by By Michael Williams
University of Chicago Press, 2003
Reports are increasing about the impact of world-wide deforestation on global warming. A correspondent for the U.K. news magazine, The Economist, for example, wrote in a special edition titled “The World in 2008” that: “The relentless felling of the world’s tropical forests may be causing one-quarter of all carbon-dioxide emissions,” much of which is the result of huge, post-harvest fires. Similar concern was expressed by scientists and delegates at the recent international conference in Bali on global warming.
With this in mind, I recently re-read a remarkable book that was published five years ago, Deforesting the Earth, by Michael Williams. The book is unquestionably a monumental achievement, a comprehensive history of how episodes of deforestation over 10,000 years have transformed societies and landscapes everywhere. The author, a professor at the University of Oxford, nevertheless notes that it “was written in the old-fashioned way…by a lone scholar trying to make sense of an enormous literature.”
Williams rightly claims that his book is not just “a history of forests and forestry.” It is much more. In his words, the book provides the “social, economic, and intellectual context” essential to understanding how the clearing of the world’s forests was inextricably linked to the society of the age in which it occurred. The book is divided into three parts, which together trace the human impact on the world’s forests from the end of the Ice Age to modern times.
Part 1, called “Clearing in the Deep Pas,”, sets the stage for his central thesis that humans have been dramatically altering forests since the dawn of history. Tracing ancient forest change worldwide, Williams presents convincing evidence that “human impact was early, widespread, and significant, and the forests of the world changed accordingly.”
The next part, “Reaching Out: Europe and the Wider World,” is a fascinating tour of the world’s use and destruction of forests from medieval times to the early twentieth century. Here he explores the many myths that portrayed forests as places of “evil and wild animals…the abode of savagery” – notions especially shaping early attitudes toward forests in North America. Detailed maps trace forest clearing throughout the world, including state-by-state statistics in the U.S.
“Scares and Solutions, 1900-1944,” is, in fact, a “scary” description of the present state of information about the rate of deforestation worldwide. According to Williams, “we are left with the knowledge that the exact magnitude, pace, and nature of one of the most important processes in the changing environment of large portions of the earth is largely unknown.”
This book is superbly crafted, well organized, and beautifully written. The text is supported with 200 illustrations, tables and maps, and upwards of 2,000 scholarly notes and references. The bibliography alone is 80 pages long. While the book is packed with quantitative and historical data, it is not overpowered by purely objective information. By skillfully weaving examples of the influence of folklore, tradition, and religion with the hard facts detailing deforestation in each historical period he examines, Williams effectively defends his thesis that we can only understand the causes and meaning of deforestation from within their social context.
In his brief “Epilogue,” Williams makes it clear that he has not attempted to propose “solutions for environmental degradation” but rather to help the reader make sense of the momentous change that has taken place in the world’s forests. The book, he states, “is an invitation for reflection, not a prescription for action. That I leave to others.” He warns, however, that “deforestation is no longer just an economic issue…it is also fast becoming a matter of humanitarian concerns mixed with long-term environmental ethics.”
For this reader, an aging professional forester, this book is more than an exhaustive study of forest history. It is a wake-up call for our profession. We are increasingly ineffective in the struggle to protect and manage the forests of the world because we have narrowly defined forestry as applied science and economics. Williams’s book is a warning that forest policy must be enlarged to encompass broader social concerns and environmental ethics if our profession is to remain relevant in a rapidly changing world.