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Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis by Michael Williams, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2003, 689 pp, cloth US$70.00 ISBN 0-226-89926-8
Let there be no doubt: Deforesting the Earth is a major achievement. In 500 pages of text supported by approximately 75 pages of notes and an 80-page bibliography, Michael Williams ranges across the globe and through the last 10,000 years of the past to detail the progress and patterns of human-induced deforestation. This is, in many ways, an audacious effort, especially when set against the widely-induced tendency, in many parts of academia, to disseminate knowledge in what one of my colleagues calls SPUs (smallest publishable units). Williams has devoted most of the last decade-and in some sense the better part of his scholarly life-to this project, which follows (and borrows from) his also-weighty Americans and Their Forests (1989). My copy of Deforesting, barely a month in my possession, is already well thumbed, and I am certain that it will see much more use in the future. This is one of those books to which scholars and students will long turn for information (and lecture material). In this sense it stands comparison with Clarence Glacken's Traces on the Rhodian Shore (1967), and like that volume it is likely to be one of the books by which the discipline of Geography is known.
Williams is loudly and proudly, an historical geographer, and an unreconstructed one at that. The clearing of the forest is 'an intensely geographical phenomenon' and a self-evidently historical process. Some might wish to see it as 'environmental history', but for Williams the combination of a focus on time and space, and his own interest in 'places, localities, regions and landscapes', make this book one that he 'would like to call historical geography' (preface). Moreover, this is historical geography of the old school. Although there is a fleeting engagement with 'discourses in a Foucaldian sense' in a discussion of the ways in which 'knowledge of biodiversity has been socially "produced"' (p. 437), Williams explicitly eschews 'marxists, postmodernist...[and] political...