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Terra, November 2007
Hardcover
Our 100-Million-Year-Old Ecosystem--and the Threats That Now Put It at Risk
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
November 2007
On Sale: November 13, 2007
480 pages
ISBN: 0374273251
EAN: 9780374273255
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
A paleontologist awakens us to the "extinction event" that
human activity is bringing about today
The natural world as humans have always known it evolved
close to 100 million years ago, with the appearance of
flowering plants and pollinating insects during the age of
the dinosaurs. Its tremendous history is now in danger of
profound, catastrophic disruption. In Terra, a brilliant
synthesis of evolutionary biology, paleontology, and modern
environmental science, Michael Novacek shows how all three
can help us understand and prevent what he (and others) call
today’s “mass extinction event.”
Humanity’s use of land, our consumption, the pollution we
create, and our contributions to global warming are causing
this crisis. True, the fossil record of hundreds of millions
of years reveals that wild and bounteous nature has always
evolved not quietly but thunderously, as species arise,
flourish, die off, and are replaced by new species. We learn
from paleontology and archaeology that for 50,000 years,
human hunting, mining, and agriculture have changed many
localities, sometimes irrevocably. But today, Novacek
insists, our behavior endangers the entire global ecosystem.
And if we disregard—through ignorance, antipathy, or
apathy—the theory of evolution that developed with our
modern understanding of the Earth’s past, we not only impede
enlightenment but threaten any practical strategy for our
own survival.
The evolutionary future of the entire living planet depends
on our understanding this.
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