The Living Planet: A Portrait of the Earth Hardcover – November 1, 1984

The Living Planet is the story of the Earth's surface and its colonization by animals and plants. Changes proceed continuously. Vocanoes erupt, island are formed and disappear. Rivers clog and change their courses. Lakes fill with sediment and become swamps, and eventually plains. As continents drift over the face of the globe, moving toward the equator or up to the poles, so jungle may turn to tundra, and grasslands bake into desert. In the Living Planet David Attenborough explores the strategies different species use to survive environmental change. He visits Nepal and the Himalayas and the depths of the deep ocean. With techniques borrowed from mountaineering he climbs to the upper-most branches of the Amazon jungle canopy, in search for just a small handfull of the hundreds of thousands of individual creatures that may occupy a single hectare of forest. The picture that emerges is one of every conceivable relationship of interdependence between plants, animals, and their environments. If a habitat undergoes chang,e how do species adapt? As lake regions drain to marsh, what is required of the occupants? How do they survive? This is what David Attenborough shows us. Species' adaptations are often extraordinary: fish that walk or lay eggs on leaves in mid-air; snakes that fly; flightless birds that graze like deer; and bears that grow hair on the soles of their feet. Finally, Attenborough takes us to the most confused and indecipherable of all world habitats; the city of man. Here in the articial environment man has created for his own habitations, adaptation continues to be the key to survival.