Readers of Science will not be surprised to learn that the world's forests are shrinking. Most will also know that the habit of cutting, burning, and clearing trees goes very deep in human history. In Deforesting the Earth, historical geographer Michael Williams gives the most comprehensive account ever written of when, where, and how humans have wrought what is surely the most dramatic change in Earth's surface since the end of the Pleistocene 10,000 years ago―and what may shortly become the great- est change since the beginning of the Pleistocene, over 2 million years ago. Driving home his central thesis that deforestation has a long history, Williams observes that about half of the forest that has disappeared was already gone before 1950. But it is surely just as striking that half the clearing has taken place since 1950―and the great majority since 1900. From the single observation that half of the world's forest has been lost in the past 50 years, one can extract the book's two major themes: humans have been changing forests for a long time, yet what we are doing now is without precedent.
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