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A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations
by Clive Ponting
Product Group: Book
Publisher: St Martins Pr (1992-04)
ISBN: 0312069871
EAN: 9780312069872
Dewy Decimal #: 304.28
Hardcover: 432 pages
SKU: A-10-0611
Condition: Like New Like New
Comments: 1st US Edition ISBN Misprinted behind cover page as 0312069891!!! Owner's name written in flyleaf, otherwise like new
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
Clive Pontings original and provocative history of human civilizationnow in a thoroughly revised, expanded, and updated edition
Years ahead of its time, Clive Ponting captivated readers with A Green History of the World, his study of great civilizations and the causes of their fall. Using the Roman empire as its central example, this classic work reveals how overexpansion and the exhaustion of available natural resources have played key roles in the collapse of all great cultures in human history. With an argument of urgent relevance to our modern society, A Green History of the World offers a provocative and illuminating view of human history and its relationship to the environment.
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Customer Reviews
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If you could only read one book
Rating  (5)
Date: 2008-02-15
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
Every conscious being on this planet should read this book because it is a history of how our species has radically changed the environment on this planet. If the accumulative facts on how humans have and continue to alter the environment we need to survive doesn't rise to the top of your priority list, then... what?
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What would a green Zinn do?
Rating (5)
Date: 2007-11-19
4 out of 4 customers found this reveiw helpful
At last! I have stumbled on an explanation of human history that makes sense of the rises and falls, the wars, the conquerors, the plagues and the shopping habits of our specie. This is a grand overview of our impact on the planetary environment since the rise of agricultural societies about 12,000 years ago. Seeing the past through a green lens fills in missing pieces in the picture painted by standard historical texts. Starting with the microcosm of Easter Island where Polynesian settlers created one of the most advanced cultures of its day, only to devolve to cannibalism and failure after deforestation destroyed their soil, Ponting step-by-steps through the collapse of one society after another. He has assembled the archaeological data amassed in the modern era to establish his case that agriculture has been a disaster for humans and the planet. Consider that a Bushman, forced to live on the African desert, works less than half the hours of his agricultural counterpart, and enjoys a higher nutritional level than half of the world today. Or the reality that every agricultural economy in the past has crashed, repeatedly, with food production devastated by depleted, eroded soil, or salinization and waterlogging after irrigation. The author clearly establishes that fertile soil is the most critical and least replaceable resource in our tool kit. When one lays Ponting's assessment beside a current picture of world agriculture, with topsoil disappearing at one hundred times the rate of recovery, our future looks iffy. After this reading I am left wondering how we can ever achieve a meaningful "balance" given our past record. The planet supported about 4 million humans when we were all gatherer/hunters. Note that this puts us almost 6 billion over the top today, supported on a raft of petrochemical soil amendments. Perhaps we should beat our plowshares into swords?
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Amazing
Rating (5)
Date: 2006-08-14
Haven't finished it yet. But I did stop in wonder for a good long while when I read that Plato (PLATO!) had given a good long description of the deforestation and erosion of Greece.
It covers more ground than the (similar point of view and many years later) Jared Diamond Collapse. For instance, in a later chapter that I skimmed early on, he talks about epidemics and sickness. Our best health care in the world, in Ponting's view, is mostly following, not altogether successfully, in the footsteps of basic sanitation--i.e., public health and nutrition trump treatment for disease.
I expect that I don't, and won't as I continue to read, agree with everything he says. But he does makes one think.
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incomplete facts, needs an editor, cant stay on subject
Rating  (1)
Date: 2004-11-30
10 out of 43 customers found this reveiw helpful
man abuses our environment
there, now you dont have to sit throug 400 pages of ranting about how statistics are proving we destroy our environment. If you need this book to realize we are a destructive race; well then maybe you should read it, its so repetative you are bound to get the idea.
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very good overview and introduction to the subject
Rating (5)
Date: 2004-02-04
7 out of 7 customers found this reveiw helpful
Clive Ponting's book provides a very good introduction to the subject. It is well written and serves as an excellent starting point, introducing the important questions and providing thought provoking conclusions.Comments that the book is inaccurate regarding Easter Island are illogical. As Ponting points out, the very first Europeans to arrive on the island found a society already devastated by the environmental degradation that it failed to prevent. The diseases inadvertantly spread to the Easter Islanders through this first European contact were not a primary cause of the downfall of the island civilization.
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