Instruct: Classify a given review into positive or negative sentiment.
Query: History from the Environment's Point of View

Clive Ponting's subtitle is slightly misleading, as this book is less about the history of civilization's collapse than a history of civilization's influence on the environment. This is a thorough and interesting study of how humans have changed or damaged their natural surroundings from the earliest hunter-gatherer days through the modern post-Industrial world. It seems that any modification of the environment has unintended and unexpected consequences down the road. Of course in the past few had the time or the vision to anticipate these consequences, and we are now living with the results of centuries of pollution, salinization, and general degradation. This is not a polemic but a well-argued study which asks us to consider whether our effect on the natural world has been more for good or ill. It is a good precursor to ideas later developed further in Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, among others.