| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.1

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.	1
At the outset, Williams sets three important limits. First, he confines himself almost entirely to English language sources. Second, he focuses mostly on Europe and North America on the grounds that the core of the world system influenced the course of what happened elsewhere. It is hard to imagine that a single author could have done more in one volume, but the short sections on China, Japan, Africa, and other areas in the first two parts are treated only lightly at best. Third, he avoids an overt theoretical structure, although of course his own is implicit.	2
Within these limits, Williams marshals a huge amount of material from a wide range of disciplines and topics; some 1,600 items are listed in the bibliography. The great strength of this book is that Williams orders, evaluates, and interprets the material in a way that makes an intelligible story. Throughout, there are insights that grab and challenge the reader and stimulate thought about other times and places. One keeps on coming across references to look up and read further. Williams usually avoids simplistic generalizations and alerts us to what is not known. The last part of the book, dealing with "the great onslaught"—mainly on the tropical forests over the last half-century—is the most difficult because of the burgeoning literature and argument about the causes and extent of deforestation. Although Williams discusses the "cultural climate" of forest conservation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he gives scant attention to the rise of the environmental movement in the second half of the twentieth century. Yet its global linkages, its focus on tropical rainforests, and its campaigns put deforestation on the public agenda at the global scale as never before, and stimulated national and international policies and projects throughout the tropical world. Perhaps Williams sees all this more as verbiage than action, or perhaps it is too recent to be evaluated, but it hardly should be ignored. He seems to have little time for environmentalism. In several places he trashes the Edenic notions of indigenous societies living in ecological harmony with nature: "Precontact America, in particular, has been perceived [by Murdo Macleod] as 'a place as close to an ecological paradise as humans are likely to come.' ... Nor does such a view of an ecological paradise credit the capability and aspirations of the indigenous inhabitants to better themselves. Consequently, long before the supposed Eden was spoiled by grasping, exploitative European invaders, shifting cultivators and peasant cultivators were chopping, cropping, burning and grazing their forests, changing them to cropland and grassland" (p. 336).	3
All good fun for the reader. Williams is similarly dismissive of postmodernism, political ecology, and Marxism and, in my view, takes a more jaundiced view of deforestation in Soviet Russia than of similar deforestation by American lumber barons a century before. In a work of this size and scope, every reader will think of things that might have been emphasized differently or should have been included, but every reader will find far more to interest, appreciate, and stimulate.	4
Deforesting the Earth is, however, more than Williams's work. It encapsulates—and meticulously references—a huge amount of other people's work. We should read it as a celebration of effort and advance in environmental history. Two-thirds of the references in the bibliography are from the 1960s on. Although this reflects Williams's reading of the current literature, it also reflects the rise of the field. It is salutary to remember that much of our archaeology and palynology depends on carbon and other forms of radioactive dating of materials that only became possible from the mid-twentieth century. However, the great advance of environmental history contains a rather bitter paradox: As the forest has become scarcer, so have we learned more about it. Williams ends this magnum opus: "In a decade or so, perhaps another chapter will have to be written, outlining how humans grappled with the problems of the use and abuse of their incomparable heritage, a green global mantle of forest." When that chapter is written, let us hope that the knowledge so clearly paraded in Deforesting the Earth will lead to more hopeful outcomes.	5
Reviewed by John Dargavel,* Australian National University*.

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.