The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us

Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award and the PEN New England Henry David Thoreau Prize.



A dazzling, inspiring tour through the ways that humans are working with nature to try to save the planet.

With her celebrated blend of scientific insight, clarity, and curiosity, Diane Ackerman explores our human capacity both for destruction and for invention as we shape the future of the planet Earth. Ackerman takes us to the mind-expanding frontiers of science, exploring the fact that the "natural" and the "human" now inescapably depend on one another, drawing from "fields as diverse as evolutionary robotics…nanotechnology, 3-D printing and biomimicry" (New York Times Book Review), with probing intelligence, a clear eye, and an ever-hopeful heart.

• The Hidden Half of Nature: The Microbial Roots of Life and Health
• A Natural History of the Senses
• Annals of the Former World
• The Wonder of Birds: What They Tell Us About Ourselves, the World, and a Better Future
• The Quantum Moment: How Planck, Bohr, Einstein, and Heisenberg Taught Us to Love Uncertainty
• The Gecko’s Foot: How Scientists are Taking a Leaf from Nature's Book
• First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe
• The Genius of Birds
• The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter
• A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes