I. G. Simmons.
An Environmental History of Great Britain: freom 10,000 years ago to the present.
Edinburgh University Press. 2001
This is a history of the environment of England, Wales and Scotland,
and of the interactions of people, place and nature
since the last ice sheet withdrew some ten thousand years age.
It is concerned with the changing cultures (in the full anthropological sense)
of the peoples inhabiting Britain as well as with the environment they
transformed, exploited, abused and cherished.
As the author points out, every culture in Britain
has had to acknowledge its placement on a set of islands
50° N where any month of the year can be the wettest month of the year,
where there are some long shallow estuaries and a few deep inlets,
and where cereals do not reliably ripen 300 metres above sea-level.
Cultural imagination cannot alter these realities,
but it can variously view them as dangerous or picturesque,
as economic or uneconomic.
The book is a history of changing reflexivity in the interactions
between people, culture and nature.
The book is structured as a chronological narrative. It is written with unusual grace, wit and clarity, and illustrated with fifty photographs and some sixty maps and diagrams, all specially prepared for this book. The author draws on a very wide range of sources and uses scientific evidence together with the conventional historical record, as well as on his own experience of the landscapes of Britain. This is cultural and natural history at its best, with a wide appeal within and without the academy.