As peak hurricane season has commenced along the southeastern coast of the United States, where I live, and as the twentieth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina has just passed, it seems fitting to review Sustainability in Ancient Island Societies: An Archaeology of Human Resilience, a recent publication in the Society and Ecology in Island and Coastal Archaeology series by the University Press of Florida. The volume’s authors are tasked not only with understanding how past peoples mitigated anthropogenic and natural changes to their socioecosystems but also with addressing how these adaptations might provide practical solutions for modern societies facing similar challenges and rapidly changing conditions around the world today, in an era of human-induced global climate change sometimes known as the Anthropocene.

This engaging edited volume consists of 10 global case studies, with coverage of North America (3), the Caribbean (1), the North Atlantic (1), Asia and the Pacific Islands (4), and a thematic study of large-scale island engineering globally. The diversity of studies from Oceania is notable and warranted, given that this region has often served as the poster child for isolated, fragile islands colonized by human societies seen as ecodestroyers, one of the tropes that this book seeks to work against. The book’s coeditors (Scott M. Fitzpatrick, Jon M. Erlandson, and Kristina M. Gill) reframe this polarizing debate—one often cast between humans as ecodestroyers versus humans in romantic harmony with their landscapes—in refreshing ways, by asking, (1) how can island archaeologists tell success stories of how communities in the past used their traditional ecological knowledge, social adaptations, and technological innovations to mitigate negative behaviors; and (2) can such techniques and technologies be applied toward mitigating similar pressures in the present? Given its wide-ranging scope, this edited volume is relevant to a broad audience of archaeologists, anthropologists, environmental and resource management specialists, conservationists, and even policymakers.

Most contributors to this book grapple well with the first question; there are many success stories of responses to severe challenges such as climate change, overpopulation, and overharvesting of resources. These range from shifting to exploitation of diverse marine microenvironments and broad-spectrum terrestrial resource use (chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5), targeted use of fire to encourage plant production (chapters 2, 3, and 4), landesque-capital improvements to terrestrial and marine landscapes to intensify sustainable agricultural or aquaculture production (chapters 3, 6, and 7), use of traditional ecological knowledge as a moral principle and/or source of social identity to encourage sustainable resource use (chapters 5 and 7), and maintenance of social ties with external groups as a key lifeline in times of environmental and social stress (chapters 9 and 10). Likewise, old narratives of islands as uniquely fragile ecosystems are overturned. For example, Erlandson et alia (chapter 2) argue that Tuqan, one of the Channel Islands off the coast of California, was a socioecosystem where the challenge was how to manage an abundance of resources rather than impoverishment. In Tuqan, integrated marine and terrestrial resource management—through regularized burning, harvesting of foods from low trophic levels, and culling of apex predators—enabled long-term sustainability.

Another strength of the volume is the diversity of theoretical lenses through which these case studies of sustainability unfold. Chapter 8 explores the historical ecology of the US Georgia coast using the theory of adaptive cycles, chapter 10 frames Norse resilience in Iceland through the push and pull of cultural conservatism versus innovation, and chapter 11 examines the engineering of islands and artificial landforms via sunk-cost economics and emplacement. Varied chapters (1, 5, and 7) explore the benefits of marrying cultural identity and landscape management efforts and call for continued collaboration with Indigenous communities, particularly to establish buy-in and efficacy for local conservation and restoration efforts.

My one critique of the volume is that the coverage of how technologies and approaches used to mitigate environmental change in the past can be successfully used in the present is spotty and may at times be too far of a reach. Both the introductory chapter and the first case study (chapter 2) argue that despite the negative consequences of first island colonization—where new plants and animals were introduced including humans, who inexplicably shifted local socioecosystems—Indigenous communities generally were able to live on their islands up to the time of European contact in a relatively sustainable manner. Consequently, islands were less fragile than once assumed, but this all shifted after European contact, as many of the chapters attest, when more destructive European animals were introduced, when non-Indigenous values and governing systems were imposed, and when—after the Industrial Revolution—commercial fishing and agriculture took hold. These are important points to make, given that they support just how sustainable land and sea management was in many, if not most, precontact communities in the past.

Yet one must ask, given that the scale of human population growth and environmental degradation is so much more accelerated now than before, have we reached a tipping point where past mitigations, which evolved out of local place-based practices, can no longer save us? This is a key point highlighted in chapter 9, in which Christopher B. Wolff, writing about Indigenous peoples of eastern Canada, asks, “What are the limits of cultural resiliency and sustainability . . . Would extended warmer periods that led to the diminishment of important aspects of . . . ecosystems actually lead to conditions that would undermine the resiliency of the cultures that rely on them?” (p. 222). This is serious food for thought. Will modern conditions lead to situations where traditional ecological knowledge and cultural traditions can no longer be maintained in their place-based regions, requiring either shifts to new economies or technologies or moves to new regions where the original mitigation techniques are no longer compatible? This question and the topics covered in this thoughtful book demand further consideration and debate.