Grass A Natural History of the Humble Plant that Made Us Human

About this book

The story of grass is bigger than grass itself; it is the story of us and our place in the natural world. From creeping turf and towering bamboo, to rolling meadows, vast savannas and fields of wheat, grass is all around us. Yet despite its ubiquity, hardly any of us pay it much mind as we trample it underfoot every day. But what is perhaps the most overlooked plant is in fact one of the most remarkable, and our casual dismissal of it belies a much deeper, more complicated relationship that stretches back to the roots of our own species.

In Grass, Julia Rosen shows not only how this extraordinary plant exploded from near ecological obscurity to spread across the planet, reshaping the landscape and producing new ecosystems in its wake, but how its rise to dominance enabled our own.

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Biography

Julia Rosen has spent her nearly decade-long career as a journalist writing about our relationship with the natural world, for publications such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, National Geographic and The Los Angeles Times. Her writing is award-winning: several stories have been anthologised in the Best American Science and Nature Writing, including features for The Atlantic on phosphorus and invasive earthworms. Her earthworm feature was the most-read science story published by The Atlantic in 2020, and her latest this summer on the importance of grasslands, which draws on her reporting and takes a page from the book, was one of the must-read stories of the day and was featured on NPR's Short Wave podcast.