The World System and the Earth System

Hornborg, Alf; Crumley, Carole L

Contributors from a wide spectrum of disciplines, including archaeology, anthropology, geography, ecology, palaeo-science, geology, sociology, and history discuss the complex ways in which human culture, economy, and demographics interact with ecology and climate change.

Preface, Contributors, Introduction: Conceptualizing Socioecological Systems, Part I: Modeling Socioecological Systems: General Perspectives, 1. Historical Ecology: Integrated Thinking at Multiple Temporal and Spatial Scales, 2. Toward Developing Synergistic Linkages between the Biophysical and the Cultural: A Palaoenvironmental Perspective, 3. Integration of World and Earth Systems: Heritage and Foresight, 4. World-Systems as Complex Human Ecosystems, 5. Lessons from Population Ecology for World-Systems Analyses of Long-Distance Synchrony, 6. Sustainable Unsustainability: Toward a Comparative Study of Hegemonic Decline in Global Systems, Part II: Case Studies of Socioenvironmental Change in Prehistory, 7. Agrarian Landscape Development in Northwestern Europe since the Neolithic: Cultural and Climatic Factors behind a Regional/Continental Pattern, 8. Climate Change in Southern and Eastern Africa during the Past Millennium and Its Implications for Societal Development, 9. World-Systems in the Biogeosphere: Urbanization, State Formation, and Climate Change Since the Iron Age, 10. Eurasian Transformations: Mobility, Ecological Change, and the Transmission of Social Institutions in the Third Millennium and the Early Second Millennium B.C.E., 11. Climate, Water, and Political-Economic Crises in Ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, 12. Ages of Reorganization, 13. Sustainable Intensive Exploitation of Amazonia: Cultural, Environmental, and Geopolitical Perspectives, 14. Regional Integration and Ecology in Prehistoric Amazonia: Toward a System Perspective, Part III: Is the World System Sustainable? Attempts toward an Integrated Socioecological Perspective, 15. The Human-Environment Nexus: Progress in the Past Decade in the Integrated Analysis of Human and Biophysical Factors, 16. In Search of Sustainability: What Can We Learn from the Past?, 17. Political Ecology and Sustainability Science: Opportunity and Challenge, 18. No Island is an "Island": Some Perspectives on Human Ecology and Development in Oceania, 19. Infectious Diseases as Ecological and Historical Phenomena, with Special Reference to the Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919, 20. Evidence from Societal Metabolism Studies for Ecological Unequal Trade, 21. Entropy Generation and Displacement: The Nineteenth-Century Multilateral Network of World Trade, References, Index