A Green History of the World

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.