SS Eagle: The Secret Mission 1944–45. Harold Squires. 1992. St John's: Jesperson Press, xii + 113 p, illustrated, soft cover. ISBN 0-921692-37-4. $Can 11.95.

disciplines of the natural sciences, which continue to monitor the causes and extent of environmental change. Research on environmental issues has tended to be predominantly science-based, partly because it is assumed that global environmental change requires scientific interpretation. However, the present ecological crisis, in its regional and global senses, is a complex of social and environmental conditions arising from human activity. Yet, comparatively little research demonstrates the diverse and intricate ways in which humans engage with and influence the natural world, and how environmental change modifies human activity. While social science is well equipped with the theoretical and methodological tools to understand the human dimensions of global environmental change, there has been little progress in the social sciences beyond outlining 'strategies for research. ' The 10 essays in this volume address this imbalance from the perspectives of anthropology, archaeology, and human ecology, and in doing so make a significant contribution to the literature on the human dimensions of global environmental change. The contributors take an anthropological approach to understanding the dialectical nature of human-environment relationships in historical context. They argue that historical ecology, or 'the study of past ecosystems by charting the change in landscapes over time' (page 6) can help to explain how changes in demography, subsistence, land use, and environmental perception have caused people to modify (whether intentionally or not) the global environment. Such an approach contrasts with other, more traditional, anthropological assumptions that, in pre-modern cultures, problems arising from human-environment interactions had only local consequences. Instead of viewing the environment as something that people live in, exploit, and are influenced or constrained by, one of the aims of the book is to address the problem of denying 'the environment a meaningful role in history' (page 2). In this sense, the contributors argue that the study of human-environment relations is to be placed at the centre of any discourse on global environmental change if it is to be made sense of and the implications understood. Several contributors (Crumley, Winterhalder, Ingerson, Gunn, and Patterson) explore the theoretical challenges global environmental change poses to the study of humanenvironment relations, while others illustrate historical ecological processes in a number of case studies (Schmidt on equatorial Africa, McGovern on Norse Greenland, Hassan on ancient Egypt, and Marquardt on southwest Florida). These case studies demonstrate, for example, how people in the past lived beyond their means, existing on scarce resources, or how they were forced to adapt to new environmental conditions brought about by changing technology and agricultural methods. As a number of contributors (such as McGovern and Patterson) argue, by examining how humans related to their environments in the past, we are in a better position to understand the temporal and spatial processes of environmental change and to act on this understanding. As anthropologists are now demonstrating in increasingly sophisticated ways, conceptualisations of, and interactions with, the environment inform social relations and human action. By understanding how such conceptualisations, and, indeed, human actions, have changed through time, Historical ecology demonstrates that the (not always wide) gap between the natural and social sciences can be bridged, and that a new holistic environmental science is possible by assuming an interdisciplinary perspective on environmental change. For this reason alone, Historical ecology should appeal to those in the social and natural sciences who are concerned with developing new theoretical insight into regional and global environmental change. (Mark Nuttall, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, Lensfield Road, Cambridge CB2 1ER.)