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by Clive Ponting

Like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, Clive Ponting's book studies the relationship between the environment and human history. It examines world civilisations from Sumeria to ancient Egypt, from Easter Island to the Roman Empire and it argues that human beings have repeatedly built societies that have grown and prospered by exploiting the Earth's resources, only to expand to the point where those resources could no longer sustain the societies' populations and cause subsequent collapse.





This new edition of Clive Ponting's international bestseller has been revised, expanded and updated. It provides not only a compelling story of how we have damaged the environment for thousands of years but also an up-to-the-minute assessment of the crisis facing the world today - and the problems that have to be addressed in the search for solutions.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Environment, Science, Ecology, Nature, Politics

478 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

Reviews

[Marc Lamot · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first edition of this book dates from 1991. This certainly made the publicist Clive Ponting (1946-2020) a pioneer in what has since become the popular genre of Big History. He covers the entire history of mankind from hunter-gatherers to post-industrial society, with an emphasis on environmental aspects. This book is chock-full of information and impressively broad, with a striking number of graphs. Ponting certainly has done a great job. But the annoying thing is that he does not mention anywhere what his material is based on, so no footnotes, not even a bibliography, only a very concise further reading list at the end. The latest edition, from 2007, has been supplemented with information about the climate crisis, and ends on a very pessimistic note. More in my History account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....

[Sense of History]

The Briton Clive Ponting has published on a wide range of subjects, after his sensational resignation as a top civil servant (he had released secret documents about the Falklands War). And so he also tackled this global overview of human history, with an emphasis on environmental aspects. What is particularly striking is that Ponting almost completely ignores political history. He focuses entirely on the relationship between man and the ecosystem surrounding him (perhaps more correctly: the influence of the ecosystem on man and certainly in the last 200 years vice versa). His conclusion, - how could it be otherwise -, is clear: “Human history can be seen as a succession of ever more complex and environmentally damaging ways of meeting the same basic human needs.” In his last chapter (in the updated version of 2007) Ponting stresses that things look bad, very bad indeed, especially because of climate change, and that there are no immediately sound solutions in sight.

Interestingly, he also pays attention to the ideological background in the relationship between man and the environment: the views of religions and secular beliefs, which in most cases give man total supremacy, most of all in the secular progress-belief of the Enlightenment. And Ponting also describes how the Western culture of overexploitation gradually spread throughout the world via colonization, hegemony and imperialism. This book certainly is meritorious, but perhaps slightly outdated in the meantime (see Headrick Humans versus Nature: A Global Environmental History, or specifically for climate change Lieberman Climate Change in Human History: Prehistory to the Present). The text is sometimes really overloaded with factual material, and regularly repetitive.

[Litbitch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kind of a People's History of the World, but from an environmental perspective. Not as good a writer as Zinn, but readable. It is a hugely informative book if you are interested not only in environmental history, but in the imperialist practices that have left some nations unable to feed or support themselves, while Western nations bask in surplus.

[Richard Reese · Rating 5 out of 5]

A New Green History of the World (2007) is the new and improved version of A Green History of the World (1991), which was translated into 13 languages. British historian Clive Ponting did a fantastic amount of research, and then refined it into a very readable, mind-altering 400-page book (a silver bullet cure for folks suffering from denial). It spans the two million year saga of our hominid ancestors, devoting most attention to the last 12,000 years, the era of thunder footprints.

Ponting provides numerous charts displaying the skyrocketing growth of many unsustainable trends. For example, world coal production was 10 million tons in 1800, 760 million tons in 1900, and 5 billion tons in 2000. World oil production was 95 million tons in 1920, 294 million tons in 1940, 2.3 billion tons in 1970, and 3.8 billion tons in 2004. Is it any wonder that the atmosphere is having convulsions?

For almost the entire human journey, wood was our fuel, a renewable resource. With the shift to agriculture and civilization, we invented forest mining, which is unsustainable. Industries making glass, ceramics, bricks, and metals rapidly obliterated forests. By the 1550s, regional wood shortages began limiting growth. The English were the first to begin the shift to coal. Coal lit the turbo thrusters for the Industrial Revolution, which accelerated the process of urbanization, and ignited two centuries of pandemonium.

Until 1800, 95 percent of humans were paupers. Ponting says, “Since the rise of settled societies some ten thousand years ago the overwhelming majority of the world’s population have lived in conditions of grinding poverty. They have had few possessions, suffered from appalling living conditions, and have been forced to spend most of their very limited resources on finding enough food to stay alive.” European commoners often lived in crude huts with dirt floors, and no windows or chimney. Bed was a heap of straw. No corpse was buried in usable garments.

Until 1800, most people travelled on foot. Paupers couldn’t afford horses, or six acres (2.5 ha) of pasture to feed one. Consequently, villages and towns remained small, close to their food supply. Few places could afford even rudimentary sanitation services. Village households dumped their night soil in the streets. Almost any place was a restroom. Fecal-oral diseases were popular, and bathing was not, especially in chilly months. It was a wonderland for rats, fleas, flies, lice, and infectious diseases.

In 1652, the council of Boston banned residents from discarding the “entrails of beasts or fowls or garbage or dead dogs or cattle or any other dead beast or stinking thing” into the streets. In the summer of 1858, the British House of Commons abandoned its sittings because of the unbearable “Great Stink” (all raw sewage went into the Thames). The official residence for Britain’s prime ministers is 10 Downing Street, which didn’t have an indoor bathroom until 1908. And so on.

