As we proceed to demolish the last great forests on Earth in the tropics of both Africa and America, it is easy to believe this catastrophic event is a novelty. True enough, the global congruence of overpopulation, industrialism and deforestation are novel, but it is equally apparent that history has much to say about the symbiosis of civilization and its forests.

As difficult as it is to imagine today, most of what is now the "civilized world" was forest land prior to its conversion for human purposes. Dense stands of ancient Atlas cedar once blanketed the now-barren mountains and hills of northern Africa. Cedars of Lebanon--the source of timber for Solomon's ships--as well as oak and pine once forested the Holy Land and upper drainages of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers; today these areas are mostly desert or scrub.

The dry, rocky, picturesque hills of Greece, Italy and Madeira, now barely productive enough for grape vines, were once blanketed not only with forests, but with fertile soils. Their rivers were deep and clear, flowing throughout the year, not the droughty arroyos seasonally inundated with silt-laden torrents that characterize the Mediterranean region today. Their very coastlines are altered. Soil washed from the slopes has come to rest in river deltas, extending once sharply defined shorelines far out into marshy shallows and destroying ancient harbors.

John Perlin's new book, "A Forest Journey," is like some Greek epic poem spanning 4,000 years of civilization. The refrain is inevitably tragic. It begins with the "Epic of Gilgamesh" about 2000 BC. Gilgamesh penetrated the primordial cedar forest in the mountains south of Mesopotamia to acquire timber necessary for building his city-state of Uruk. According to Perlin, the "Epic" recounts droughts that plagued southern Mesopotamia in the aftermath of deforestation. Subsequently, during the heyday of Sumerian civilization, ships carried oak from Arabia, cedar from Turkey, juniper and sycamore from Syria to the city-states of Lagash and Ur.

One of the immediate consequences of these early logging activities was that the rivers of the Near East soon flowed with silt and dissolved salts, clogging the network of irrigation canals upon which agriculture depended, as well as the river estuaries where principal ports had been established. The water systems could be dredged--at great expense--but the exposure of salt-laden sedimentary rock eventually salinized valley agricultural soils. So far as Perlin is concerned, the subsequent decay of Sumeria was directly correlated with declines in the barley harvest over three centuries.