I think anyone attempting a work of the scope of Guns Germs and Steel is bound to get things wrong, not least because it is nigh on impossible to get everything right when devising a theory of everything. Historical, archaeological, economic, biological, climate knowledge is continually being discovered, rewritten or challenged. Pre-history in particular is subject to substantial change at short notice. If everything in Guns Germs and Steel had been right at time of writing it would already have had to be revised in some of its detail. What I liked about it most was how it made me look at things from a completely different perspective, ignoring the usual political and narrative approach of most history. I'm not sure I agreed with it all, not sure if I knew nearly enough to even judge much of it. I re-read it almost immediately after reading it the first time, which I don't do very often.
WM - I particularly like keeping together in time
Try 'the human planet' by Simon Lewis and mark maslin
To be fair to him, he's not an historian, but he's furnished the discipline with a number of useful insights.
I have, just never got round to reading.
It's also true that some historians don't like being challenged by outsiders, especially if they come up with perspectives which they have never really encountered or considered. Inevitably some of his conclusions will be wrong and he himself admits to a good degree of speculation in some areas. It might have been better if he had made fewer judgements about China, for example, but other historians have erred on the other side by completely ignoring all the aspects which Diamond presents.
I noticed nobody picked this up. Is Foster too political for the mainstream ecological movement?
Well some people are inclined towards theory and some aren't, and I think that goes for the environmentally inclined as well as more old school socialists. There's plenty of equally impenetrable degrowth literature. I've not read a great deal of that but I enjoy reading Giorgos Kallis on Twitter and he's written / contributed to a fair few recent books inc The Case for Degrowth. I find the ecosocialism / degrowth debate a bit hard to get my head around - some ecosocialists are also basically degrowthers, others are much more techno-utopian eco-modernists but with a marxist slant.
Possibly. You do need to know your Marx to get the most out of his work or at least be prepared to accept class as your starting point. Both he and Paul Burkett have done sterling work in recent decades in making Marxist ecology, working from the basis of the 'metabolic rift', a fruitful research tradition. Watching Jason W Moore's star rise in recent years on the back of Web of Life has been somewhat bizarre. I think he baffles to deceive half the time and busies himself developing unwieldy and rather pointless 'anti-dualist' compound terms, but he does come across well in interviews.
I'd recommed Ian Angus' Facing The Anthropocene as a good intro to a radical earth systems politics; JBF's The Ecological Rift is also a good intro, as is Joel Kovel's The Enemy of Nature (also check out the recent posthumous essay collection The Emergence of Ecosocialism). If you're into histories of ideas Foster's Marx's Ecology is good and has now been followed by The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology. Haven't read that yet. I thought Andreas Malm's Fossil Capital was magnificent, although a bit too long. At the theoretical level, his Progress Of This Storm is a welcome breather from Marxist scholarship and more a general argument for (critical) realist thinking in climate change / ecological politics, and an excellent caution to anyone considering a turn towards the knob that is Bruno Latour.
uio.academia.edu
I could only find this. Any good?Alexander Dunlap has a couple of books worth looking at (free to download).
Alexander Dunlap | University of Oslo - Academia.edu
Academia.edu is a place to share and follow research.
