Adventures in the Anthropocene (eBook)

We live in epoch-making times. Literally. The changes we humans have made in recent decades have altered our world beyond anything it has experienced in its 4.5 billion-year history — we have become a force on a par with earth-shattering asteroids and planet-cloaking volcanoes.

As a result, our planet is said to be crossing a geological boundary — from the Holocene into the Anthropocene, or Age of Man.

Quitting her job at science journal Nature, Gaia Vince decided to travel the world at the start of this new age, to explore what all these changes really mean for the people living on the frontline of the planet we've made.

She found ordinary people solving severe crises in ingenious, effective ways. Take the retired railway worker who's building artificial glaciers in the Himalayas, for example, or the man who's painting mountains white to attract snowfall. Meet the villagers harvesting water out of the desert air and farmers combining the latest genetic modifications with ancient irrigation techniques, witness the electrified reefs in the Maldives and the man who's making islands out of rubbish in the Caribbean.

Alongside these extraordinary stories, Gaia looks at how humanity's changes are reshaping the living planet and identifies some of the ways we need to engineer Earth for our future, bringing to life what the Anthropocene means for all of us and how we might survive the coming centuries.

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** Winner of Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books 2015 **We live in epoch-making times. The changes we humans have made in recent decades have altered our world beyond anything it has experienced in its 4.6 billion-year history. As a result, our planet is said to be crossing into the Anthropocene the Age of Humans. Gaia Vince decided to travel the world at the start of this new age to see what life is really like for the people on the frontline of the planet we ve made. From artificial glaciers in the Himalayas to painted mountains in Peru, electrified reefs in the Maldives to garbage islands in the Caribbean, Gaia found people doing the most extraordinary things to solve the problems that we ourselves have created. These stories show what the Anthropocene means for all of us and they illuminate how we might engineer Earth for our future.