Sustainability or Collapse? An Integrated History and Future of People on Earth (review)

This broad and provocative collection of essays has an ambitious goal—to systematize the history of past human interactions with the environment, to understand our environmental future better. It is hard to imagine a larger task. The thirty-four contributors seek to craft a “fully integrated history of humans and the rest of nature” (4). These essays are the first steps of the larger project, called the Integrated History and Future of People on Earth (ihope).

Theirs is not a purely academic exercise. The contributors hope to produce a practical model (or a series of practical models). The data include knowledge of such events as the rise and fall of the Roman and Mayan Empires, the historical impacts of El Niño, twentieth-century geopolitics, and so on. The resulting models will enable predictions about such diverse phenomena as land-use patterns, ecosystem dynamics, and climate shifts. Should accurate predictions appear too tough a proposition, the volume editors are comfortable instead with the expectation that “IHOPE can use a deeper understanding of the past to help us create a better future, rather than to predict the future” (14).

The volume is divided into five parts. The first introduces the volume and discusses methodology. The following parts attempt to integrate history and nature within four time frames—the millennial (up to 10,000 years ago), the centennial (up to 1,000 years ago), the decadal (up to 100 years ago), and the future. Each of the last four parts contains three-to-five topically focused essays, as well as a longer “group report” that draws larger conclusions and relates the lessons of each time scale to the ihope project.

This project reveals interdisciplinarity at its best and worst. The authors come from a wide variety of fields—economics, anthropology, climatology, resource management, and a host of others. Almost all of the contributors take approaches derived from the social and natural sciences; only two or three humanistic perspectives are represented. One of the greatest challenges facing the ihope project is the difficulty of bridging disciplinary divides, especially in the assessment of data. How might someone assess—for modeling purposes—the information drawn from pollen sediments, archeological sites, and written documents? More generally, how can human social processes like land-use patterns or information flows be integrated with such quantifiable natural processes as soil erosion or greenhouse-gas concentration? Costanza suggests a system for “grading” data as a place to start. The volume makes its greatest contribution to interdisciplinary history in answering these types of questions.

Some of the essays are dense, jargon-laden, and hard to follow. But the authors are asking important, hard questions, and their answers to these questions are nearly always provocative. ihope is certainly a worthy, if tremendously ambitious, project. If the goal is to understand everything that has ever happened to guide future responses to environmental problems, asking eminent scholars from a variety of disciplines to tackle hard questions is the place to start.