Overview

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 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 civilization. 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.

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Reviews

""This is Donald Worster at his best: history transformed into philosophy. Be Fruitful and Multiply is bold and provocative; overflows with wisdom; and is full of passion for all life on earth."" -- ""Christof Mauch, Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU Munich"" ""Worster crafts a sweeping narrative that challenges conventional pessimism with a scientifically grounded optimism about our capacity for intelligence and adaptation."" -- ""Nancy Langston, author of Sustaining Lake Superior""

Author Information

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, Oregon. Tom Beyer is a character actor who has appeared in over 100 TV shows, films, and commercials; has performed in innumerable plays and musicals; and has narrated many audiobooks. Grown in New York, fermented in Seattle, and aged in Los Angeles, his passions include Shakespeare, reading, intense physical exercise, and animal rescue. He has won awards for his stage work as both an actor and a director, and has adapted classical literature for the theater. He believes strongly in civic engagement, and volunteers for multiple organizations.

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