Is there a relation between the scattered, local and regional environmental changes that humans caused in the past and the globalizing environmental change, perilous in many ways, that is now on the rise? Are significant parameters of ‘unsustainable’ human behaviour rooted in evolution? Even more fundamentally: can we quantify or map the human impressions on the earth and atmospheric systems over the long term?

In an ambitious volume drawn from a conference at Lund University, Sweden, in 2003, human ecologist Alf Hornborg and archaeologist Carole Crumley have collected 21 papers that circle around questions like these. There is much to be said in favour of this collection. Perhaps most important is the many takes on a physical and material interpretation of ‘economy’ in different historical periods, including our present. Not just Hornborg himself, but several others (for example Nina Eisenmenger and Stefan Gilljum, and Andre Gunder Frank, to whose memory the volume is dedicated) here analyse flows of resources and wealth within communities and across boundaries.

Anthropologist Thomas Abel connects to Howard T. Odum's tireless preoccupation with flows of resources and how to discern a ‘realistic’ account of the economy from a sustainable point of view. Sociologist Thomas D. Hall and biologist Peter Turchin argue, with a conceptual start in population ecology, that there are ‘pulsations’ in the world system over the long term, indicating ‘long-distance synchronicity’.

Several authors go even further to discuss periodizations. Obviously, a world history as seen from the angle of two large interacting systems, one human, the other physical, must be different from one focusing on human intentionality. Not surprisingly, broad brush patterns follow. Political scientist George Modelski argues for the periodic arrival of ‘dark ages’ and tries to impose a neat sequence of such periods on human history, reflecting the supposed existence of some global systematics or structure dating back at least to the Egyptians. Other authors speak of a ‘cultural-economic rhythm’ (political scientist William R. Thompson), of ancient high cultures, or point to demographic parallels across scales and regions (sociologist Chris Chase-Dunn, T. D. Hall & P. Turchin). Yet others, like archaeologist Kristian Kristiansen, observe major patterns of change simultaneously occurring in world regions (Eurasia and Eastern Asia), again suggesting a pulsating pattern in the larger history. Several solid diachronical case studies of the book, such as those of Amazonia (Hornborg and Betty J. Meggers, respectively), implications of climate change in Eastern Africa (Karin Holmgren & Helena Öberg), and I would also include Kristiansen and Thompson in this group, are characterized by a more compacted time and space and refrain from far-reaching speculation of pulsations and connections.

There is an element of tragedy in some of these papers, in the sense that after having read them the links between past and present unsustainabilities seem less sure. Thompson's earnest attempt to connect periods of economic decline, crises and regime shifts in ancient south-western Asia to harsh climates and detrimental environmental change is a telling case, both in that he fails to find either any such connection or any obvious periodization.

With all their diplomatic grace, even the editors seem reticent about some of the most drastic formalizing approaches to the past. Hornborg cites Gregory Bateson, an early sceptic of ‘delegating to computers our responsibility for pursuing knowledge’. Still, there is a lot of computer-based work in this book, and rightly so. There are modelling studies from regions as diverse as China, Europe and the Middle East. They share many heuristic insights. The problems arise in the historical approaches, when ambitions grow beyond what models can justify. John Dearing, presenting arduously compiled and very interesting environmental history data from Lake Ennai in Yunnan, runs into problems when he ventures into ‘foresight’ based on models, still he only reluctantly backs off from what seems a hopeless mission to model ‘future socioenvironmental change’, not just for Yunnan, but for the entire world.

While generously welcoming everybody to this volume, Hornborg is right in warning in his foreword of ‘imperial’ tendencies of scientists entering the chaotic and anarchic worlds of human mores and missions. Carole Crumley, evoking C. P. Snow, is also right in suggesting the continued meeting of the two cultures of humanities and science in the further attempts to understand how humanity has ended up where it is. The contribution of this volume is that the editors have, unreservedly, allowed this meeting to take place in the free spirit of academic exchange.