Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World

Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World - Paperback

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Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World
  • Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World
Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World - Paperback

Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World - Paperback

by Peter Godfrey-Smith
$22.00
$22.00
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Hardcover $29.00 Paperback $22.00

Book Overview

One of the Washington Post's 50 Best Nonfiction Books of 2024

The bestselling author of Other Minds shows how we and our ancestors have reinvented our planet.

If the history of the Earth were compressed down to a year, our species would arise in the last thirty minutes or so of the final hour. But life itself is not such a late arrival: It has existed on Earth for something like 3.7 billion years--most of our planet's history and over a quarter of the age of the universe (as far as we can tell).

What have these organisms--bacteria, animals, plants, and the rest--done in all this time? In Living on Earth, the philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith proposes a new way of understanding how the actions of living beings have shaped our planet. Where his acclaimed books Other Minds and Metazoa explored the riddle of how conscious minds came to exist on Earth, Living on Earth turns to what happens when we look at the mind from another side--when we come to see organisms as active causes, not merely as results of the evolutionary process. The planet we inhabit is significantly the work of other living beings, who shaped the environments that we ourselves later transformed.

To that end, Godfrey-Smith takes us on a grand tour of the history of life on earth. He visits Rwandan gorillas and Australian bowerbirds, returns to coral reefs and octopus dens, considers the impact of language and writing, and weighs the responsibilities our unique powers bring with them, as they relate to factory farming, habitat preservation, climate change, and the use of animals in experiments. Ranging from the seas to the forests, and from animate matter's first appearance to its future extinction, Godfrey-Smith offers a novel picture of the course of life on Earth and how we might meet the challenges of our time, the Anthropocene.
ISBN9781250397539
Author Peter Godfrey-Smith
PublisherPicador USA
GenreHobbies & interests and Education
FormatPaperback
PublishedSeptember 2025
LanguageENG- English
Pages336
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

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More by Peter Godfrey-Smith

Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World

Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World - Paperback

Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World - Paperback

By Peter Godfrey-Smith

About Peter Godfrey-Smith

Peter Godfrey-Smith is a distinguished professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and a professor of the history and philosophy of science at the University of Sydney. He is the author of several books, including Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science and Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection, which won the 2010 Lakatos Award. His underwater videos of octopuses have been featured in National Geographic and New Scientist, and he has discussed them on National Public Radio and many cable TV channels.

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