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Be Fruitful and Multiply
How Fertility and Innovation Have Changed Humankind and the Earth
Brief Description
A groundbreaking history that explores how human desires have affected our relationship with the natural world, and why this is a cause for hope. Donald Worster looks back over 200,000 years of Homo sapiens sapiens to show how human nature, especially the drive for food and...
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Description
A groundbreaking history that explores how human desires have affected our relationship with the natural world, and why this is a cause for hope.
Donald Worster looks back over 200,000 years of Homo sapiens sapiens to show how human nature, especially the drive for food and sex, has responded to environmental conditions throughout history. Examining how this process led from foraging to the agrarian revolution and then to a capitalist way of life, Worster brings us face to face with a third transformation of human society that is beginning to take shape in China: an ecological civilisation.
This meticulously researched book explores how human desires have driven us to overrun our environments, and how we have adapted by creating new relationships with the earth. Tying the past to the future and humans to the planet, Worster acknowledges that we are at a potentially dangerous tipping point. Yet he offers a surprisingly optimistic vision, full of faith in the strength of our human desires, to help us develop exciting futures in a changing world—as we have done time and again—and achieve a good life for the billions of us trying to survive on a finite planet.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9780300278972
Publisher: Yale University Press
Format: Hardback
Date Published: 06 January 2026
Country: United States
Imprint: Yale University Press
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Width: 156.0mm
Height: 235.0mm
Weight: 250g
Pages: 328
About the Author
Donald Worster is an award-winning author and one of the founders of the field of environmental history. His many books include Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s, winner of the Bancroft Prize. He lives in Corvallis, OR.
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