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“It deals with a 300- to 350-year period. So again, part of my admiration for it is the size of the canvas on which he paints. Secondly, it provides both a kaleidoscopic and encyclopaedic sense of the scale of environmental change going on in the world in the pre-industrial period. It’s easy for us to imagine that strong and disruptive environmental changes are mainly a consequence of industrialisation, and there is some underlying truth to that. But Richards helps us understand that even before steam engines, humankind was capable of powerful and enduring alterations, species extinctions that will last for the eternity of time, and broad-scale deforestation.” Read more...
The best books on Environmental History
John R McNeill, Historian
