Table of Contents

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.

About the Author

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.

Reviews

"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"