About the book
Columbia professor Ruth DeFries, a MacArthur fellow, tells how humans, long on the edge of starvation, came to produce enough food for 7 billion people to eat nearly 3,000 calories a day. Her ratchets are innovations large and small that carried the species from hunting and gathering on the African savannah to supermarket aisles: controlling fire, breeding palatable plants, shipping fertilizer across the Atlantic and tinkering with plant genomes. In the twentieth century came the biggest ratchet of all, as fossil fuels, scientific plant breeding and nitrogen fertilizers combined to nearly quadruple the population in a century. DeFries argues that limits do exist, but that humanity has so far surpassed every one it has faced.
Steven Pinker chose it for a Guardian list of books to make readers optimists.
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This book has 1 recommendation
Steven Pinker (Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, author)
On Steven Pinker’s Steven Pinker recommends books to make you an optimist (The Guardian, by Steven Pinker)
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