A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations (Paperback)

He starts off by solving the mystery of Easter Island. Those enormous statues and their abandonment all over the landscape do not need to be explained by alien spaceships. It is instead a story which will become depressingly familiar in the course of the book; a society with a more-than-adequate diet goes in for conspicuous display, eventually consumes all the resources necessary for that display (in this case, the trees that were needed for rollers to pull the gigantic statues), and collapses.

The same story happens again and again: humans find a new resource, over-exploit it, then face disaster if, like the Easter Islanders, they can't move on; or, like the fur trappers of North America and Siberia in the 19th century, they move on and over-exploit the next resource.

From the ecological point of view, major changes in human history are not so much the result of innovating genius but of response to self-inflicted disaster. Thus, the development of agriculture is not, "Ah-ha! I've just invented the plough!" but, "Oh dear, we've killed off all the large game animals, so we've got to do all that boring stuff with seeds."

Human history is not entirely depressing. Ingenuity has frequently - but not always - rescued a society from its own mistakes. Cities crammed with thousands of people needing to drink and defecate ensured both quantity and quality of water by creating drains and aqueducts. Overpopulated England, its forests cut down, turned to coal and started the Industrial Revolution.

But the solutions have created their own problems: the drains just shoved the shit downstream, and burning coal produced the infamous London fog. Ponting discusses only one society that lasted in more-or-less stability for long: Egypt. From the time of the earliest pharaohs to the mid-nineteenth century, about 7000 years, a substantial population lived by the gifts of the Nile and had enough left over to create a complex culture.

The book has all the advantages and disadvantages of cross-disciplinary work; specialists in each discipline can always pick holes. But more important is the way that new questions are generated, especially the ones that Ponting himself doesn't answer.

For example, it is clear from the book that tropical savannas, far from being pristine, are the environments which have undergone human intervention the longest. However, Ponting does not look at how humans have maintained this stability. Perhaps they wiped out the megafauna when they first arrived (and if they followed the usual pattern of human history they certainly did), but the indigenous people of Northern Australia afterwards developed systems of managing the environment that made the people of the Nile look like fly-by-night fur trappers.

Warning: this book can seriously damage your prejudices.