With urbanization, the privileged class grew — folks who could afford horses, stables, carriages, and feed. More horses were needed to haul more goods. As cities grew, they got too big for foot travelers, so horse-drawn buses, trolleys, cabs, and coaches came into service. Sprawling cities gobbled up nearby farms, increasing the distance between the inner city and their source of food. More horses were needed to haul more food over more miles. Eventually, farmers could no longer afford to have urban manure hauled to their distant fields, so it piled up in empty places.

By 1900, horses plopped 10 million tons of fragrant manure on British streets each year. When it rained, the streets became yucky mucky smelly ponds. In warm dry weather, the breezes carried manure dust for all to inhale. The incredible filth attracted countless trillions of flies that took great delight in spreading typhoid. New York City had to remove 15,000 dead horses annually. Imagine the stench.

By the early twentieth century, Britain and France each had about 3.5 million horses. The U.S. had 20 to 30 million, and feeding them required 88 million acres (36m ha) of farmland — about a quarter of the total. These countries had little spare land to feed more urban horses; they were close to Peak Horses. (Here’s an interesting stinky horse story.)

In 1900, London was the world’s biggest city, with 4.5 million. New York City was second with 2.7 million. Their streets were jammed with slow chaotic clippity-clop traffic, close to capacity, with little room for more. The bubble of cheap and abundant horse feed was over. Both cities had to switch from horse power to fossil power. By 2000, Tokyo had 26.4 million, Mexico City had 18.4 million, and Mumbai had 18 million. They cannot shift to horse power when motor vehicle extinction approaches.

Modern cities cannot function without nonrenewable fossil power. It is needed to move folks from home to work, and from the ground floor to the thirtieth. It moves water in, and sewage out. It picks up the garbage and carries it to landfills. It powers farms, ships, air travel, factories, mines, refineries, lighting, communication systems, and on and on. The list includes everything essential for the energy-guzzling consumer lifestyle, and industrial society itself.

Our global civilization is completely addicted to ever-increasing quantities of finite nonrenewable resources. Obviously, this can only be temporary. We’ve had a high-speed joyride of insane growth, pollution, and ecological gang rape. We’ve invented lots of fascinating gizmos, lived like crazy, and created a monster that has an expiration date. It will disintegrate, sooner or later. Ponting warns that we are approaching a major crossroads.

To make the coming decades even more exciting, climate change is knocking on the door, stopping by to collect our staggering karmic debts. The Technology Fairy cannot give us the magic beans needed to remove the carbon from our emissions. Ponting shrugs, “Global warming is the greatest threat that the world faces and finding a solution will be extremely difficult.”

The Technology Fairy also appears impotent to accelerate the crop yield gains necessary for feeding the projected mob in 50 years (see Cribb and Bourne). Like the Green Revolution disaster, GMO crops require big inputs of fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation — large fields, expensive seeds, rich farmers, big machines, and lots of petrol. Industrial agriculture is getting gray and wrinkled, its best days behind it. Ponting has no faith in biotech miracles.

With the calm and objective voice of a venerable professor, Ponting lifts readers far above the intense roaring madness that we consider normal. When we can observe the human journey from a perspective that spans thousands of years, it’s easy to see that our consumer lifestyle is an extreme deviation from the human journey. Every student in every nation should take a class based on this book, every year. The family of life is paying a terrible price for our ongoing ignorance of environmental history. Few have a competent understanding of the path we have taken, or the predicaments that now threaten us.

I’ve only mentioned a few of the topics in Ponting’s book. It’s a fascinating experience. He did not include the obligatory chapter of brilliant solutions. His conclusion: “The course of human history over the last two centuries has produced change at a rate never before experienced and brought together a series of interlinked problems that almost defy solution because of their complexity.” Progress is wonderful, eh?

[Regan Norris · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book began well, and does offer some interesting insight, but while I anticipated a lot more reconstructions via archaeology of historical situations, what I got was mostly an indictment of colonialism and imperialism, for its exploitative practices in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as the post-colonial fallout of the later 20th and early 21st centuries. As informative as Ponting's catalog of offenses is, after reading Diamond and Fagan, I'm surprised at the dearth of pre-1700 examples provided. Additionally, the narrative takes on a repetitive, heavy-handed tone after a while, which becomes the intellectual equivalent of a wall of sound, drowning out pertinent details. I confess that I stopped fifty pages before the end in fatigue. There seemed little purpose to the history at that point except to continue the listing of our collective offenses. I think I flipped to the end to confirm this (the fact that I can't recall any sort of pronounced denouement should speak for itself). While I admire the author's knowledge and interest, the publisher/marketing information is misleading. It isn't a "green history of the world" in a catholic sense, but a history of modern human exploitation of the world. The title and description imply that it is of much broader scope than it is.

[Rhys · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clive Ponting offers a sprawling history of the world from an environmental perspective. But don’t let the size of the book deter you - it is an engrossing read.

