Desert Hawk Books

 

Important environmental lessons from the past

Human Impact on Ancient Environments

Charles L. Redman

 

 

288 pages
9 photos
46 line illustrations
6" x 9"

Paperback
Quantity: $22.95 & S/H

Cloth
Quantity: $45.00 & S/H

 

"This is a book that had to be written, and that must be read. There is a widespread myth that ancient peoples lived in a virtuous Golden Age of environmental wisdom, and that only we evil moderns damage our environments. As long as we continue to believe that myth, history can have nothing to teach us about the environmental crises facing us today. Redman shows us, instead, how people have been heavily impacting their surroundings for thousands of years—and what we need to learn from history, before it becomes too late."
-  Jared M. Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction

Threats to biodiversity, food shortages, urban sprawl . . . lessons for environmental problems that confront us today may well be found in the past. The archaeological record contains hundreds of situations in which societies developed long-term sustainable relationships with their environments—and thousands in which the relationships were destructive.

Charles Redman demonstrates that much can be learned from an improved understanding of peoples who, through seemingly rational decisions, degraded their environments and threatened their own survival. By discussing archaeological case studies from around the world—from the deforestation of the Mayan lowlands to soil erosion in ancient Greece to the almost total depletion of resources on Easter Island—Redman reveals the long-range coevolution of culture and environment and clearly shows the impact that ancient peoples had on their world.

These case studies focus on four themes: habitat transformation and animal extinctions, agricultural practices, urban growth, and the forces that accompany complex society. They show that humankind's commitment to agriculture has had cultural consequences that have conditioned our perception of the environment and reveal that societies before European contact did not necessarily live the utopian existences that have been popularly supposed.

Whereas most books on this topic tend to treat human societies as mere reactors to environmental stimuli, Redman's volume shows them to be active participants in complex and evolving ecological relationships. Human Impact on Ancient Environments demonstrates how archaeological research can provide unique insights into the nature of human stewardship of the Earth and can permanently alter the way we think about humans and the environment.

Charles L. Redman is Professor and Director of the Center for Environmental Studies, Arizona State University.