The Human Age
The World Shaped By Us
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Bestseller
Diane Ackerman is justly celebrated for her unique insight into the natural world and our place in it. In this landmark book, she confronts the unprecedented reality that one prodigiously intelligent and meddlesome creature, Homo sapiens, is now the dominant force shaping the future of planet Earth.
Humans have “subdued 75 percent of the land surface, concocted a wizardry of industrial and medical marvels, strung lights all across the darkness.” We tinker with nature at every opportunity; we garden the planet with our preferred species of plants and animals, many of them invasive; and we have even altered the climate, threatening our own extinction. Yet we reckon with our own destructive capabilities in extraordinary acts of hope-filled creativity: we collect the DNA of vanishing species in a “frozen ark,” equip orangutans with iPads and create wearable technologies and synthetic species that might one day outsmart us. With her distinctive gift for making scientific discovery intelligible to the layperson, Ackerman takes us on an exhilarating journey through our new reality, introducing us to many of the people and ideas now creating—perhaps saving—our future and that of our fellow creatures.
A beguiling, optimistic engagement with the changes affecting every part of our lives, The Human Age is a wise and beautiful book that will astound, delight and inform intelligent life for a long time to come.
“The Human Age is a dazzling achievement: immensely readable, lively, polymathic, audacious.” —THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ackerman (One Hundred Names for Love) addresses a currently vogue topic, the Anthropocene the geologic age humans have shaped by altering the world's ecosystems and in doing so raises the bar for her peers. "We've subdued 75 percent of the land surface," Ackerman points out, "preserving some pockets as wilderness,' denaturing vast tracts for our businesses and homes, and homogenizing a third of the world's ice-free land through farming." Yet in the face of massive changes that have "created some planetary chaos that threatens our well-being," she finds hope. Ackerman views the efforts of the tiny, deluge-prone Indian Ocean nation of the Maldives to be carbon neutral by 2020 as "a model for changes radical enough to help fix the climate." Her critical eye focuses on changes at the human as well as the global level: "Anthropocene engineering has penetrated the world of medicine and biology, revolutionizing how we view the body." The greatest strength of her work, though, is the beauty of her language, the power of her metaphors, and the utterly compelling nature of her examples. Whether Ackerman is writing about an iPad-using orangutan or Polynesian snails whose "interiors belong in a church designed by Gaud ," her penetrating insight is a joy to behold.
