Sustainability or Collapse?: An Integrated History and Future of People on Earth

Human history, as written traditionally, leaves out the important ecological andclimate context of historical events. But the capability to integrate the history of human beingswith the natural history of the Earth now exists, and we are finding that human-environmentalsystems are intimately linked in ways we are only beginning to appreciate. In Sustainability orCollapse?, researchers from a range of scholarly disciplines develop an integrated human andenvironmental history over millennial, centennial, and decadal time scales and make projections forthe future. The contributors focus on the human-environment interactions that have shaped historicalforces since ancient times and discuss such key methodological issues as data quality. Topicshighlighted include the political ecology of the Mayans; the effect of climate on the Roman Empire;the "revolutionary weather" of El Nino from 1788 to 1795; twentieth-century social, economic, andpolitical forces in environmental change; scenarios for the future; and the accuracy of such pastforecasts as The Limits to Growth.

Will Steffen is Director of the Center for Resource and Environmental Studies and Director of the ANU Institute of Environment at the Australian National University and Chief Scientist at the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, Stockholm.