Book Review

Environmental history is no longer a new field, so when one of its tribal elders speaks on a grand subject of his choosing, the occasion merits careful attention. When the elder is J. Donald Hughes aspiring to summarize a lifetime of scholarship, and he takes the whole Earth for his abode, the book merits a close reading.	1
An Environmental History of the World proposes a comprehensive survey from basic principles to the "primal harmonies" of prehistoric times to the crazed confusion of "present and future." Each chapter follows an identical formula: Each begins with a statement of general purpose and setting, then illustrates that era and its developments with three examples, and finishes with a conclusion. Almost all of the sites will be familiar to environmental historians. Only four of them are in the United States—the book is truly global in scope. No single place or event is allowed to dominate. Essays on eighteen sites have been published previously by the author between 1996 and 2000 in the journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism.	2
What Donald Hughes brings to this generically familiar terrain is a personal vision and a thesis that "historical explanations must take account of the fact that the human species is part of ecological systems" (p. 5). Quoting Aldo Leopold, he argues that environmental history should examine the "fusion" of people and nature in a common "community of life." Scholarship should be multicultural and multicausal and should incorporate the sacred and indigenous as well as the scientific and humanistic. Scholars should emulate Socrates and be citizens of the world.	3
Style matters. Hughes writes with simple declarative sentences; they cover the topic as falling leaves cover the ground. But they don't build into a thesis-driven narrative. His refusal to put nature and culture into formal opposition deprives him of one of the basic conceits used to animate and sculpt environmental stories. That is his deliberate choice, and he makes it with cause; but without a surrogate, there is little dramatic tension, which is to say, that the art of historical literature, which depends on conflict and closure, consists of little more than breezes that stir those leaves. The many examples sit in the text like the sacred groves he lovingly describes around the world. Environmental ills result from the recycling of common errors and moral failings that transcend particular creeds, philosophies, and eras. Arrogance, greed, a lust for power, a refusal to accept the communal context of one's actions, a willful ignorance of history with its lessons and examples—these cause societies to rupture the bond they share with the community of life, and thus repeat the same core causes.	4
This is a book of good sense, humility, care, earnestness. Its bland style thus reflects in written prescription the prescriptions for practice toward the "sustainability" that Hughes urges.	5
The human species is part of nature, and nature consists of systems with many parts and functions. Among these are ecosystems, which also include the elements of the environment with which life interacts. These systems undergo changes through time. Human actions produce many of these changes. Changes are always complex, so that different changes are results of the same actions. Some changes are within the capacity of an ecosystem to absorb and compensate for, and remain healthy. Others may go beyond that capacity, and erode or transform the ecosystem, even so completely as to destroy it (p. 8).	6
This is, in brief, not an inspirational text. It is a compilation of practical advice and collective sense, full of historical parables, the sort of wisdom literature common to the philosophers and prophets Hughes knows so well from ancient times. There is more of Seneca and Cicero than of Donald Worster and Barry Commoner. Whether this particular Polonius can inflame the young Hamlets of environmental history is unclear. But the book is an honorable coda to an honorable career within another community that Donald Hughes values, the community of scholars.	7
Reviewed by Stephen J. Pyne, a professor in the School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University and the author, most recently, of Fire: A Brief History.

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