Introduction: conceptualizing socio-ecological systems -- Modeling socio-ecological systems : general perspectives / Carole L. Crumley -- Historical ecology : integrated thinking at multiple temporal and spatial scales / Frank Oldfield -- Towards developing synergistic linkages between the biophysical and the cultural : a palaeo-environmental perspective / John A. Dearing -- Integration of world and earth systems : heritage and foresight / Thomas Abel -- World-systems as complex human ecosystems / Thomas D. Hall Depauw & Peter Turchin -- Lessons from population ecology for world-systems analyses of long-distance synchrony / Jonathan Friedman -- Sustainable unsustainability : toward a comparative study of hegemonic decline in global systems -- Case studies of socio-environmental change in prehistory / Bjorn E. Berglund -- Agrarian landscape development in North-Western Europe since the Neolithic : cultural and climatic factors behind a regional/continental pattern / Karin Holmgren & Helena Berg -- Climate change in Southern and Eastern Africa during the past millennium and its implications for societal development / Chris Chase-Dunn, Thomas D. Hall & Peter Turchin -- World-systems in the biogeosphere : urbanization, state formation, and climate change since the Iron Age / Kristian Kristiansen -- Eurasian transformations : mobility, ecological change, and the transmission of social institutions in the third and second millennium BC / William R. Thompson -- Climate, water, and political-economic crises in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt / George Modelski -- Ages of reorganization / Betty J. Meggers -- Sustainable intensive exploitation of Amazonia : cultural, environmental, and geopolitical perspectives / Alf Hornborg -- Regional integration and ecology in prehistoric Amazonia : toward a system perspective -- Is the world system sustainable? attempts toward an integrated socio-ecological perspective / Emilio F. Moran -- The human-environment nexus : progress in the past decade in the integrated analysis of human and biophysical factors / Bert J.M. de Vries -- In search of sustainability : what can we learn from the past? / Susan C. Stonich & Daniel S. Mandell -- Political ecology and sustainability science : opportunity and challenge / Thomas Malm -- No island is an "island" : some perspectives on human ecology and development in Oceania / Alfred W. Crosby -- Infectious diseases as ecological and historical phenomena, with special reference to the influenza pandemic of 1918-19 / Nina Eisenmenger & Stefan Giljum -- Evidence from societal metabolism studies for ecological unequal trade / Andre Gunder Frank -- Entropy generation and displacement : the nineteenth-century multi-lateral network of world trade