Living on Earth
-
- 24,99 €
Publisher Description
"Listening to Godfrey-Smith's exploration of animal consciousness will rattle every nook and cranny of your brain with an onslaught of interesting questions...the author leaves listeners with a radical new perspective." —AudioFile on Metazoa
This program is read by the author.
The bestselling author of Other Minds shows how we and our ancestors have reinvented our planet.
If the history of the Earth were compressed down to a year, our species would arise in the last thirty minutes or so of the final hour. But life itself is not such a late arrival: It has existed on Earth for something like 3.7 billion years—most of our planet’s history and over a quarter of the age of the universe (as far as we can tell).
What have these organisms—bacteria, animals, plants, and the rest—done in all this time? In Living on Earth, the philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith proposes a new way of understanding how the actions of living beings have shaped our planet. Where his acclaimed books Other Minds and Metazoa explored the riddle of how conscious minds came to exist on Earth, Living on Earth turns to what happens when we look at the mind from another side—when we come to see organisms as active causes, not merely as results of the evolutionary process. The planet we inhabit is significantly the work of other living beings, who shaped the environments that we ourselves later transformed.
To that end, Godfrey-Smith takes us on a grand tour of the history of life on earth. He visits Rwandan gorillas and Australian bowerbirds, returns to coral reefs and octopus dens, considers the impact of language and writing, and weighs the responsibilities our unique powers bring with them, as they relate to factory farming, habitat preservation, climate change, and the use of animals in experiments. Ranging from the seas to the forests, and from animate matter’s first appearance to its future extinction, Godfrey-Smith offers a novel picture of the course of life on Earth and how we might meet the challenges of our time, the Anthropocene.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Peter Godfrey-Smith looks at the effects that living organisms have had on planet Earth—and makes a great case for humanity needing an attitude adjustment—in this thought-provoking non-fiction listen. Starting from the very beginning, when single-cell organisms first formed, Godfrey-Smith offers a fascinatingly comprehensive (and impressively concise) history of life on Earth. And his conclusions are easy to understand: Life affects its environment far more than the environment affects life. Of course, the specific creatures that have had the greatest impact are humans, and Godfrey-Smith, a professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Sydney, holds us accountable for controlling more than our fair share (especially with practices like industrial farming). Narrating the book himself, Godfrey-Smith puts his honed lecturing skills to good use, keeping us utterly engaged. Living on Earth makes it clear that, much like the past, Earth’s future lies squarely in humanity’s court.
