Being green—or not
A NEW GREEN HISTORY OF THE WORLD:
The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations
By Clive Ponting
464 pp. Penguin Books (Revised paperback) $16
Reviewed by Marty Carlock
A reader who is paying attention can’t get very far into A New Green History of the World without asking:
How can one guy know all this stuff? And then: How
accurate is it?
The answer to question #1 is probably that undergraduate research assistants collect it for him—the author was until recently Reader in Politics and International Relations at the University of Wales, Swansea. Aside from the quibble that an expertise in politics and international relations seems only distantly related to the subject of this book, answer # 2 is more complicated.
“Green history” in Ponting’s definition has to do with how humankind alters its environment, and vice versa. The subtitle here is The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations. It’s hard to say question #2 has an answer, given that science—anthropology, archeology, and global systems sciences in this case—likes to think it is an exact and factual discipline and that history is often a compendium of many different versions of and opinions about events. Let us suspend judgment and go with the professor’s flow.
Ponting’s initial chapter lays out his thesis in a nutshell. At its height, circa 1550 CE, the population of Easter Island numbered about 7,000 people, highly organized and creating massive art of ritual significance. When the first Europeans arrived less than a century and a half later, some 3,000 desperate people were living in a primitive state, perpetually at war and cannibalizing one another.
What happened? The island had few resources to begin with—no permanent streams, very few species of plants and animals. The climate was such that most of the food resources the first settlers brought with them from their Polynesian home failed to thrive; on Easter Island they had to live on sweet potatoes and chickens. Unluckily for them, raising these two foodstuffs took very little time, leaving them leisure for other activities. In short order they created, Ponting says, “the most advanced of all Polynesian societies and one of the most complex in the world for its limited resource base.” The result of its ritual life, as we all know, was the creation and erection of hundreds of gigantic stone statues around the island.
Sooner or later the population would have denuded the island of its original forests anyway—for firewood, house construction, canoes, or simply to clear fields—but the process was accelerated by the need to move those stone monoliths from the quarries where they were carved to designated ritual ahus, or platforms. Having no draft animals, the people hauled the statues themselves and eased the way by cutting logs to use as rollers. As time went on and new houses were needed, the people had no wood and had to move into caves instead. It’s unclear what happened to the food supply, although climatologists now know that denuding an area of trees changes its climate drastically. What is known indicates that competing clans killed and ate each other at an increasing rate.
The author makes his way through such topics as “The First Great Transition” from hunting-gathering to agriculture; “The Long Struggle” to balance food production and population; “The Ways of Thought” that, dating from the earliest Western philosophers, have so many of us convinced we can take what we want from the Earth; the “Second Great Transition,” to the exploitation of fossil fuels for energy, the “Rise of the City,” “Polluting the World,” “The Threat to Global Systems,” and so forth.
A seasoned environmentalist is likely to ho-hum at these topics, but Ponting keeps us reading with little nuggets of insight. Here’s one: soil takes thousands of years to form, so on a human timescale it is a non-renewable resource. Another: Humans were hunter-gatherers for 99 percent of human history. One I like: Women, gathering for one to three hours a day, which was all they needed to do, brought in twice as much food as the men hunting. A downer: The “Green Revolution” of 50 years ago, with new varieties of high-yield grains, was a disaster for the peasant farmers of the world. A stunner: The invention of farming was a drawback, less efficient, less productive and more labor-consuming than nomadic foraging.
So why—and how—did agriculture develop? Ponting postulates that around 18,000 BCE the Kebaran culture of the Levant, a semi-sedentary people, gathered seeds of einkorn and emmer (primitive wheats), wild lentils, peas, broad beans and chickpeas. When the last ice age ended in roughly 10,000 BCE, the warming climate added new food sources such as oak, almond and pistachio trees. The Natufian culture emerged, developing bone sickles with flint blades, querns, grinding stones, mortars and pestles. Food was so abundant that villages could be maintained, the people gathering food without moving around. But in time more warming brought a drier climate. A subsistence crisis resulted as wild crops diminished. Accustomed after 2,000 years to a sedentary life, some villages began to plant grasses nearby.
What agriculture did was create artificial ecosystems, which in the long run were not, and never are, Ponting maintains, sustainable. We can merely nod knowingly when, later in the book, he notes that cities are the most artificial and unsustainable of environments.
Ponting’s outlook is gloomy. He theorizes that even if world politics began making green choices tomorrow, it would take generations, maybe centuries, before the world righted itself. Worse, it’s clear that our techno-industrial juggernaut isn’t going to stop now for trivial theories. This edition is a second, thoroughly revised version of the original 1991 book. Ponting laments that at the end of the first edition he tried to strike a balance between optimism and pessimism, but the intervening sixteen years “has been a period of wasted opportunities.”
The green community is prey to a bad habit, that of pointing fingers at all that is wrong without offering alternatives. This author apologizes that he no longer can offer optimism. He lays out his “green history” with clarity and great erudition, until we are saying, Yes, yes, let’s reform. Yes, we know better, we’re too smart to repeat Easter Island, Assyria, Palenque, and an infinitude of others. We wait expectantly, but Ponting shrugs and signs off, leaving us empty-handed.
Free-lance writer Marty Carlock has published more than 1,500 articles in thirty-plus publications on subjects ranging from art to the environment to food to sports. For eighteen years she was a regular contributor to The Boston Globe. Holder of a master’s degree in art, art history and art criticism from Mount Holyoke College, she is the author of A Guide to Public Art in Greater Boston. At present she writes for Sculpture and Landscape Architecture magazines.
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