This essential book for climate-conscious readers reveals how understanding the past can support modern-day sustainability efforts

The world faces an uncertain future with the rise of climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, overfishing, and other threats. Understanding Imperiled Earth meets this uncertainty head-on, presenting archaeology and history as critical guides to addressing the modern environmental crisis. Through archaeology, scientists can discover the location and composition of native forests and vegetation communities, records of changing atmospheric conditions and how living things responded, and the ways people have influenced their environments for thousands of years.

Anthropologist Todd J. Braje draws connections between deep history and today's hot-button environmental news stories to reveal how the study of the ancient past can help build a more sustainable future. The book covers a diverse array of interconnected issues, from the extinction of megafauna like dire wolves and woolly rhinoceros to the conservation work of Indigenous communities to the need for interdisciplinary perspectives and collaboration to combat environmental challenges, with chapters that include:

Chapter One Nature, Humans, and History
Chapter Two Out of Africa and Around the Globe
Chapter Three Climate of Change, Now and Then
Chapter Four No Trees for Notre-Dame
Chapter Five Disappearing Birds of Hawai'i
Chapter Six Three Million Dollar Tuna in Tokyo
Epilogue Planet Earth in the Age of Humans

The book explores the consequences of global phenomena, like mass deforestation in medieval Europe or overharvesting of ocean resources. Braje examines how their historical roots offer a necessary baseline for a healthier Earth, because that understanding of how the the planet used to be is fundamental to creating effective restoration efforts moving forward through vertical farming, urban forests, sustainable food webs, and more. Imperiled Earth offers an illuminating, hopeful, and actionable approach to some of the world's most urgent problems.
About the Author: TODD J. BRAJE received his PhD in anthropology from the University of Oregon and is now a professor at San Diego State University where he also chairs the anthropology department . He's the author of several books, including Islands through Time and Modern Oceans, Ancient Sites, and has published more than 100 academic journal articles and book chapters. His research focuses on the archaeology of maritime societies, the application of archaeological records to modern resource management, and the peopling of the New World.