Deforesting the Earth by Michael Williams, University of Chicago Press, $70, ISBN 0226899268
The Earth Remains Forever: Generations at the crossroads Rob Jackson, University of Texas Press, $45, ISBN 0292740557 Reviewed by Adrian Barnett
ON 8 MARCH 1862, a Confederate ironclad single-handedly attacked a blockading Union fleet of wooden ships, and won. It marked a turning point, says Michael Williams. 鈥淔rom that moment a drain of the world鈥檚 forests that had gone on for thousands of years stopped suddenly and dramatically.鈥�
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Deforesting the Earth is human history seen through a wooden lens: a documentation of the rise of humans and the concomitant fall of the forest. There are faults. Williams dismisses the well-respected disease theory of Pleistocene megamammal loss in a line, and he includes little of African or South American pre-colonial history, nothing of Polynesia or Australia and next-to-nothing on non-Chinese Asia, Egypt or Mesopotamia. In a treatment of such scope, I suppose something has to give.
His areas of focus 鈥� Europe, North and Central America 鈥� receive broad, deep treatments. Beginning with the Neolithic, then moving through Europe鈥檚 medieval and North America鈥檚 colonial forest practices, Deforesting the Earth traces the central role of wood in human society. A great deal of our past has been intertwined either with the getting of wood or with getting it out of the way. Not content with historical analysis, Deforesting the Earth follows the trail to the present day. It describes the impacts of the caterpillar track, the chainsaw and the skewed economies of former colonies forced to trade in a world where the imperatives of the colonial Triangle Trade have been replaced by the World Trade Organization鈥檚 edicts.
It is a remarkable, scholastic tour de force that provides an annotated guide to the social processes driving deforestation. It leaves an image of a locust-like humanity that gives little hope for the future.
Rob Jackson鈥檚 The Earth Remains Forever has an even broader range, focuses on the recent past and delivers a much more upbeat message. Relying more on polemic than Williams, Jackson鈥檚 brasher style of palliative Panglossism fails to convince me. Still, on the off chance that he is right, it鈥檚 probably best to adopt his take-home message that conservation-consciousness is a good and timely idea.