New Green History of the World
Clive Ponting
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.
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About Clive Ponting
Reviews for New Green History of the World
Observer
Ponting's re-evaluation of history is an important antidote to mental troglodytism. It also makes a welcome change from the scatter-gun apocalypse-mongering which has become standard fare in green literature. With luck and foresight, and more books like this, we may yet learn our lesson
Independent on Sunday
Pioneering...a book good enough to rival the best American products in the field... Clive Ponting has embraced a daunting task with commendable success
Times Literary Supplement
An ambitious and thought-provoking attempt to rewrite history from an ecological standpoint
Independent
Large, ambitious and often enthralling, it is a successful attempt to look at the unfolding of world history from an entirely new perspective
Literary Review