The World System And The Earth System: Global Socioenvironmental Change And Sustainability Since The Neolithic

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"This is both an exciting and rewarding book. What unites the authors is their willingness to test the hypothesis that the biophysical earth systems and the historical social world systems ultimately form a single inseparable whole, whose mode of operation needs to be elucidated." Immanuel Wallerstein, Yale University It is increasingly clear that social and ecological systems are inextricably linked on a global scale. Yet, despite the current interest in bridging our concepts of nature and society, attempts at integration continue to be stymied by the different theoretical trajectories and academic traditions that divide them. In this benchmark volume, top scholars come together to pursue a more rigorous framework for understanding and studying social and ecological systems. Contributors from a wide spectrum of disciplines, including archaeology, anthropology, geography, ecology, palaeo-science, geology, sociology, and history, present and assess both the evolution of our thinking and current, state-of-the-art theory and research. Covering ancient through modern periods, they discuss the complex ways in which human culture, economy, and demography interact with ecology and climate change. The World System and the Earth System is critical reading for all scholars and students working at the interface of nature and society. Table of Contents Preface Contributors Introduction: Conceptualizing Socioecological Systems Part 1 Modeling Socioecological Systems: General Perspectives 1. Historical Ecology: Integrated Thinking at Multiple Temporal and Spatial Scales 2. Toward Developing Synergistic Linkages between the Biophysical and the Cultural: A Paleoenvironmental Perspective 3. Integration of World and Earth Systems: Heritage and Foresight 4. World-Systems as Complex Human Ecosystems 5. Lessons from Population Ecology for World-Systems Analyses of Long-Distance Synchrony 6. Sustainable Unsustainability: Toward a Comparative Study of Hegemonic Decline in Global Systems Part II Case Studies of Socioenvironmental Change in Prehistory 7. Agrarian Landscape Development in Northwestern Europe since the Neolithic: Cultural and Climatic Factors behind a Regional/Continental Pattern 8. Climate Change in Southern and Eastern Africa during the Past Millennium and Its Implications for Societal Development 9. World-Systems in the Biogeosphere: Urbanization, State Formation, and Climate Change Since the Iron Age 10. Eurasian Transformations: Mobility, Ecological Change, and the Transmission of Social institutions in the Third Millennium and the Early Second Millennium 11. Climate, Water, and Political-Economic Crises in Ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt 12. Ages of Reorganization 13. Sustainable Intensive Exploitation of Amazonia: Cultural, Environmental, and Geopolitical Perspectives 14. Regional Integration and Ecology in Prehistoric Amazonia: Toward a System Perspective Part III Is the World System Sustainable? Attempts toward an Integrated Socioecological Perspective 15. The Human-Environment Nexus: Progress in the Past Decade in the Integrated Analysis of Human and Biophysical Factors 16. In Search of Sustainability: What Can We Learn from the Past? 17. Political Ecology and Sustainability Science: Opportunity and Challenge 18. No Island is an “Island”: Some Perspectives on Human Ecology and Development in Oceania 19. Infectious Diseases as Ecological and Historical Phenomena, with Special Reference to the Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919 20. Evidence from Societal Metabolism Studies for Ecological Unequal Trade 21. Entropy Generation and Displacement: The Nineteenth-Century Multilateral Network of World Trade References Index