Inheritors of the Earth by Chris D Thomas

Inheritors of the Earth by Chris D Thomas

Human activity has irreversibly changed the natural environment. But the news isn't all bad.

It's accepted wisdom today that human beings have permanently damaged the natural world, causing extinction, deforestation, pollution, and of course climate change. But in Inheritors of the Earth, biologist Chris Thomas shows that this obscures a more hopeful truth -- we're also helping nature grow and change. Human cities and mass agriculture have created new places for enterprising animals and plants to live, and our activities have stimulated evolutionary change in virtually every population of living species. Most remarkably, Thomas shows, humans may well have raised the rate at which new species are formed to the highest level in the history of our planet.

Drawing on the success stories of diverse species, from the ochre-colored comma butterfly to the New Zealand pukeko, Thomas overturns the accepted story of declining biodiversity on Earth. In so doing, he questions why we resist new forms of life, and why we see ourselves as unnatural. Ultimately, he suggests that if life on Earth can recover from the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs, it can survive the onslaughts of the technological age. This eye-opening book is a profound reexamination of the relationship between humanity and the natural world.

Chris D.Thomas is a conservation biology professor at the University of York in the United Kingdom. Since 2000, he has authored roughly twenty magazine and other popular articles, published 210 scientific journal articles, twenty-nine book chapters, edited one academic book, and published 210 scientific journal articles. His study has been featured on the front pages of the Guardian and the Washington Post, and he has been mentioned over 26,000 times, making him one of the world's most influential ecologists. He earned the Marsh Awards for Climate Change Research in 2011 and for Conservation Biology in 2004, as well as the distinguished British Ecological Society President's Medal in 2001. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 2012 and is a long-standing fellow of the Royal Entomological Society.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781610397278
ISBN 10	1610397274
Title	Inheritors of the Earth
Author	Chris D Thomas
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Publicaffairs
Year published	2017-09-05
Number of pages	320
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.