| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.1

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis. By Michael Williams. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. xxxvi + 689 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $70.

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. Williams has been working on this book since 1994, but it is the culmination of a much longer endeavor in historical geography, marked by his Making of the South Australian Landscape (Academic Press, 1974) and his Americans and Their Forests (Cambridge, 1989) among many other writings. Notably, it is the work of an individual scholar rather than a compendium or the product of a research team with which such large projects usually now are addressed. However, it also should be read as a great celebration of the work of hundreds of other scholars who have written on the issues raised in this book over the last forty years or so. Deforesting the Earth tells the story of deforestation from the Ice Ages to the present. It is divided into three parts of roughly equal length. "Clearing in the Deep Past," covers the earliest hunter-gatherer societies, the first farmers, the classical world and the medieval world. "Reaching Out: Europe and the Wider World" covers two periods, 1500-1750 and 1750-1920. Each period has chapters dealing with the "driving forces and cultural climates" of change, followed by chapters on Europe or the temperate world, and the wider or tropical world. The third part, "The Global Forest," deals with what Williams calls "the great onslaught" on the world's forests, mostly in the second half of the twentieth century. It is similarly divided clearly into chapters covering "scares and solutions," "dimensions of change," and "patterns of change." Williams carries this clear structural approach throughout the chapters, which are aided by maps, diagrams, and tables.

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