The Human Age
Description
Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award and the PEN New England Henry David Thoreau Prize.
A dazzling, inspiring tour through the ways that humans are working with nature to try to save the planet.
With her celebrated blend of scientific insight, clarity, and curiosity, Diane Ackerman explores our human capacity both for destruction and for invention as we shape the future of the planet Earth. Ackerman takes us to the mind-expanding frontiers of science, exploring the fact that the "natural" and the "human" now inescapably depend on one another, drawing from "fields as diverse as evolutionary robotics...nanotechnology, 3-D printing and biomimicry" (New York Times Book Review), with probing intelligence, a clear eye, and an ever-hopeful heart.
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Content
- Intro
- Title
- Contents
- I. WELCOME TO THE ANTHROPOCENE
- Apps for Apes
- Wild Heart, Anthropocene Mind
- Black Marble
- Handmade Landscapes
- A Dialect of Stone
- Monkeying with the Weather
- Gaia in a Temper
- Brainstorming from Equator to Ice
- Blue Revolution
- II. IN THE HOUSE OF STONE AND LIGHT
- Asphalt Jungles
- A Green Man in a Green Shade
- House Plants? How Passé
- Opportunity Warms
- III. IS NATURE "NATURAL" ANYMORE?
- Is Nature "Natural" Anymore?
- The Slow-Motion Invaders
- "They Had No Choice"
- Paddling in the Gene Pool
- For Love of a Snail
- IV. NATURE, PIXILATED
- An (Un)Natural Future of the Senses
- Weighing in the Nanoscale
- Nature, Pixilated
- The Interspecies Internet
- Your Passion Flower Is Sexting You
- When Robots Weep, Who Will Comfort Them?
- Robots on a Date
- Printing a Rocking Horse on Mars
- V. OUR BODIES, OUR NATURE
- The (3D-Printed) Ear He Lends Me
- Cyborgs and Chimeras
- DNA's Secret Doormen
- Meet My Maker, the Mad Molecule
- Conclusion: Wild Heart, Anthropocene Mind (Revisited)
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Further Reading
- Index
- Also by Diane Ackerman
- Praise for THE HUMAN AGE
- Copyright
