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Book Review
| Rethinking Environmental History: World-System History and Global Environmental Change. Edited by Alf Hornborg, J. R. McNeill, and Joan Martinez-Alier. Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2007. xvi + 406 pp. Maps, figures, tables, index. Paper $39.95.
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| This hefty anthology brings together twenty-two scholars devoted to developing new global approaches to environmental history. The authors—anthropologists, economists, geographers, historians, and sociologists—display a wide variety of questions, methodologies, and analytical frameworks, and yet their contributions form a coherent whole that is theoretically sophisticated, geographically far-reaching, and historically specific all at once. This stems from the authors' willingness to engage the biggest of problems from the unequal global distribution of environmental burdens to the prospects of long-term sustainability of human-environmental relations. |
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After an illuminating introduction by Alf Hornborg, the essays are grouped into two parts. Part 1 offers empirical case studies of socioenvironmental changes over the past two millennia. Three essays address commodity frontiers and deforestation—Robert B. Marks' longue durée overview of South China's changing environment; Michael Williams' analysis of timber trade, regional deforestation, and global displacement of environmental costs; and Jason W. Moore's piece on the relocation of silver mining (and the accompanying deforestation) from Europe to Potosí in the sixteenth century. Three essays focus on the linkages between markets and land use patterns. Mats Widgren reviews the various ways—and the reasons why—human societies have invested in land both to exploit and preserve it. N. Thomas Håkansson shows how "unincorporated" ivory trade reduced biodiversity in the East African savannas, and Rafael A. Gassón explains how shifts in global markets have repeatedly reconfigured the Venezuelan llanos. Four essays combine environmental analysis with geopolitics, providing fascinating insights into how ecological realities have shaped imperial systems. J. Donald Hughes shows how depletion of natural resources crippled the Roman Empire by the mid-third century; Janken Myrdal argues that Sweden's seventeenth-century imperial project was fueled by an impeding food crisis; Richard Wilk traces the origins of the nineteenth-century global food system that emerged to provide rations and luxuries for extractive workers; and J. R. McNeill reveals how sugar, slave trade, and yellow fever intertwined to condition geopolitics in the colonial Caribbean. |
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Part 2 introduces more theoretical ways of understanding global distribution of ecological degradation. Joan Martinez-Alier discusses the changes that the nineteenth-century shift in global social metabolism triggered in core-periphery dynamics; Stephen G. Bunker elucidates structural asymmetries in the costs of commodity production between cores and peripheries; and Hornborg focuses on the British cotton industry to argue that the time-space savings in some areas are bound to cause corresponding losses elsewhere in the world-system. Another cluster of essays examines how richer countries maintain high consumption levels by moving their environmental burdens to less affluent nations. Roldan Muradian and Stefan Giljum provide a late twentieth-century global overview of this process, and Andrew K. Jorgenson, James Rice, and Helga Weisz propose alternative methodologies (such as using weighed export flows) to gauge it. Josiah Heyman and William H. Fisher offer case studies of the externalization of ecological loads by focusing on polluting industries on the U.S.-Mexico border and monoculture-inducing soybean production in Mato Grosso, Brazil, respectively. Joseph A. Tainter's comparison of Epirus (Greece) and New Mexico (U.S.) reminds us that marginalization in the world-system takes many forms, including unawareness of the global forces that condition regional destinies. The last essay comes from Immanuel Wallerstein, who addresses head-on the key question of capitalism's future (it will be dead by 2050, he says) and then asks what choices are available in the future. His prognosis is hardly reassuring. |
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Pekka Hämäläinen is assistant professor of U.S. borderlands and Native American history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. |
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