"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
Published in 2002, Deforesting the Earth was a landmark study of the
history and geography of deforestation. Now available as an abridgment,
this edition retains the breadth of the original while rendering its
arguments accessible to a general readership.
Deforestation--the thinning, changing, and wholesale clearing of forests
for fuel, shelter, and agriculture--is among the most important ways
humans have transformed the environment. Surveying ten thousand years to
trace human-induced deforestation's effect on economies, societies, and
landscapes around the world, Deforesting the Earth is the preeminent
history of this process and its consequences.
Beginning with the return of the forests after the ice age to Europe,
North America, and the tropics, Michael Williams traces the impact of
human-set fires for gathering and hunting, land clearing for
agriculture, and other activities from the Paleolithic age through the
classical world and the medieval period. He then focuses on forest
clearing both within Europe and by European imperialists and
industrialists abroad, from the 1500s to the early 1900s, in such places
as the New World, India, and Latin America, and considers indigenous
clearing in India, China, and Japan. Finally, he covers the current
alarming escalation of deforestation, with our ever-increasing human
population placing a potentially unsupportable burden on the world's
forests.
