published in 1999 by Wiley, 357 pages
Little did I know when I climbed a mountain on remote Mago Island in the eastern islands of Fiji and took a photo of the stunning coastal lagoons that it would one day become the front cover of a book. The extraordinary thing about these lagoons is that they have been pushed up above the ocean surface, their coral-reef borders becoming solid limestone walls, creating a memorably tranquil landscape.
The Pacific Ocean and the crustal basin it occupies are the world’s oldest, the residue of the ancient Panthalassa Ocean that covered most of the earth’s surface a thousand million years ago. Or so. This book documents the history of the Pacific Basin, the changes it has undergone in both the deep distant past but also more recently, since the arrival of people along its western fringes and their subsequent dispersal.
It takes 114 pages for me to get through all but the last 1,770,000 years of Pacific history, at the time considered to be the start of the Quaternary Period in which we still live. This Period was distinguished by the oscillations of the Earth’s climate between warmer inter-glacial times (such as we live in today) and cooler glacial times, also known as ice ages. Much of what we have learned about these climatic oscillations have come from Antarctica, especially from the Dry Valleys near McMurdo Sound (pictured below is Wright Valley), oddly ice-free today in an otherwise largely ice-covered continent.
The spread of people throughout the Pacific Basin can often be detected by the enduring things they left behind, often their pottery. Below is a spectacularly-decorated piece of Lapita pottery excavated by Rosie Kumar at the Bourewa site (Fiji) and photographed a few minutes afterwards, the first time it had seen the light of day for perhaps more than three thousand years. The outline of a human face with nose and eyes and possible facial tattoos can be seen on the right.
Changes in natural vegetation can also be used as proxies for changes in climate or even the arrival of humans in a particular place. In New Zealand, where there are many endemic species of plants, changes in pollen from trees like Nothofagus solandri (pictured below) have been used to track the gradual warming during the most recent inter-glacial period.
A reviewer in The Australian Geologist considered this book
“is most successful in providing a serious review of environmental changes around the Pacific Basin … the list of almost 1,000 references provides a comprehensive documentation of diverse sources of data and is a valuable resource for future students of the Pacific region … the book richly illustrates the value of seeking regional patterns to support local evidence. The author is to be congratulated for the vision to see the value of a regional compilation at this scale and the courage to undertake such a mammoth task.”
Writing in the journal Environment and History, another reviewer found this book
“clear and uncomplicated … very readable and accessible … soundly researched and up-to-date”.
Always a bit expensive to purchase, you can still find copies on sale. Reviews of Environmental Change in the Pacific Basin can be found here. The list of chapters is here.