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Book Review
| Mappae Mundi: Humans and their Habitats in a Long-Term Socio-Ecological Perspective: Myths, Maps, and Models. Edited by Bert de Vries and Johan Goudsblom. Amsterdam [Netherlands]: Amsterdam University Press; distributed in the United States by the University of Chicago Press, 2003. 470 pp. Figures, tables, maps, notes, bibliography, index.
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| In the past decade a number of studies have developed a long-term perspective on the relationship between humans and the environment. Johan Goudsblom, Fire and Civilization (Viking Adult, 1992), Fred Spier, The Structure of Big History (Amsterdam, 1996), Steven Pyne's series of volumes on world fire, and David Christian's prize-winning Maps of Time (California, 2004) are among the more important works. |
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Mappae Mundi: Humans and their Habitats in a Long-Term Socio-Ecological Perspective: Myths, Maps, and Models is an important addition to this emerging literature. The fruit of a collaboration between leading members of what might be called "the Dutch school" of ecohistorical study, Mappae Mundi consists of a series of interrelated chapters that place the changing relations of humans and their habitats in the perspective of the very long term. |
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The introduction enunciates a socio-ecological perspective on the expansion of the anthroposphere. The authors distinguish three social regimes that have transformed human relations to the biosphere: the domestication of fire, the agricultural revolution, and industrialization. Each regime has been characterized by what the authors call "hypertrophy" and "atrophy" in the pattern of distribution of its social benefits. |
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Successive chapters examine the longterm history of climate change and ecological transformation in the Holocene (12,000 B.P. to present) and the transformation of the environment during the agrarian age (3000 B.C.E. to 1750 B.C.E). Readers will be particular interested in the methodological approaches discussed in Chapters 5 and 8. Chapter 5 proposes a series of models of population/environment interactions in an effort to develop a science of complex human systems, while Chapter 8 presents some thoughts on the obstacles to a unifying perspective and provides cases studies that link mathematical modeling and socio-temporal perspectives. |
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In Chapter 6, Bert de Vries directly addresses the question of human complexity and its environmental outcomes. Ever-wary of environmental determinism, he concludes that "social complexity has evolved in more directions that just state and trade regimes"(p. 201) in which unintended social and environmental consequences played crucial roles. The chapter includes a remarkable sequence of color maps that illustrate the main points. Chapter 7 explores the ecological footprint of the Roman empire on the Mediterranean region. |
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Chapter 9, "Population and Environment in Asia Since 1600" is a partic-ularly important region-by-region survey of population-environment dynamics over the last millennium. While the data on which it is based are variable, the attempt is laudable and helps generate some important questions relevant to the present. A series of full color maps incorporating the available (admittedly patchy) quantitative data demonstrates the main points. (John F. Richards' The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (California, 2003) covers some of the same material). |
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A characteristic of our current era is accelerating expansion of the anthroposphere, according to Goudsbloum. His study of the past 250 years (Chapter 10) seeks to bring to bear the longterm perspective on the phase of industrialization. Goudsblom's main point on the intensification and complexification of industrial regimes parallels that of Christian. |
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Edmund Burke, III is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he is director of the Center for World History. He is the co-editor (with Kenneth Pomeranz) of The Environment and World History (under submission). |
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