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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33.2 (2002) 276



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Book Review

World Ecological Degradation:
Accumulation, Urbanization, and Deforestation, 300 B.C.-A.D. 2000


World Ecological Degradation: Accumulation, Urbanization, and Deforestation, 300 B.C.-A.D. 2000. By Sing C. Chew (Walnut Creek, Calif., Alta Mira Press, 2001) 216 pp. $62.00 cloth $24.95 paper

In recent years, scholars rooted in various social science and biological disciplines have written short histories of the human transformation of the biosphere. Chew, a sociologist, is the latest to attempt this daunting task, producing a bold overview of five millennia. He argues that the domestication of the earth has been a constant flow of environmental degradation, essentially similar from one civilization to another. His method of covering a vast subject briefly is to select several civilizations, beginning with ancient Mesopotamia and Harappa from 3000 to 1700 B.C., then moving to Crete and Mycenaean Greece from 1700 to 1200 B.C., and finally ending with classical Greece and Rome.

Recognizing that ecological change is a complex and variable phenomenon, Chew employs deforestation as his indicator for the broader processes. His use of that concept, however, is broad and imprecise. A major difficulty with it is that he does not consistently distinguish between ecological change and ecological degradation. For anyone who confronts this fundamental question, it is essential to articulate the criteria for considering change to be deleterious. This difficulty aside, Chew presents an excellent fusion of environmental concern and world systems theory in chapters 6 through 8. Chapter 6 surveys "Trade, Hegemony and Deforestation" from 500 to 1800 A.D., presenting an inte-grated view of Old World intercontinental trade and environmental change and demonstrating the existence of those links long before the conventional view of global integration as a largely modern phenomenon.

The final chapter, "Ecological Consciousness and Social Movements among les ancients [sic] et les modernes, 2700 B.C.-A.D. 2000," attempts to define the ways in which environmentally concerned voices have been raised in every civilization since ancient times. From the epic of Gilgamesh, the Rig Veda, and the earliest Chinese records, he moves rapidly through early modern Europe to the Sierra Club in the present. This is valuable discussion of the intellectual history of environmentalism, though Chew's choice of illustrations is not always convincing.

 



Richard P. Tucker
University of Michigan

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