I. G. Simmons: Global Environmental History

Abstract

Both human ecology and environmental history excel at monographic treatments of limited time and place—an artifact, perhaps, of academia. So it remains to the senior scholars of broad reading and experience to take on the task of synthesizing the work of many. I. G. Simmons’ latest work, Global Environmental History, is the first singleauthored volume on a subject that has enjoyed considerable growth over the last 10 years. Writing synthetic histories of global scope across recent geological time must be as fulfilling as it is daunting. Much depends on the organizational schema of the historian. Simmons has chosen, appropriately enough, to use the agricultural and industrial revolutions as pivots, giving us chapters on gatherer-hunters, pre-industrial agriculture, the industrial world, and the post-industrial age. The structure seems to loosely follow Donald Worster’s now classic call for environmental historians to pursue an agro-ecological approach, but Simmons adds a nice touch by favoring a periodization determined by the means by which humans drew energy from the environment. The focus on energy and history dovetails with the recent explosion of histories of energy, and Simmons goes to great pains to merge this literature with older—but still valuable—ecological histories. Each chapter includes discussions of basic environmental relationships, demographics, the impact of humans on the natural environment (and vice versa), but Simmons also gives us a great deal of social history and cultural ecology. For example, he wonders how hunters and gatherers thought about nature and how their cosmogonies worked in and alongside the natural landscape. The culture/ nature debate, which has often preoccupied the work of environmental historians, comes to an easy reconciliation with Simmons. To be sure, he does not ignore the divide; instead, he uses it to structure his histories—always trying to join the mind with the body. If energy provides the chronology of the chapters, and the culture/nature dialectic structures his material, then it is the dramatic tension between fragmentation and coalescence that provides Simmons with his thesis. It is the same theme that is captured in Norton’s global history textbook, Worlds Together, Worlds Apart. As far as cross-cutting themes are concerned—and historians disagree about how valuable they are as analytic categories—fragmentation and coalescence works well enough. But Simmons’ contribution is to add the natural environment to this story. There are two socio-natural trends, Simmons tells us, that can be found across space and time. “The first is that societies may be prone to fragmentation, as when social classes emerge based on, for example, birth or wealth or on technologies of separation such as the mobile headset. The second is the opposite: a tendency to coalescence, as happens, for Hum Ecol (2009) 37:671–673 DOI 10.1007/s10745-009-9247-0