Agricultural History Review, Volume 55 Part 1 (2007), p. 143

Geographers and historians alike have become quite familiar with the distinctive contribution made by Michael Williams to the interpretation of landscape transformation. Its remarkable scope includes a range of local, regional, national and global studies variously characterized by closely textured analyses, sweeping panoramas, deft insertions of biographical, economic, environmental, historiographical, political and other gleanings, and an enviable confidence in straightforward summation and illustration. Notwithstanding these precedents, and especially the author’s anticipatory Americans and their forests (1989), Deforesting the Earth may have seemed stupendously ambitious in 2003, when it first appeared. In another sense, however, it encouraged the trend towards urgent scholarly engagement with rising anxieties about the environmental health of the planet and the maintenance of its resource endowment – pertinence disputing prematurity.

In the original version, the culpability issue was provocatively grounded in the story of human occupation following the widespread return of tree cover after the last Ice Age. Indeed, its overall commitment to a generous sweep through time and space served to rebut naïve characterizations of ‘pristine’ forests, and emphasized instead the pervasive effects on the world’s tree cover of rural settlement expansion, diffusions of commercial agriculture and industry, and their amplification and diversification under European imperialism. In the process it questioned casual denigrations of certain forest users, notably the most ‘traditional’, least commercial managers. It also located deeper historical background for today’s debates on the causes and significance of carbon emissions, though more evidence is now accumulating, and it brought the vexed story of denudation into the present era. The abridgment faithfully maintains these lines. Three years on, depth and complexity still seem quite persuasively sampled across the prodigious global canvas: the same argument emerges for balancing the current privileging of tropical depredations with a focus on earlier transformations in the temperate zones; all of this continues to permit some critical inspection of the countervailing moves towards more sophisticated ‘sustained yield’ forestry, temperate and tropical, including influential progress during (and not necessarily because of) Britain’s imperial aegis; and in the penultimate chapter there is effectively a repeat of a delayed allusion to the hazards posed for statistical inventory practice by disagreements on the very meaning of ‘forest’ cover, and by resort to widespread extrapolations from unsubtle aggregations.

So ‘Abridgment’ is appropriate; this is not presented as a comprehensive revision. The main difference appears to have involved a prudent tightening throughout, partly through a small condensation and refinement of the text, but more notably by sacrificing dozens of well-drafted figures and tabulations, and by replacing the lengthy bibliographical list with a small-print bibliographical essay. The latter section may provide the more convenient guide, not only for non-science readers; on the other hand, the apparent spate of productivity in this busy interdisciplinary area probably built expectations of an updating of the reference list as a separate task in itself. Yet importantly, Williams has seized the opportunity to modify the original discussion of the processes and patterns of early domestication in the light of new research findings, especially with a view to improvements in dating precision, and he appears to be more cautious about the spiraling effects of associations between forest disturbance and the spread of pathogens.

In its modest revisiting, Deforesting the Earth continues to offer an impressive and timely sieving of p ublished, overwhelmingly anglophone works. Regional and local studies from around the world – accommodating more primary evidence, recovering more detail – should now test-run its combination of monumental template and interim contextualization. Perhaps that also applies to elaborations of palynological and other scientific techniques, which allow significantly increased access to quite recent pasts. Teachers and supervisors who feel inclined to protest the loss of so many instructive maps, diagrams and tables may be consoled by the retention of nearly all of the original fine plates; in any event, the omissions are readily tracked down in the hardback edition. Judicial pruning has delivered a slightly more compact, paperback volume, at a relatively cheap price which should recommend it to the discerning educated public as well as to libraries and students.