World Ecological Degradation: Accumulation, Urbanization and Deforestation 3000 B.C.-A.D. 2000

Rating:
Summary: Underresearched and overreaching.
Review: One does not need to write a book about the weather when he can simply stick his head out the window.

Although this work compiles some useful data and facts, it does little to answer the most important questions concerning societal collapse. It is not enough to say that rising populations and urban settlements tax the environment, this is obvious; the question is why do populations rise in the first place and why do these populations organize themselves in highly stratified systems with specialized economies necessitating great amounts of food surpluses and specialist produced craft goods?

Moreover, this work attempts to tackle a subject that anthropological archaeologists have been working on diligently for decades without referring to much of their work. For instance Flannery, 1972 isn't even in the bibliography and Culbert's synthesis of the vast amount of Mayan archaeology completed in the 1970's to get at these very ecological questions isn't either.