He begins the work with a 20-page description covering roughly two-million years of human survival. The subsequent 1% of human existence on the planet takes the remaining 400 pages. Ponting makes his point of departure the end of the last ice age and the beginning of agriculture - what he calls the ‘first great transition.’ The transition he describes is surplus food production through the domestication of plants and animals. The food surplus allowed for a percentage of the population to pursue other activities like art, governance, and war. Food surplus allowed for urbanization and a growth in population.

The fixed aspect of agriculture and urbanization led to greater demands from nearby water supplies and fertile soil. Ponting provides cautionary tales of the collapse of early civilizations due to environmental deterioration. He also suggests that the First Great Transition was truly a transition from human subsistence as hunters and gatherers to a dependence on agriculture and the governance required to protect land and distribute food with the consequent growth of bureaucracies. Ponting implies that it was an irreversible transition as the environment became too damaged to support large populations as hunters and gatherers.

The next stage of human existence the author calls ‘the long struggle.’ The spiral of population growth and the growing demand for fertile land and fresh water to grow food represents human existence until very recently. Ponting describes the rise and fall of populations due to available food and the impacts of disease.

Interestingly, many of our major diseases originated in other species and jumped to the human population due to the domestication of animals. “Many of the common human diseases are close relatives of animal diseases. Smallpox is very similar to cowpox and measles is related to rinderpest (another cattle disease) and canine distemper. Tuberculosis originated in cattle as did diphtheria. Influenza is common to humans, pigs and birds and the common cold came from the horse. Leprosy came from the water buffalo. The result is that after living for almost ten thousand years in close proximity with animals, humans now share sixty-five diseases with dogs, fifty with cattle, forty-six with sheep and goats, forty-two with pigs, thirty-five with horses and twenty-six with poultry” (p.200). According to Ponting evidence indicates that hunters and gatherers were considerably healthier than humankind during this period.

Ponting continues his green history with a long and thorough description of our growing debasement of the environment: deforestation, mining, the fur trade, whaling, overfishing, and the salination and desertification of fertile land are all covered in gory detail. “The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that since 1945 human activities have degraded two billion hectares of land, of which 430 million hectares have been irreversibly destroyed” (p.253).

What I thought was one of the strongest aspects of Ponting’s A New Green History of the World was his ability to connect human institutions and ways of thought to our collective impact on the environment upon which we rely for existence. He does not shrink from assessing economic systems and the resulting inequalities of access to sufficient food and clean water.

The Second Great Transition, according to Ponting, has been our exploitation of fossil energy to support ever growing populations of people (with fertilizers, pesticides, and farm machinery) with ever-growing levels of consumption (with industrialization and automation, etc.). Like the first great transition, the second appears irreversible as we rely on fossil energy to augment a diminishing and polluted natural environment.

He concludes: “The problem for all human societies has been to find a way of extracting from the environment their food, clothing, shelter and other goods in a way that does not render it incapable of supporting them” (p.423). The challenge, of course, will be to recognize the point at which this will no longer be possible ,and to find the economic and social means to respond to achieve some level of sustainability.

Ponting reminds us that: “Some societies have succeeded in finding the right balance, some have failed.”

[Judith · Rating 4 out of 5]

I will never forget the lessons of Easter Island as described in this book. The history of Easter Island is not one of lost civilisations and esoteric knowledge. Rather it is a striking example of the dependence of human societies on their environment and of the consequences of irreversibly damaging that environment. It is the story of a people who, starting from an extremely limited resource base, constructed one of the most advanced societies in the world for the technology they had available. However, the demands placed on the environment of the island by this development were immense. When it could no longer withstand the pressure, the society that had been painfully built up over the previous thousand years fell with it. This book is also interesting for everyone who want to know more about the history of stone chicken coops ;-)

[Simon B · Rating 2 out of 5]

An ambitious but disappointing read. Ponting provided some genuine insights. I was impressed by his account of how the history of European colonialism and present global inequality are significant ecological factors. However, his overall explanation for the multiple crises relied on the hoary old environmentalist myth of overpopulation. Lacking an analysis of capitalism, he misdiagnoses the problem and mistakenly confuses people for pollution. The part that really bugged me is that he didn't even acknowledge that his opinion is highly contested among ecologists. This book is getting rather old (2007) now and it really shows with his analysis of climate change. Plus the complete lack of footnotes or references is a questionable choice.

[Asa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thoroughly reflective and important classic.

Despite this book's green deterministic bent, it certainly makes it hard, actually impossible, to deny that overexpansion and the exhaustion of available natural resources have played key roles in the collapse of all great cultures in human history.

[Ramil Kazımov · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bu kitabı az önce bitirdim.. Ve de görünen o ki, türkçe yorum yapan ilk insan olma onuruna erişmiş bulunuyorum))

Kitap alıştığımız tarih kitabı değildir, aslında bir sosyal gelişmenin çevre ile iç-içe anlatıldığı bir kitap. Ve ekonomik gelişmenin kronoloji anlatımlı bir kitabı..

İlk insanların yaratılmasından ve onların çevre ile etkileşim içerisinde yaşamasından günümüze kadar olan ekonomik gelişmeni öğreniyoruz. Kadim imparatorluklar ve devletlerin çevreden kaynaklanan çöküşü (tabii ben buna ekonomini de ilave edebilirim) ve son 250 yıllık zaman diliminde kapitalizmin yükselişi ve insanların çevre pahasına ekonomik gelişmesini anlatıyor bu kitap. Lancashire-da ilk fabrikaların görülmesinden modern tüketim toplumlarının yükselişine kadar global ekonomi o kadar hızlı gelişti ki bundan önce çevreye verdiğimiz zarar devede kulak kalır.. Tabii dünyanın ilk küreseleşme dalgasını da hesaba katmak gerekir..

