompasses. It is also a book important for many interests: environmental, historical, economic and more. Clearly it will endure for decades to come, even after the current struggle over remaining forests has largely played out." (Thomas E. Lovejoy American Scientist 2003-10-01)

"A geographer has now written a book that takes its place among a handful of essential works for understanding this phenomenon. . . . Deforesting the Earth is a well-written, richly and beautifully illustrated, and solidly documented work of synthesis. . . . It is also a model of geographic inquiry that quietly transcends all of the divisions that have plagued the discipline for so long. . . . If more geographers had written such books in the past, the discipline's place and value in academia would today be too obvious to require any justification." (William Meyer Annals of the Association of American Geographers)

"This book is a tour de force in historical geography. The original volume . . . was much larger, but even the new summarized version is a comprehensive account of the destruction of natural forests. . . . [A] great achievement." (John Flenley New Zealand Geographer)

"'A culture is no better than its woods,' wrote WH Auden, who thought on the sylvan evidence of his own time, when the Amazon rainforest had barely lost a twig, that 'our great society is going smash.' Michael Williams's tome is a planetary overview of the impact of humanity on trees since the neolithic era, which has varied from disastrous to frighteningly catastrophic, and is worsening by the second. (If humans are intelligent, why didn't they understand sooner that a strict limit on their reproduction was the fulcrum of all balances?) Williams does the big view with statistics (how much timber was required to heat Rome's baths and effects thereof on the Mediterranean ecostructure) and the smaller, precisely placed detail—the dissatisfaction with the Chinese mandarinate felt by those whose fir trees were burnt in quantities to produce the soot for the bureaucrats' considerable ink requirements. The careless felling of forests was the foundation of the fortune and attitude of colonial and postcolonial North America—once peak wood had been consumed, the profligacy was transferred to peak oil." (Vera Rule Guardian)

"[The book] will be of interest to academics, students, and practitioners in many disciplines and professions, but for those who care about natur in general and forestes in particular, and for whom history and geography matter, it constitutes essential reading." (Judith Tsouvalis Royal Geographical Society)

"The book is unquestionably a monumental achievement, a comprehensive history of how episodes of deforestation over 10,000 years have transformed societies and landscapes everywhere. . . . The book is superbly crafteD, well organized, and beautifully written." (Carl Reidel Northern Woodlands)

“Deforesting the Earthis not a book you read from cover to cover at one sitting but a definitive study to which one returns again and again, to browse, to marvel at the expert synthesis of myriad sources and the daunting statistics on virtually every page. Anyone who doubts the power of history to inform the present should read this closely argued and sweeping survey. This is rich, timely and sobering historical fare written in a measured, non-sensationalist style by a master of his craft. One only hopes (almost certainly vainly) that today’s policymakers take its lessons to heart.”--Brian Fagan, Los Angeles Times (Brian Fagan Los Angeles Times)

“Williams livens this monumental work with colorful, interpretive essays on the human factors motivating the hunter to burn, the lord of the manor to reserve, the peasant to use and abuse, the colonist to exploit, the pioneer to vanquish, and we moderns to overuse the forests. The conservation and environmental movements are discussed with an objectivity and impartiality that is refreshing.”--Virginia Quarterly Review (Virginia Quarterly Review)

“This is truly a magnum opus—a great scholarly work. It is great in scope, it addresses one of the major global problems of our times, it is detailed in execution, and it proffers the perceptive and balanced judgments of an eminent scholar at the height of a long career.” (John Dargavel Environmental History)

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