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Title details for The Big Ratchet by Ruth DeFries - Available

The Big Ratchet

How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis

by Ruth DeFries
Pam Ward
Audiobook
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The Big Ratchet is the story of the ratchets: the technologies and innovations, big and small, that propelled our species from hunters and gatherers on the savannahs of Africa to shoppers in the aisles of the supermarket.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.The Big Ratchet itself came in the twentieth century, when a range of technologies-from fossil fuels to scientific plant breeding to nitrogen fertilizers-combined to nearly quadruple our population in a century, and to grow our food supply even faster. To some, these technologies are a sign of our greatness; to others, of our hubris. MacArthur fellow and Columbia University professor Ruth DeFries argues that the debate is the wrong one to have. Limits do exist, but every limit that has confronted us, we have surpassed. That cycle of crisis and growth is the story of our history; indeed, it is the essence of The Big Ratchet. Understanding it will reveal not just how we reached this point in our history, but how we might survive it.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    September 9, 2014

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781622315284
      • File size: 208896 KB
      • Duration: 07:15:11

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Defries, an environmental geographer and 2007 MacArthur Fellow, offers the basic information we should all know to understand our species' precarious ability to extract enough food for our growing numbers from our small but bountiful planet. Following the outline of a basic course in food systems or sustainable development, the book discuss climate change only briefly, environmental politics not at all. Pam Ward's delivery is always clear and well paced. She's at home with the pronunciation of scientific terms and place names from around the world. Her didactic tone may remind listeners of a grade school teacher, but she gets her points across. F.C. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      June 30, 2014
      Columbia professor and MacArthur fellow DeFries (Ecosystems and Land Use Change) follows the trajectory of the human species by tracing how we meet our most basic need—feeding ourselves. DeFries frames humanity’s relationship to the environment in three-step cycles of pivots, new innovations that allow us to stave off hunger by extracting energy from nature more efficiently; ratchets, the population increase that this new bounty allows; and hatchets, obstacles that arise when the innovation has reached a limit that lead to the invention of new pivots. Her history of agriculture tracks our path from hunter-gatherers to farmers to city dwellers: in each successive stage we have grown more reliant on the efforts of fewer people to feed more, and have utilized sources of energy which steal fewer of the calories by moving from human power, to animal power, to the power of fossil fuels. Neither technophile nor doomsayer, DeFries sees today’s hatchet not in overpopulation but in the uneven distribution of access to new methods and in the declining quality of the human diet. DeFries places her faith in human creativity as a primary means to our survival, an appealing point of view for the hopeful but concerned reader. B&w images.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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