Kolumbun Hint Adalarına seyaheti ile dünya ekonomisinin globalleşmesi başladı. Kolumb ve beraberindekiler Kuzey Amerikaya giderken kendileri ile mikroplarını da getirdiler tabii. Amerika kıtalarının sömürgeleştirilmesi ve orada yaşayan yerlilerin hem kılıçtan geçirilmesi, hem köle olarak işletilmesi hem de bağışıklıkları olmadığı mikroplardan olmesi de bununla başlamış oldu. O cümleden farklı kıtalarda bulunmayan hayvanların ve mikropların Avrupadan Avusturalya ve Amerika kıtalarına getirilmesi de dünya tarım ve hayvancılığının tektipleşmesi ve yerli türlerden yüzlercesinin mahvolması ile sonuçlandı..

Daha sonra İlk sanayileşme dalgası İngilterede başladı. Evlerin üzerinin sisle örtülmesi de bununla birlikte gelmiş oldu. Ve modern hava kirliliğinin artması da Lancashire-deki fabrikaların bacalarından yükselen sislerle başlamış oldu. Çevreye bundan önce de çok zarar verilmişti ama sanayi devrimi bu zararları o kadar çok artırmış oldu ki geri dönüşü olmayan bir durumla karşı-karşıya bulunduk.. On dokuzuncu yüzyıl bir çok bitki ve hayvan türünün azalmasına ve bazılarının da yok oluşuna şahitlik etdi.

Yirminci Yüzyıl ise ekonomik gelişme ve çevreye verilen zararlarda artım bakımından bir önceki yüzyılı gölgede bıraktı.. Teknolojinin hızlı yükselişi çevreyi hem kirletti hem de artan sayıda insan ölümlerine sebep oldu. Atmosfere atılan emisyonların miktarı kat-kat artmış durumda ve yaşaığımız yirmi birinci yüzyılda giderek daha da artıyor. Tabii bazıları çevrecilik haraketlerinin yükselişini umut vadedici ve çevre dostu teknolojilerin yükselişini olumlu karşılıyor ama kitabı okursanız bunların fark yaratmayacak umutlar olduğunu öğrenmiş olursunuz.. Mesela, 1997 Kyoto protokolü ABD tarafından onaylanmadı (Başkan Clinton imzaladı ama Meclisin onaylamadığı bir şey kabul edilmez ve başkan Clinton bunu biliyordu). Adı geçen dönemde ABD dünyada çevreyi kirleten birinci ülke konumunda idi. Bu protokolü imzalayan ülkelerin atmosferi kirletme payıysa o kadar küçük ki onların imzası hiç bir şeyi değiştiremez. Küresel ekonominin günümüzdeki şekliyle devamı dünyamızın sonunun başlangıcı desek, yanılıyor olamayız. Kapitalist ekonominin yaşam düzeyimizi yükselttiği doğru. Ama zararları o kadar çok ki kapitalizmin devamı hepimizin sonu olacak. Siyaset adamlarının, Avusturalya Başbakanının sözlerini baz alarak "çevreyi yalnız ve yalnız günümüz ekonomik gelişini sürdürerek korumalı, başka yol ola bilmez" yaklaşımı bizlere şunu gösteriyor: siyaset adamları çevreden çok onları seçen seçmenleri düşünüyor. Seçmenlerse ekonomik gelişmeyi düşünüyor. Ekonomik gelişme çevreye zarar vermeden sürdürüle bilmez. Çevreye zarar vermekse hepimizi tehdit ediyor. Yeşil ekonomi gibi süslü laflar edilebilir ama gerçekte tüm bu yaklaşımlar şimdilik anlamsız ve alakasız.

Kısaca, kitap muazzam bilgi birikimine sahip ve herkesin okuması gereken bir kitap. Herkese tavsiye ederim. Kitap bize dünyanın ekonomik gelişmesinin nelere mal olduğunu anlatacak kendi türünde nadir bilgi hazinelerinden biri. Şahsen okurken çok keyif aldım ve bilmediğim bir çok şey öğrenmiş bulunuyorum. Zaten bilmediğim o kadar çox şey varki..

[Kent Curtis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great overview of human history on earth from the perspective of resources and resource exhaustion. Ponting's engaging and really accessible book argues that humans tend to overreach when they develop successful systems for exploiting nature to their benefit and they tend to collapse. He identifies several instances in human history and then posits that the current practices are putting us in real danger.

[Cynda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review to Follow.

[Mimi Somsanith · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm fortunate to have learned my lesson from previous reads and go through the Table of Contents before suffering throughout most of this book. The last handful of chapters I read was enough to keep me awake. It seems as though most civilization/environmental books go through a version of history and development similarly with few points here and there that are cool to know.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is history on the grand scale – going back to the big idea and changing the way we look at the world. This is a refreshing re-telling of history – taking away the Whig legacy of history as progress and taking instead the perspective of what we have done to exploit the world, and of our capacity to drive civilisations to collapse.

