Neil Roberts (1)

I tend to think of the Holocene as “now”, and that it’s always been “now”; Kansas has always been part of the Great Plains; Ireland has always been boggy. As Neil Roberts points out in The Holocene: an Environmental History, there have been some pretty dramatic changes in the Holocene; as the ice melted back Kansas was boreal forest for a while and the bogs of Ireland are the result of Neolithic agriculturalists felling the forests.

Roberts begins with chapters on how we know what we know; how past environments are identified (pollen analysis, for example) and how they are dated (radiometric methods and dendrochronology, for example; for more on this see Quaternary Dating Methods). Then follows a discussion of the Pleistocene, so the scene can be set, and finally a chronological sequence of environmental changes in the early Holocene, the introduction of agriculture, the “taming” of nature, and “modern” (post 1500) times. These are interesting reading, with case studies from around the world, including the Far East and the tropics. Roberts often buys into “only man is vile” scenarios, such as the Jared Diamond “Collapse” argument that the Easter Island population deforested itself into near extinction and human-caused extinction of the North American large mammal fauna – without noting that these are controversial (I think he’s probably right, but the other side has some cogent arguments that should have been presented). To be fair, Roberts does present alternative , non-anthropogenic arguments for some supposed human effects, noting (for example) that lake acidification can sometimes result from natural processes rather than acid rain. And in his final chapter he offers gentle criticism of one of the central environmental activist myths – that there are “natural” landscapes unaffected by humans – noting that humans have been part of ecosystems since the early Holocene and that many “natural” landscapes – he cites the New England pine barrens and the Dartmoor wilderness – are products of heavy human modification.

Well presented, well referenced, with clear explanations of the various techniques used to build up data. For other books on similar topics, see After the Ice, The Archaeology of Environmental Change, and Human Impact on Ancient Environments.… (mer)