*NEW blog at nickbrooks.wordpress.com*

This is one of three accounts I maintain on Flickr. The others relate to my work in / obsession with arid places. One of these accounts houses photos from the Fezzan region of Libya, acquired on a number of research trips:

www.flickr.com/photos/fezzan/

The other is exclusively devoted to the Western Sahara Project, an ongoing research project dealing with archaeology and past environmental change, which I direct:

www.flickr.com/photos/western_sahara_project/

www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~e118/welcome.htm

(You can join us in Western Sahara as an amateur volunteers - it's a bit pricey but it's great fun, and very interesting. See the above sites for details).

When I'm not pootling about in the desert, I'm either earning a living by addressing the practical issues of how we can adapt to climate change, or pursuing other research on the role climate change played in the development of the first "civilisations" (for want of a better word). In this capacity I'm interested in what studies of past social and environmental changes can tell us about how we ended up with the societies we did, and the implications of this for our understanding of civilisation and "progress".