“From one perspective, this invention of new techniques [clothing, housing, writing], the use of more complicated production processes and the use of more resources, can be viewed as progress – the increasing ability of human societies to modify the environment and utilise its resources in order to meet their growing needs. From an ecological perspective this process has a very different interpretation. Human history can be seen as a succession of ever more complex and environmentally damaging way of meeting the same basic human needs. There may not have been any alternative given the rise in human numbers and the impact of new technology but that does not alter the fact of the greater amount of environmental damage involved in all these processes.”

I read this for five months on and off, allowing the sheer weight of the argument to sink in.
“It is not until the end of the seventeenth century that the continuous increase in scientific knowledge and the steady advance of technology.. began to convince some thinkers that history might be a chronicle of progress rather than decay.”

Ponting takes the long perspective:
“There is no doubt that the world is now facing its sixth great extinction of animals and plants (the last one was 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs became extinct).”
Reminding us, though, that extinction is not an entirely modern phenomenon and that stone age American settlers “left a trail of destruction… Two thirds of the large mammals present when humans first arrived were driven to extinction.”

It is extraordinary the sheer scale of what we as a species have done over a few millennia and in particular over the last 200 years:
“Ecological constraints were broken by the development of agriculture.. the last 10,000 years of history have been shaped by an agriculture-based boom that has sustained a rise in numbers from four million to over six billion.”

Ponting characterises most of human history as constrained by a shortage of access to energy, desperate for animal and human power, with human power often coming cheaper than draft animals: “Humans are more efficient energy converters than animals.”

Then came the great transition, to energy plenty, with all its consequences for belching carbon into the atmosphere:
“Until the early nineteenth century renewable resources – human, animal, water, wind – provided nearly all the world’s energy. Now over 85% comes from non-renewable fossil fuels.. the transition to fossil fuels has been accompanied by a spectacular rise in energy consumption.”

We are reminded how close society has often been to the vision of Malthus – constantly driving itself to the edge of population collapse:
“The endemic level of inadequate diet and malnutrition for most of the people in the world was frequently turned into disaster by the outbreak of famine..In China in the two thousand years between 108 BCE and 1910 there were 1,828 years (over 90% of the total) in which famines involved at least one province in the country. In France between 970 and 1100 there were 60 years of famine at a time of expanding agricultural output…”

He points out that other civilisations must have thought they were sustainable, but over time collapsed:
…“irrigation can badly degrade the land and lead to waterlogging and salinisation as the early societies in Sumer discovered over four thousand years ago. These effects are now found in half of the irrigated land in Syria and Iraq, a quarter of the irrigated land in the US and four fifths of the irrigated area in the Punjab.”

We are reminded of the constant struggle to get beyond subsistence, bringing in energy and effort from the earth, of the practical limits to city and civilisation growth throughout much of human history:

“Until the early nineteenth century nowhere in the world could more than about ten per cent of the population be employed in non agricultural activities because agricultural production was so low.”
He brings you back to the norms of disease and death throughout most of human history – and the potential for a return to that as disease becomes resistant to antibiotics. The past is piled high in sewage and you can smell the stench from his stories (although some cities in India and China did it better).

We are reminded of the limits of agricultural efficiency and increased energy efficiency in a world of population growth, increasing inequality, and a constant drive to grow to maintain employment, electability and pursue western lifestyles:

“Modern industrialised agriculture is highly inefficient in energy terms. The most energy- efficient agriculture in the world is rice growing in the paddy fields of China and SE Asia where the output of energy is about fifty times greater than input. Other so-called primitive agricultural systems are also highly energy-efficient producing about twenty times the energy they use. At best, modern cereal farming produces only about twice as much energy as it consumes in the form of fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides and machinery. Modern agriculture is also becoming less energy-efficient….Meat production in the industrialised world now consumes between two and three times the energy it produces…add the energy cost of processing and distributing food. This takes about three times as much energy as producing the food itself.”

There is an interesting debate about whether cities are sustainable – he sees them as not because their inhabitants have unsustainable lifestyles.

It is very hard to believe, by the end of the book, that Western lifestyles are anything but a dangerous, critically risky theft of the earth's resources.

The idea that property is theft is not explicitly stated, but seeps out between the lines.
“In its deepest sense the problem of famine stems from the change of attitude towards food that goes back to the emergence of agriculture. Gathering and hunting groups do not regard food as something to be traded but as available to all within the group. The problem of entitlement arose once the ownership of land and food became the norm when settled agricultural societies emerged.”

Clive Ponting has a Victorian love of statistics in action. His is almost an hommage to Chadwick:
“In 1853 when the Lambeth Water Company finally moved its source of water supply further upstream away from the most polluted area, the death rate in the area it supplied rapidly fell from 130 per thousand to 37 per thousand.”

In a book aiming at such an authoritative sweep of history it seems a major failing that there are no footnotes – only a rather limited and dated reading list – and one is left wondering where some fascinating statistics come from:
The unsustainable dynamic of inequality - “The US contains about 5% of the world’s population yet it consumes every year about 40% of the resources used in the world.”
Growth faster than the world has ever before seen - “The world in the twentieth century..
World population x3.8..
World industrial output x35 …
World energy use x12.5 …
World water use x9 …
World fertiliser use x342”

The evils of the car (and the importance of recycling your old car) – “Car production now consumes more resources than any other industry. It uses about 20% of world steel production, 35% of the zinc, 50% of the lead, 60% of all natural rubber and 10% of world aluminium production. In addition over a third of the world’s oil consumption is accounted for by vehicles.”

