Missing the Global in the Local and the Local in the Global. The Idea of Prehistory Makes It Hard to Think about Global Change. The Beginning of History: The Land (and This Book and You and Me) Is Made of Matter. The Land Is the Functioning Skin of the Planet. The Land Lives, Suspended in a Network of Unholy Complication. Emergent Land Turning Green: The Coevolution of the Continents and Atmospheric Oxygen. The Land Covers Itself with Plants and Animals (and the Human Animal Comes Down from the Trees). The Land Covers Itself with Humans. Humans Cover Themselves with the Land. The History Hidden by Paradise: A Case Study.
Denis Wood is a writer living in Raleigh, North Carolina. He is the author of several books, including the bestselling The Power of Maps, written for the award-winning Power of Maps exhibition he put together at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. The exhibit was later remounted at the Smithsonian Institution. From 1974 to 1996, Wood was Professor of Design at North Carolina State University. He received a doctorate in geography from Clark University.
"Five Billion Years of Global Change is a dazzling intellectual
journey that has the potential to alter profoundly the ways in
which we think about our planet, human history, and our own lives.
The book depicts an intricately interwoven physical reality at a
multiplicity of scales, from aeons to nanosecond, from cosmos to
the subatomic. Commanding a prodigious range of knowledge, Denis
Wood writes in a captivating style all his own."--Wilbur Zelinsky,
Department of Geography (Emeritus), The Pennsylvania State
University "This book offers a deep meditation on the relation
between place and time as the environments in which we live. Not
since Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach has a single text presented
a thesis at once so radical and completely formed. Every section
overturns popular preconceptions. Time and again, what at first
seems an absurd statement becomes fully evident a few pages later.
It is this type of inversion of the common wisdom that makes the
book an important delight. Readers of Wood's earlier work will not
be disappointed: Five Billion Years of Global Change does for
environmental studies and natural history what The Power of Maps
did for cartography."--Tom Koch, author and adjunct professor,
Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Canada
"This inspiring book bursts into the emerging field of 'Big
History'--history writ across all time, from the Big Bang to
today--with an exhilarating style and sweep that should put it at
the top of the genre. Cosmologist of the quotidian, geographer of
Earth's grandest processes, Wood takes us from the Initial Instant
through the earth's formation, life's beginnings, continents'
shiftings, civilizations' risings and fallings, and on to our own
contemporary habitations on the land. A bold, original, and
visionary work."--Kent Mathewson, Department of Geography and
Anthropology, Louisiana State University
"Wood's conversational style and knack for storytelling helps him
take a mammoth and potentially overwhelming subject...and make it
enjoyable for almost any audience....This book would be a pleasant
read for those with a basic science background and a curiosity
about humanity's connection to the land....Environmental
professionals with interdisciplinary degrees would find this book
particularly intriguing. It's light enough for casual reading, but
also contains the 'facts and figures' that make it a valid
information source for students and professionals."--
"Environmental Practice"
"For the cause of understanding global change processes, Wood takes
the power of words and forms a new, arousing, and persuasive
language for the topic....Wood manages to compile the most
important results from the respective fields in an exemplary
interdisciplinary way. His book broadens the horizon of specialists
while at the same time offering a compilation of the literature and
scientific environmental thinking for an interested general
audience."-- "H-Net Review"
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