The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis

How an ordinary mammal manipulated nature to become technologically sophisticated city-dwellers--and why our history points to an optimistic future in the face of environmental crisis
Our species long lived on the edge of starvation. Now we produce enough food for all 7 billion of us to eat nearly 3,000 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