The perils of prosperity - “In Britain one in five adults is now clinically obese – a rate double that of the 1970s. In the US… about a third of the population…”

Whole economies structured round unsustainable travel - “7% of the world’s workforce is employed in the tourism industry.”

Climate change already clearly observable over the twentieth century – “Warmer air is able to hold more water vapour and rainfall has increased by just under 1% a decade in the mid to high latitudes of the northern hemisphere. The number of heavy storms has also increased – by about 4% over the twentieth century.”

“Around Britain small marine animals and seaweeds have on average moved 150 km north in the last fifty years.”

I have visions of thousands of PhD students slaving to contribute just one fact to this tome – and then wonder whether sometimes Ponting himself, or a research assistant, made them up on the back of an envelope as 1980s civil servants were in the habit of doing. I longed for the references, even online, even if they were as long as the book itself.

But overall, I found myself convinced by his arguments, particularly as he drew to a close in this updated 2007 version building on the IPCC report on climate change – change is happening faster than it ever did in the past, and there is no reason to believe we can keep up. The hidden message is that in an unequal way, across the world, we are heading for population crisis and collapse, as the huge build up of population growth, the limits of energy intensive farming and higher temperatures well above the ‘safe’ two degrees coincide. Even if in our lifetimes we appear to cope, the change built up in the environment, from accumulated greenhouse gases, and the irreversibility of much change over a century or more, will result in mass human misery. There is no reason to believe, in the face of the evidence, that our governments and multinationals will be able to prevent it.
He rejects the two degrees centigrade rise talk of world governments.

“In its Energy Outlook for 2006 the International Energy Agency forecast that the most likely scenario was a 53% increase in world energy use by 2030 and that fossil fuels would make up over 80% of that increase…carbon dioxide concentrations… would rise to…two or three times above pre-industrial levels… continued growth in the world economy.. would imply an average temperature rise of at least 5 degrees C but perhaps twice that in high latitudes.”

He reminds us that increased energy efficiency is not really the solution if it simply powers economic growth.

“Many societies in the past believed that they had a sustainable way of life only to find some time later that this was not the case. By the time they had to face the crisis, they were unable to make the social, economic and political changes necessary for survival.”

[Nick Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great read, would have been 5 star but Clive leaked documents about the Falklands. I will forgive but I will never forget.

[Phil · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up this book just over a year ago because the title intrigued me and also because it promised a wider view of history than what I generally read. To a very large degree, this book delivered that. Ponting's project is to view the impact of humanity and, particularly, the advent of civilization on the world and her resources. It is a blend of history and science which should be included on the shelves of any serious historian because it gives the wider, longue duree, view of human history which should form a framework to interpret wider social, economic and cultural understanding.

I should note, however, that I didn't find it easy reading. That is, I missed the personal aspects of the history because the view is so wide here that people come out almost as an abstraction, rather than people. However, given the subject matter, I can't see how it could be anything else.

So, very much well worth reading and useful resource for anyone thinking of the wider view of human history.

[Nemo · Rating 2 out of 5]

417 page is really too long and tedious to read. And 90% of texts are examples, numbers, repeatedly, to prove a few simple judgment: 1) human history has seen two great leaps first agri second industrial/western expansion. And along with it, ecosystem is down, new diseases, unequal third world, pollution, over population. The whole book can be summarized by one page. and I dont think there is anything new to know. It is basically a good book for reference use (if you want to wrtie sth about human and environment interaction this book can be used for citing cases and numbers).

The only interesting part of the book is the beginning story of Easter Island and the big statues (what happend to the islanders who built such big statues?), it read like a suspense story. I will remember this book only because this story.

[Peter]

Thorough look at the human impact on the environment from hunter/gatherer times to the present. Particularly interesting information on how some well-known civilizations like Rome, Easter Island, and even the fabled Atlantis may have brought about their own doom by damaging their environment. Very dense with information and somewhat dry, but a great reference.

[Nick Mather]

This is an important, disturbing, and compelling book. Ponting provides a history of the world that illustrates nely 10,000 years of environmental degradation caused by humans. The writing is free from rhetoric and based solely on an abundance of facts making it next to impossible to ignore.

[Michael Kearney · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just a short note. I did a lot of skimming here. It was just the nature of the book, fact after fact. I wish he would have used some notes. I can't imagine a pub. letting him get away with not backing up his writing.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Required book for Environmental Sociology... really dense, and I'd love to have time to really sift through it.

[Vanessa Fuller · Rating 5 out of 5]

This does not leave me feeling particularly optimistic about the future for humanity.

[Yngve Skogstad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rather than a history of the world seen from the perspective of plant and animal life (or some notion of Gaia), this is the story of the impact the human species has inflicted on nature throughout its history. It might not be exactly what the main title would suggest, but nevertheless an incredibly informative work that successfully spans a host of disciplines, yet does so in a manner that leaves a coherent and readable text.

