of the edition of A Green History of the World (then out of print) for the We owe Clive Ponting a debt of gratitude for his pioneering historical study. Like Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, Clive Ponting’s book studies the relationship between the environment and human history. A Green History of the World. The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations. by Clive Ponting. pages, paperback, Penguin, A Green History.
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This is an important, disturbing, and compelling book.
To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. Although I was basically born an environmentalist, worod books I read at this time in my life formed the foundation of my thinking. In the case of agriculture, the use of land for crops led to deforestation, the histlry of highly unusable land after too much irrigation led to massive salinization of the soil, and disease as people lived in close quarters with domesticated animals.
A New Green History Of The World : The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations
One pattern that emerges from the book is clkve capacity for sticking our heads in the sand as the world burns and continuing with business as usual well past the point where corrective action was urgently needed. I expect that I don’t, and won’t as I continue to read, agree with everything he says.
These items are shipped from and sold by different sellers. Really tough to read the whole thing straight through.
Amazon Second Chance Pass it on, trade it in, give it a second life. Want to Read saving…. Almost any place was a restroom. The ObserverLondon A welcome change from the scatter-gun apocalypse-mongering which has become standard fare in green literature. The Sunday IndependentLondon. The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations. I have not read the earlier version of this book, and so cannot make comparisons, but much of the book is so well written, and other parts so badly, that it feels hisfory if the earlier version was very well edited, and then the updates were inserted on a word processor.
Contents The Lessons of Easter Island. His statistics are bountiful and his reasoning is lucid. Ponting warns that we are approaching a major crossroads. They cannot shift to horse power when motor vehicle extinction approaches.
What Is Sustainable: A New Green History of the World
A Green History of the World: Reinventing the Economy to End Oppression. This is an immensely valuable analysis, but I think that it is a 5-star topic hiding within a 3-star book. Awarding this book five stars has come as somewhat cclive a surprise to me. Its dry academic tone and focus on facts rather than rhetoric are real assets here.
The first parts of the book discussing what we know of the oldest civilizations were fascinating, and the perspective it gave by covering human civilization worrld the hunter and gatherer period all the way through the early 21st century was just cool.
A Green History of the World: The Environment & the Collapse of Great Civilizations
Ponting provides numerous charts displaying the skyrocketing growth of many unsustainable trends. Ponting describes how exhaustion of the resources to which they had access doomed many human societies. What must we do in order to protect our planet and all the Earthlings that depend on it? Leprosy came from the water buffalo.
Quotes from A Green History of the World Edition “The Easter Islanders, aware that they were almost completely isolated from the rest of the world, must surely have realised that their very existence depended on the limited resources of a small island.
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. They cannot shift to horse power when motor vehicle extinction approaches. Aa begins the work with hishory page description covering roughly two-million years of human survival. There seemed little purpose to the history at that point except to continue the listing of our collective offenses.
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