Book description
Like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, Clive Ponting's
book studies the relationship between the environment and human
history. It examines world civilisations from Sumeria to ancient
Egypt, from Easter Island to the Roman Empire and it argues that human
beings have repeatedly built societies that have grown and prospered
by exploiting the Earth's resources, only to expand to the point where
those resources could no longer sustain the societies' populations and
cause subsequent collapse.
This new edition of Clive Ponting's international bestseller has
been revised, expanded and updated. It provides not only a compelling
story of how we have damaged the environment for thousands of years
but also an up-to-the-minute assessment of the crisis facing the world
today - and the problems that have to be addressed in the search for solutions.
Clive Ponting was until recently Reader in Politics and International
Relations at the University of Wales, Swansea. Available in Pimlico are
his most recent books:
A New Green History Of The World: The
Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations;
Gunpowder: From the Alchemists of China to the Battlefields of
Europe;
The Pimlico History of the Twentieth Century
;
World History: A New Perspective
;
Thirteen Days: The Road to the First World War
; and
The Crimean War
. He recently took early retirement and now lives on a small Greek
island where he is creating a Mediterranean garden and cultivating
olives.