My main takeaway from the book is there never was some pristine past, where humanity lived in harmony with nature. The basic historical struggle for humanity, as for most species, has been to exploit the resources of its surroundings in a way that insures its continued survival, without undermining the longer-term capacity of ecosystems to continue providing these vital resources. Some societies have definitely been better at this than others, with hunter-gatherer societies at one end of the scale, and industrialized capitalist core-societies at the other, but the tension and the tendency to over-exploit has always been there. Ponting points to two key transitions that brought us here: firstly the shift to agriculture, which still seems like an illogical move because it so obviously worsened people's life conditions in the sense of a less nutritious diet, new diseases and a massive increase in the required amount of labour. The second transition was the “industrial revolution”, which has led to high-energy-use, mass-consumption societies in the global North, built on the resources and labour of the global South, organized through a (post-)colonial world system.

As civilization has “progressed” and the human population has grown, environmental problems have intensified, both in terms of their number and scope. Some of them are ancient and recurring, like de-forestation, or soil salinization from irrigation. Others are new, like chemical pollution, or climate change. Whereas civilizations have collapsed from eroding their trophic base many times before in history, these were localized events often occuring on a multi-generational time scale, so that people might not be aware they were living through a civilizational collapse. Yet the situation at the onset of another civilizational decline/collapse is that we have a perfect storm of ecological crises that are of a global scale and many of which feed into eachother. The political and economic structures that “we” have constructed, as well as the sheer weight of numbers from a human population of seven billion people, creates a political and technological conundrum that seems unresolvable. This is what makes our current situation totally unprecedented, and fraught territory not just for humanity, but the planet as a whole (not that I believe it could lead to a total destruction of terrestrial life, or even the eradication of the human species).

Ponting doesn't bother giving any last call for hope in the last stages of the book, and to be honest I can't blame him. Looking at the state of things there's no rational cause for optimism, yet I don't think that this ought to lead us to just give up and all become self-serving nihilsts. There might not be “a world to win”, at least not in our life-time, but the principle of harm-minimization and an attempt at creating the the conditions for an ecologically regenerating and socially liberated society to spring out of the collapse of this one is what I think should guide us in this time. Trite as it may be, I find some solace in the Gramsci-quote “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”.

[Bernard English · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't give it a higher rating because at times it was really a string of bad news data. However, he really covers all the bases and no matter what the topic, he seems to find some surprising figures that I'd never heard of. For example, supposedly traditional Chinese rice paddy farming was the most efficient ever, with an output to input ratio of 50 (I think, as I can't find the quote now). It's known that the shrinking ozone layer isn't good for our eyes, but he claims that a 1% decrease in the ozone leads to a 1% increase in cataracts. The height of people is known to be an excellent measure of both economic development and of wealth distribution. Ponting cites the dramatic example of Royal Navy recruits being eight inches shorter than their upper class recruits. He doesn't get into the relation between imperialism and the adoption of monoculture as much as I would have liked, but he does touch on it. He writes that "[S]ince 1500 Europe and the industrialized countries have had access to the resources of the whole world, first to provide a wider variety of food, then important staples and second to provide a source of raw materials (and also markets) for continues industrial expansion." I'm just guessing that the developing world would have been much better off without the European, Japanese, and American dominance. After all, their intentions were certainly not good, Cecil Rhodes himself say as much: "We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labour that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories." He is of course referring to the British African colonies. Some colonies would later also be dumping grounds for nuclear waste. Ponting is an alarmist when it comes to environmental degradation but not when it comes to many minerals which he thinks can last for perhaps another century. All in all, this book confirms my belief that mankind will not save the environment and the planet will not save mankind from it's short-sightedness.

[Matthew Carr · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was worried when I first picked up this book for two reasons:
1. It looked rather dense and there seemed to be a lot of graphs and charts I’d have to analyze that might have gone over my head of understanding
2. It seemed that it would either be too boring to finish or too pessimistic

The first one wasn’t the case, I actually found it much easier to read than anticipated and the author did a good job of treating the reader with respect and not contempt on a possible ignorance of the subject of environmental history. The second one would be partially true. As I read I found myself more and more fascinated with the rich history of ancient civilizations and their measures against their own environments from the usage of harsh agricultural productions and overcrowded population hubs as well as the disastrous affects of imperialism on inequality, disease, and the environment. However with the threat of global warming and the consequences we have created I certainly got a very pessimistic outlook on our future.

[Dameon Launert · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book took me a long time to read. There were a lot of detailed examples that slowed me down as I tried to visualize them in context with other historical events. The writing style was also a bit awkward.

Also, the second-to-last sentence in the book was rather strange: "In this wider perspective it is clearly far too soon to judge whether modern industrialized societies… are ecologically sustainable." Given the vast wealth of evidence, I think it is clear that civilization as conceived, and industrialized societies in particular, are entirely unsustainable. They all to varying degrees exploit their environment to the point of degradation, overshoot, and collapse. This is the case time and again. That ours is global or dependent upon machines and technics makes it no less so; in fact, it makes us that much more damaging and vulnerable to collapse.

Despite my criticisms, the information outlined in this book is of great importance for anyone wanting to see the big picture. Environmentalists especially should read it.

