Harvesting the Biosphere ─ What We Have Taken from Nature

The biosphere -- the Earth's thin layer of life -- dates from nearly four billionyears ago, when the first simple organisms appeared. Many species have exerted enormous influence onthe biosphere's character and productivity, but none has transformed the Earth in so many ways andon such a scale as Homo sapiens. In Harvesting the Biosphere,Vaclav Smil offers an interdisciplinary and quantitative account of human claims on the biosphere'sstores of living matter, from prehistory to the present day. Smil examines all harvests -- fromprehistoric man's hunting of megafauna to modern crop production -- and all uses of harvestedbiomass, including energy, food, and raw materials. Without harvesting of the biomass, Smil pointsout, there would be no story of human evolution and advancing civilization; but at the same time,the increasing extent and intensity of present-day biomass harvests are changing the veryfoundations of civilization's well-being.

In his detailed and comprehensiveaccount, Smil presents the best possible quantifications of past and current global losses in orderto assess the evolution and extent of biomass harvests. Drawing on the latest work in disciplinesranging from anthropology to environmental science, Smil offers a valuable long-term, planet-wideperspective on human-caused environmental change.

Vaclav Smil is the author of more than thirty books on energy, the environment, food, and the history of technical advances, including Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature, published by the MIT Press. He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba. In 2010 he was named by Foreign Policy as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers.