Chapter 1 Preface Part 2 I.The Dark Ages over World History Chapter 3 1 System Crisis Part 4 II.The Crisis of the Bronze Age Chapter 5 2 Nature and Culture Chapter 6 3 Ecological Crisis and System Transformation Part 7 III.The Crisis of Antiquity Chapter 8 4 Intensification of Natural and Social Systems Relations Chapter 9 5 A Period of Darkness Part 10 IV. System Transformation Chapter 11 6 From the Past to the Future: Whither System Transformation? Chapter 13 Appendix 1: Arboreal Pollen Influxes Chapter 14 Appendix 2: Plantago Pollen Influxes Chapter 15 Appendix 3: Arboreal and NonArboreal Pollen Influxes Percentages
Sing C. Chew is research scientist in the Department of Urban and Environmental Sociology, UFZ Centre for Environmental Research, Leipzig-Halle, Leipzig, Germany; professor of sociology at Humboldt State University, Arcata, California; and founding editor of the interdisciplinary journal, Nature and Culture.
Dr. Chew's long awaited sequel to World Ecological Degradation
provides the reader with new insights on the contemporary
environmental crisis by providing a broad, long-range perspective
on the interactions between natural changes and cultural changes.
Interdisciplinary in scope, rich in theory and data, The Recurring
Dark Ages helps the reader understand globalization in historical
perspective.
*Bill Devall, author, Deep Ecology and Living Richly in an Age of
Limits*
Sing Chew offers groundbreaking insights for anyone seeking help in
understanding the uneven course of the history of human culture in
the context of nature. By a fine analysis of the times often
discounted in world histories, Sing Chew provides a masterful new
way of seeing the import of the interaction of human societies and
the forces of the natural world.
*J Donald Hughes, University of Denver, and editor, The Face of the
Earth*
Recurring Dark Ages takes ecological disasters based on systematic
long-term overexploitation back to the beginnings of urban life and
early industrialization in the Bronze Age. Sing Chew thus situates
Dark Ages in a long-term historical perspective linked to the
operation of an ancient world system. The book provides an original
historical framework for understanding Dark Ages past and
present.
*Kristian Kristiansen, Goteborgs Universitet; coauthor with Thomas
B. Larsson, The Rise of Bronze Age Society*
This could be a fascinating romp through world history; each
chapter whizzes across space and time in lightening fashion....The
strength of this approach is the way it synthesizes and presents so
much information about the ingenuity of diverse communities and
their efforts to produce and trade across large distances and on
changing ecological terrains, and it does so with a novel and
persuasive analytic frame.
*Contemporary Sociology*
The world system has evolved and continues to do so. The question
is what drives this evolutionary process. Sing Chew has developed a
substantial argument built around intermittent and, hitherto,
poorly understood Dark Ages. Chew shines an analytical light on the
phases of deterioration that we usually ignore while favoring the
periods of growth and expansion. Yet it is unlikely that you can
have one without the other.
*William Thompson, Indiana University, Bloomington, and past
president of the International Studies Association*
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