[Loren · Rating 5 out of 5]

I used to think that people would never destroy their home (earth) intentionally knowing quite well their children and children's children would be faced with a bleak existence. We can all agree that if we love someone we want to guarantee food, water and shelter security if we can right? Why else do we tell them to eat their vegetables, fasten their seat belts and wash their hands. Sure certain patriarchs do not care about the rest of the world, but their own kids and their kids kids? Well that just had to be another story! I am sorry to report that I personally know people who have elders who would joyfully take a kidney shortening their child's young life an additional ten to twenty years if it meant they could live another day. Our situation with the planet is no different. When you look at the world and human history it is imperative that you keep these people in mind. A schizophrenic may of invented game theory (John Nash: "fuck your buddy" principle), but we are creatures of habit and persuasion right?
I had so many questions going into reading this book. Is history repeating itself? Can the collapses of previous societies provide clues to what is happening today? Are there prevailing issues that were faced by all the empires of old? What must we do in order to protect our planet and all the Earthlings that depend on it?
While on the topic of America's oil reserves, I once hypothesized (during a nightlong drunken round of chess & political banter, good times) that the fall of Rome, like so many other empires was greatly tied at the very core to its mismanagement of their finite resources. I postulated that it was in their successful exploitation of the land, people & resources of conquered territories that simultaneously made their empire possible and therefore eventually impossible. I explained that they eventually hit a tipping point where overpopulation & deforestation trumped diversification of public body & the powers of agriculture.
"The hand can only stretch so far when sitting down," I proclaimed as I captured white's knight. "And when people are wanting, corruption is inevitable and collapse is unavoidable."
My comrades disagreed wholeheartedly.
"Really?! Seriously?! Prove it! Check by the way."
At the time all I had to go on was a hunch and maybe a bit of outdated material in Robert Wright's "A Short History of Progress." Ponting's book The New Green History of the World is my checkmate kiss of death. Not only have I found evidence to support my theory on the rise & fall of Rome, but so much frighteningly more about man's relationship with this planet.
Fresh from reading E.O. Wilson's "The Social Conquest," remembering Eagleman's "Incognito" and mentally correlating Robert Wright's The Evolution of God, (evol bio, neuro, anthro) came to me a new & yet deeper understanding of the forced ideologies of our times. Ergo it is important to note that ideologies are stemmed & limited by our biology, our intelligence is a forced intelligence of cultural evolution and our cultural evolution is merely the product of trade of various resources; for example Mecca was a trading capital and had the greatest technological and civil advances before being compromised by a dominating religion. It just so happened to be Islam. We are experiencing the same here with Christianity. Our ideologies as Galbraith (Economist: The Affluent Society) so famously named conventional wisdoms are products of our physiological need to always place all nouns under "us versus them" inspection. It is a human trait we capitalize on at our very own demise. Our categorations allow our selfish trait to overcome our altrustic one therefore allowing the subjugations of many individuals for the profit of a few. And as Paul Hawken in Blessed Unrest explains, there is a deep tie between environmentalism and human rights for that reason. Ponting is smart to avoid the issue of Corpotacracy (David Mitchell "Cloud Atlas"). The nascent of the military industrial complex, the Green Revolution and the building of a flat world (Friedman "The World is Flat") of globalization go off without a hitch. It means there's notable intentional omissions that only people educated in the order of technological discoveries in the United States would even realize were censored. It forces the individual reader to take on this incessant guilt in their individual responsibility throughout history rather than the acceptance that really smart, greedy, powerful people knew certain things and made sure to manipulate the masses accordingly even to their own demise.
"So I can have more bananas now, but my great grandson may have poisoned ones? Hmm. How certain are you of this? Does he deserve a banana hand out anyway? I had to work for my bananas (not really), screw him!"
What makes us civilized, the cradle of civilization does not lie in our creation of agriculture, domestication of animals or even our written word. It is in our ability to fight the temptation of present reward for later greater progress. But our reptilian brains have only evolved so much. We are asking humans to think not just of today, tomorrow and a few years down the line, but in a timeline their little brains just can't conceptualize or frankly don't care to. In the U.S., its like the doctor who forgot the hippocratic oath & votes down universal healthcare because he thinks money only motivates a doctor, the first generation Mexican American who wants to close the borders or the guy with AIDS who votes republican. People often forget their own history, rarely look past themselves and so few are really in the position to do anything anyway so they shut down. This should be required reading as much as school world maps should be changed to the Peter's Map. Our perception of our world is beyond skewed and the sad part is most of us are not to blame. We've been bought and sold so long it's all we know how to be.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was already deeply familiar with many of the topics discussed. Despite this, Ponting provided fresh insight and perspectives in a highly accessible manner. I'm not certain how it has aged, but it is a good summary of how thoroughly we've fucked ourselves.
Though some of the worst graphs I have ever seen. Ponting, I'm sure your wife is a brilliant woman, but you should hire someone else to make your graphs.

If you're looking for a book to cry yourself to sleep at night - this is the one!

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting, concise, and (at times) sobering. This book does a great job of discussing human history through the lens of basic variables like food, energy, environment, and natural resources. High school history textbooks should focus on this information more than the characters involved in the growth of western civilization.

[Dervla · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is on such a jaw-dropping, breathtaking scale, providing such an in depth historical account of the environmental problems facing the world and attributable to human activity that it is difficult to take it all in. The author is to be commended for both how comprehensive and how easy to understand and interesting all the information is. Chilling.