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Summary and Reviews of The Human Age by Diane Ackerman

The Human Age by Diane Ackerman

The Human Age

The World Shaped By Us

by Diane Ackerman
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (3):
  • First Published:
  • Sep 10, 2014, 352 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Sep 2015, 352 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

A beguiling, optimistic engagement with the changes affecting every part of our lives, The Human Age is a wise and beautiful book that will astound, delight, and inform intelligent life for a long time to come.

As Diane Ackerman writes in her brilliant new book, The Human Age, "our relationship with nature has changed…radically, irreversibly, but by no means all for the bad. Our new epoch is laced with invention. Our mistakes are legion, but our talent is immeasurable."

Ackerman is justly celebrated for her unique insight into the natural world and our place in it. In this landmark book, she confronts the unprecedented reality that one prodigiously intelligent and meddlesome creature, Homo sapiens, is now the dominant force shaping the future of planet Earth.

Humans have "subdued 75 percent of the land surface, concocted a wizardry of industrial and medical marvels, strung lights all across the darkness." We tinker with nature at every opportunity; we garden the planet with our preferred species of plants and animals, many of them invasive; and we have even altered the climate, threatening our own extinction.

Yet we reckon with our own destructive capabilities in extraordinary acts of hope-filled creativity: we collect the DNA of vanishing species in a "frozen ark," equip orangutans with iPads, and create wearable technologies and synthetic species that might one day outsmart us. With her distinctive gift for making scientific discovery intelligible to the layperson, Ackerman takes us on an exhilarating journey through our new reality, introducing us to many of the people and ideas now creating—perhaps saving—our future and that of our fellow creatures.

A beguiling, optimistic engagement with the changes affecting every part of our lives, The Human Age is a wise and beautiful book that will astound, delight, and inform intelligent life for a long time to come.

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Reviews

BookBrowse Review

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Taking into consideration the latest technologies, the vast amount of information available online, and the advances in medicine and abilities to improve the human body, Ackerman sets out to answer whether or not it's still possible to fix the mess we've gotten ourselves into. This is a heavy question, but her overriding view is that while we human beings have created serious and threatening environmental chaos that urgently needs to be reined in, Ackerman remains enormously hopeful, reminding us that we are thinkers, builders, rearrangers, and inventors...continued

Full Review (661 words)

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(Reviewed by Sharry Wright).

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Beyond the Book



Patrick Blanc And the Vertical Garden

In the past twenty years, planted walls and vertical gardens, one of the many innovations showcased in The Human Age, have gone from novelty to mainstream, as part of the reconciliation ecology movement that is working to preserve or increase urban biodiversity. All around the world, vertical gardens are creating dynamic ecosystems that attract butterflies and birds, help clean the air, produce more oxygen, and reduce noise, while also softening contours, feeding the human spirit, and reconnecting urban dwellers with the natural world.

Patrick Blanc One of the people responsible for the creation of many of the large-scale vertical gardens is French botanist Patrick Blanc. Widely referenced as the modern innovator of the green wall, Blanc spent ...

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Read-Alikes

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