However, its best recommendation is the boldness of its theme. For decades he has researched the distribution of plants and animals in New Guinea and several islands and archipelagoes of the Pacific ocean, but this is a book about, so to speak, the distribution of human societies on the planet. The title is Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond, professor of physiology at the UCLA School of Medicine, and ranking researcher of biological diversity. There is a new English-language book in the field of environmental history deserving translation, and it is a winner.
It is time for Brazilian publishers to take action once again, if not to reduce the backlog, at least to keep up with the times.
The fact is that, since 1989, one good environmental history book has been translated and published in Brazil about every two years. There are voids that could have already been filled had there been more initiative by Brazilian publishers, such as Donald Worster's classic Nature's Economy, or William Cronon's unique Nature's Metropolis. From the French there was the translation of several texts by Fernand Braudel, the ranking French historian of the Annales school, from whom many environmental historians have taken inspiration. Since 1989, at least five important titles were translated from English: Warren Dean's Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber and With Broadax and Firebrand, Alfred Crosby's Ecological Imperialism, Frederick Turner's Beyond Geography, and John Perlin's A Forest Journey. The availability of environmental history texts in Portuguese, for Brazilian and other Portuguese-speaking readers, has improved only cautiously, despite the fact that a few translated texts received critical and public acclaim. Environmental History and the Clash of Civilizations
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