Download or read book Sustainability Or Collapse? written by Robert Costanza and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE ENVIRONMENT. Human history, as written traditionally, leaves out the important ecological and climate context of historical events. But the capability to integrate the history of human beings with the natural history of the Earth now exists, and we are finding that human-environmental systems are intimately linked in ways we are only beginning to appreciate. In Sustainability or Collapse?, researchers from a range of scholarly disciplines develop an integrated human and environmental history over millennial, centennial, and decadal time scales and make projections for the future. The contributors focus on the human-environment interactions that have shaped historical forces since ancient times and discuss such key methodological issues as data quality.