Much scholarly work is being undertaken on the fine detail of environmental history, showing how various cultural processes expressed themselves in ecological change. This book provides an outline context for them on a global basis. The main lineaments of the ecological relationships between humans and their surroundings are periodized and characterized and a series of examples show the varieties of change which can be produced. A separate chapter then adumbrates the kind of environmental history that may eventually be written for (in this case) England/Wales and for Japan. Throughout, the dominant epistemology is empirical and realist but in the last chapter Professor Simmons considers other modes of environmental knowing and so from a purely scientific beginning the book then locates itself as accessible to humanities scholars.