Preface
I grew up in a nondescript suburb of Washington, DC. I thought it was heaven. In the winter, it snowed just frequently enough to get some sledding in and cancel a few days of school, but not so much that it forced the school district to cut into summer vacation. Summers were hot and humid: the perfect excuse for spending several months in your bathing suit. Although the region was a growing metropolis, it was still interspersed with exquisite natural beauty. My father and I would go on fishing trips to the Chesapeake Bay, where we gamely hoped to catch a “blue”— the bluefish (Pomatomus saltatrix)—but we usually just came home with sunburn. I hiked in eastern deciduous forests, where I first became fascinated by plants. I spent long afternoons in a remnant sliver of forest next to my house trying to learn the names of the trees: sweet gum (Liquidambar styraciflua), sassafras (Sassafras albidum), black cherry (S. albidum), southern red oak (Quercus falcata), black walnut (Juglans nigra). I got pretty good at it, even though I spent most of my time just sitting there listening to the birds, the rustle of the trees in the breeze, and imagining I was on an epic Amazonian expedition instead of a few blocks from my home.
When I went away to college in California, the differences were disorienting. There were new plants: California buckeye (Aesculus californica), California sagebrush (Artemisia californica), California poppy (Eschscholzia californica), California fescue (Festuca californica). The landscapes were strange: golden-brown hillsides, azure-blue ocean, forests of insanely large trees, silent deserts, vast farms that stretched for miles, fish the color of oranges. It even smelled different—briny kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera), medicinal Eucalyptus (Eucalyptus globulus), calming black sage (Salvia mellifera), barbershop coyote bush (Baccharis pilularis), and shockingly sweet night-blooming cereus (Selenicereus grandiflorus).
What I didn’t fully appreciate back then was that the California geography that fascinated me was itself undergoing profound changes, as was the Maryland of my childhood—and indeed the entire planet. The planet has changed radically over the span of just a few human generations. The length and harshness of the seasons, the saltiness of the oceans, the types of plants and animals, the sounds of the day, the darkness of the night, the clearness of the sky, the quality of the water, and the smell of the air have all changed since our great-grandparents were born.
From our typically shortsighted and distracted watch, many of these changes seem gradual and subtle. But we are realizing just how different the world now is from our memory of it. We are like the astronauts in Ray Bradbury’s Mars Is Heaven. Upon landing on Mars, the crew is greeted with achingly familiar scenes from their lives back home on Earth: lush green lawns, picket fences, Mom and Dad. Faced with such an absurdity, the astronauts don’t question or analyze but instead latch on to the familiar. Mars must be heaven. Slowly, disquiet eventually creeps in, but the realization that they are most definitely not on Earth anymore comes too late. I think many of us have a creeping disquiet about the familiar yet different Earth we now call home.
This book is an introduction to our new planet. It is written in the spirt of a natural history guide; books like A Natural History of California by Allan Schoenherr, which helped orient me to the strange new California landscape I found myself in. Given the not-so-modest scope of the topic, it doesn’t cover lots of things, has large gaps in the things it does cover, glosses over an endless number of details, and idiosyncratically focuses on a few others, but I hope that it provides a somewhat helpful overview of the main ways in which we now interact with our planet.
It is organized into three sections. The prologue includes a chapter that explores some of the fundamental reasons for how we came to have such an influence on the planet. There is also a chapter that outlines the basic concept of biodiversity. How we are changing biodiversity is a theme that runs through the book. The second section contains several chapters that explore the natural history of our now human-dominated world. These include some broad overview chapters describing how we influence the Earth System, particularly its climate and biodiversity. It also includes chapters that explore in more detail two of the important ways we shape the world: agriculture and urbanization. The last section explores our changing relationship with nature. Although it starts out pretty philosophical, most of the two chapters in that section are focused on practical ways in which we are trying to take more proactive stewardship of our world.
