A brief post about the book review Deforesting the Earth: from prehistory to global crisis: an abridgment by Michael Williams, reviewed by Ruth DeFries, University of Maryland College Park in Area 39 (3) 410-411.
As I read this book review it dawned on me that this book review represents a few elements of geography: cultural and physical geography with a dash of historical geography for flavor. Williams book attempts to describe not only the historical condition of global forests (in this case that means mostly a European history), but the cultural or human interaction/use of forests and the consequences of this interaction.
Lets break this down:
Forests = Physical
People/Interaction = Cultural
Historical Context = Historical Geography
Oh and one last point to be made--the whole study is regional in nature: Europe, its regions; the Americas, all of the vast regions there; Asia and Africa. It doesn't get much more regional than this.
But I do have one question: Could historical periods be considered regions in and of themselves?
2 comments:
I dig your take on this article. The concept you brought up of time as a region is a really cool way of approaching things geographically. I found it interesting that this study ended in 1995. Well heck, a lots changed in such a short time, with Bush at the helm.
I agree: I think historical geography is RIPE for "regions," and it's a matter of thinking about what should govern their categorization. But think of the Victorian housing era (economic, resource-availability-based, aesthetic ...); or the free-love era (Summer of Love, probably tied to drugs and the relative absence of life-threatening STDs, and ending abruptly with the HIV-AIDS diagnosis -- loss of innocence); or the era of American imperialism in Latin America (the Monroe Doctrine ...); or, for that matter, the dude ranching era -- tied to train travel, a certain degree of disposable wealth, or the existence of long vacations!
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