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Book Review
| The Recurring Dark Ages: Ecological Stress, Climate Changes, and System Transformation. By SING C. CHEW. Lanham, Md.: AltaMira Press: 2006. 314 pp. $80.00 (cloth); $34.95 (paper).
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The Recurring Dark Ages emerges squarely from the world-systems discourse of sociology, and in these origins lie many of its flaws as well as its strengths. |
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The thesis of this social scientist's book is admirably clear, concisely stated, and reiterated at relevant points in the text; no reading between the lines or coppering of bets here, as in so many writings from the humanities. First, Chew proposes that rather than the explanatory model of society which he calls "economy-in-command," readers should instead consider a model of "ecology-in-command." He is quite frank in his conviction that environmental determinism explains the course of the world, and in particular in his conviction that climate changes are the driver of the meta-trends of history. (No option other than these two explanatory paradigms is given press by him here; the text as well as the footnotes indicate that he assumes that his audience is pretty well limited to world-systems sociologists and Annales-style historians who are presumably weighing these as their only two theoretical options.) |
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According to Chew, world history is characterized by periods of expansion and progress, each of which has been followed by a crisis and a "Dark Age." There have been three of these Dark Ages so far, each one fundamentally precipitated by climatic shifts that caused drought, famine, disease, population collapse, environmentally instigated migrations and invasions, and then finally a resulting political and economic collapse. The human contribution to historical crises lies mostly in intensifying and straining a straightforward exploitative relationship between society and nature sufficiently that a vulnerability to natural events is created. During the Dark Ages that always ensue after these crises, and which are taken to be in fact quite dark times for humans, nature is finally relieved of the unrelenting exploitation of humans and is able to heal. |
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