Ecological Degradation Past and Present

In his trilogy of environmental studies—World Ecological Degradation, The Recurring Dark Ages, and Ecological Futures—Sing Chew surveys 5,000 years of human history and finds a distinctive, recurring pattern: Civilizations that amass vast wealth do so by exhausting their environment, thus sowing the seeds of their collapse. Again and again, Chew observes, periods of over-accumulation are followed by extreme environmental degradation, the collapse of social systems, and a Dark Age. Today, at the beginning of the third millennium A.D., we are in the midst of a period of unprecedented accumulation, this time on a global scale, and we are experiencing worldwide environmental degradation, from the ozone layer to the rain forest. If past is prologue, Chew warns, then modern mankind may face a broad collapse of social systems and an unsettling future.