Discipline
Environment
Lessons across the journey that lean on environment, in the order they appear in the story.
- 4.5 Oceans and airDraft
Where the water and the atmosphere came from.
- 4.7 Earth as a systemDraft
Rock, water, air and life as one connected machine.
- 5.4 The Great Oxidation EventDraft
How life poisoned the planet, and why we breathe the waste.
- 6.7 Foraging lifewaysDraft
How people lived for ninety-five percent of human history, and why we keep getting it wrong.
- 7.1 Why farm?Draft
The worst decision anyone ever made, taken independently at least eleven times.
- 7.2 DomesticationDraft
What we did to plants and animals, and what they did to us.
- 7.3 Villages to citiesDraft
How a pile of grain becomes a temple, a scribe, a tax and a king.
- 7.4 The Indus Valley civilisationDraft
The largest of the ancient civilisations by area, with no palaces, no royal tombs, and a script nobody can read.
- 7.5 The price of farmingDraft
The bill for cities: disease, inequality, patriarchy, slavery and soil.
- 7.6 Empires and exchangeDraft
Why agrarian states kept growing, kept collapsing, and kept connecting.
- 8.1 The Columbian ExchangeDraft
Two worlds meet, and the deadliest thing that crosses is invisible.
- 9.1 The next century: climateDraft
The range of plausible futures narrowed at both ends, and almost nobody noticed.
- 9.2 Energy after fossil fuelsDraft
The transition is probably cheaper than not doing it, and that is the least interesting thing about it.