Bookraft

A New Green History of The World by Clive Ponting - Penguin Books June 2007, $19USThe first edition of this book was published in 1991, and 16 years later the author returns to the theme of human occupation of the planet. with even greater scientific insights at his disposal. The reading is literally geographic - spanning the globe and look at major trends in population, land use, and mineral resource throughout the World and over the 50,000 years that has seen the rise of the human species.

I should amend my statement above and say that Clive Ponting, like many scholars before including Malthus, really devotes many charts and figures and a good deal of his analysis on the World' population and how it has been sustained at various levels for the past 50,000 years. Clive's first chart on page 37 tells the book's story. It is a chart of the World's population from 10,000BC to 1AD when agricultural was just beginning to emerge (and the World's population could be estimated with some degree of accuracy). For 6000 years the World's population hovers at about 5-7 million. Then as city states arise with the full emergence of agricultural societies around 4000BC, the World's population takes off . It rises to 100 million by 1AD. Rome itself the center of the Roman Empire reached its maximum population of just over 1 million around this time.

2000 years later and on page 412 in the book, Clive lists the following facts about the 20th century (1900 to 2000):
World population increases by a factor of 3.8 despite two World Wars
World urban population increases by a factor of 12.8
World industrial output increases by a factor of 35
World energy use increases by a factor of 12.5
World oil production increases by a factor of 300
World water use increase by a factor of 9
World irrigated areas increase by a factor of 6.8
World fertilizer use increases by a factor of 342
World fish catch increases by a factor of 65
World organic chemical production increases by a factor of 1000
World carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases by 32%
And with these two statistical bookends, Clive tells a very compelling story of how Earth and humanity have stayed static and grown by a factor 70 respectively in two thousand years - and that is the limits to growth conundrum. So we have the geographic and economic history of the world and its environment - like whiskey taken straight. This puts more hitory and flesh on the UN Report on Global Warming.

Having just completed a Dr.Arzt book on the Middle Ages in Europe, this book puts the historical events in population and geographic perspective. It is utterly fascinating. What is surprising is the semblance in many forms to Jared Diamonds books Collapse and Guns, Germs, Steel. Interestingly, Clive in his extensive bibliography does not make reference to either book. And he does not incorporate the Jared Diamond ideas on the role of disease and warfare in effecting world population and growth.

Likewise I was again surprised to not see any mention of the Meadows et alia book , Limits to Growth. And so the synthesis and conflict of ideas in History of the World is not quite as complete as I had hoped. Nonetheless, with this book be prepared to see World History in a way that the Durants and Gibbon could not imagine.