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British Wildlife is the leading natural history magazine in the UK, providing essential reading for both enthusiast and professional naturalists and wildlife conservationists. Published eight times a year, British Wildlife bridges the gap between popular writing and scientific literature through a combination of long-form articles, regular columns and reports, book reviews and letters.

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Good Reads  History & Other Humanities  Environmental History

The Big Ratchet How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis - A Biography of an Ingenious Species

By: Ruth S DeFries(Author)
273 pages, b/w illustrations
Publisher: Basic Books
The Big Ratchet
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  • The Big Ratchet ISBN: 9780465044979 Hardback Sep 2014 Not in stock: Usually dispatched within 5 days
    £24.99
    #216506
Price: £24.99
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About this book

Our species long lived on the edge of starvation. Now we produce enough food for all 7 billion of us to eat nearly 3000 calories every day. This is such an astonishing thing in the history of life as to verge on the miraculous. The Big Ratchet is the story of how it happened, of the ratchets – the technologies and innovations, big and small – that propelled our species from hunters and gatherers on the savannahs of Africa to shoppers in the aisles of the supermarket.

The Big Ratchet itself came in the twentieth century, when a range of technologies – from fossil fuels to scientific plant breeding to nitrogen fertilizers – combined to nearly quadruple our population in a century, and to grow our food supply even faster. To some, these technologies are a sign of our greatness; to others, of our hubris. MacArthur fellow and Columbia University professor Ruth DeFries argues that the debate is the wrong one to have. Limits do exist, but every limit that has confronted us, we have surpassed. That cycle of crisis and growth is the story of our history; indeed, it is the essence of The Big Ratchet. Understanding it will reveal not just how we reached this point in our history, but how we might survive it.

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Biography

Ruth DeFries is Denning Family Professor of Sustainable Development and Chair of the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology at Columbia University. A recipient of the MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, she lives in New York City.

By: Ruth S DeFries(Author)
273 pages, b/w illustrations
Publisher: Basic Books
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