The Human Footprint: A Global Environmental History (review)

The Human Footprint adds to the growing literature combining environmental with world history, both of which are relatively recent and vibrant subfields of history. The book differs from other similar attempts in several ways, most notably by starting with Earth history (chapter 1) and human evolution (chapter 2), both of which are creditable syntheses of up-to-date scientific scholarship. In brief, Anthony Penna argues that a global environmental history, a story that he takes up to the present, cannot be fully understood without a billion-year perspective.

The remaining eight chapters take a topical approach, addressing world and environmental history issues in more-or-less chronological order, completing an entire arc from prehistorical times to the present in each chapter. Chapter 3, for example, addresses humans' need for food. It covers topics ranging from what can be known about prehistoric foraging societies, to the agricultural revolution, to the industrialization of food production in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, concluding with a consideration of the green revolution.

The other topical chapters explore human population growth, cities and urbanization, mining and manufacturing, industry and industrialization, trade and consumption, modes of energy use, and climate change. The more interesting discussions in the book (at least to this reviewer) include the dynamic story of Earth's history, including the roles that the Himalayan uplift and the Mediterranean Sea have had on global climate (chapter 1); nutrition and population growth (chapter 3); ancient mining and its environmental impact (chapter 5); the technological reasons iron making in China and India was so much more advanced than in Southwest Asia and Europe (chapter 5); the distancing of consumption from production, the environmental impacts of that separation, and the role of increasing mass consumption in spreading global trading networks (chapter 8); the consumption of oil in the United States (chapters 9 and 10); and the history of climate change and the dangers posed by global warming (chapter 10).

No book is perfect, especially one that attempts to synthesize the work of other historians as well as his own into a global narrative. Such an intellectual task is daunting, and Penna is to be congratulated for what he has accomplished in about 300 pages. Nonetheless, I do want to highlight three issues.

First, Penna rightfully locates the story of the emergence of settled agriculture around 10-12,000 years ago in the context of climate change, and points to some plants' development of annuality as a crucial development that makes farming (i.e., annual planting and harvesting) possible. Without discussing the debate over how that annuality developed, Penna simply says that that genetic mutation arose because humans selected some wild-food sources for planting; other scholars have argued that after the last Ice Age, a number of wild plants underwent a burst of solar radiation-induced genetic mutation that led to annuality, and that is what allowed humans to select them for planting.

Second, in chapter 9, Penna helpfully introduces Lewis Mumford's periodization of humanity's use of energy, identifying three distinct (but overlapping) historical periods: "the eotechnic (the prefix meaning 'dawn'), the paleotechnic (the prefix meaning 'old'), and the neotechnic (the prefix meaning 'new')" (p. 241). The idea that modes of energy use is a more useful way of periodizing human history than, say, modes of production or stages of modernity, has been proposed more recently by other scholars, albeit using different terms (e.g., E. A. Wrigley's concept of organic and inorganic economies, or Edmund Burke's use of the term "Age of Solar Power," or J. R. McNeill's specification of a "somatic energy regime"). But where those historians (including Mumford) are suggesting new ways of periodizing human history and organizing narratives around those concepts, Penna quarantines the idea in the penultimate chapter.

That leads to my third point. The Human Footprint lacks a narrative structure. Penna's topical approach may well preclude him providing an overarching narrative, but an idea for how he might have done...