In "The Natural History of the Present" I describe the influence of different sorts of material lives-hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists, agriculturalists, early industrialists, moderns-on the natural environment; how that came to be; the advantages and disadvantages of the commodification of nature, which began not with us but with the first agriculturalists who turned trees into logs and forests into fields. I describe the natural world and how we could live modern lives in it. Two hundred years ago the use of fossil fuels to smelt iron and power steam engines removed the limits of the agricultural world (kept in check by the growth of trees, the growth of food plants, the fertility of soils). In the 20th century petroleum (and the petrochemical industry), penicillin, and electricity removed, at least temporarily, most limits from the human habitat. Our influence on the natural world is now enormous, subtle and ineluctable-dams influence coastal estuaries, for instance; carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels warms the air and acidifies the sea; tiny amounts of chemicals that mimic hormones affect wildlife, and us. In "The Natural History of the Present" I try to outline where we stand with respect to the natural world and how we got there. Ingenuity and economics have created the modern world. Can they give us a new one? Do we want one?
About the Author: I grew up, I went to college, quit, went back. Living at the edge of a small city, I began to watch birds at age ten or twelve. After finally graduating from The School of General Studies at Columbia University in 1965, in 1967 I went to Iceland on a Fulbright Scholarship to study gyrfalcons. The result was a long paper in Raptor Research Reports. I returned to the U.S. in 1969, married, lived in New York City, read Sven Hedin and The Whole Earth Catalogue. I worked as an editor for The Institute for the Study of Science in Human Affairs at Columbia. While we both loved New York, in 1972 my wife and I left for a new adventure in the Adirondack Mountains of northern New York State, where we bought a little piece of land and started building a house. After a year we moved in. I continued working on the (very unfinished) house while my wife went to work at a nearby state college. When the house was finally done I started growing things. No one was interested in organic vegetables in 1978. I started growing perennial flower plants, which I first sold wholesale and later retail. After a while my wife was able to stop working. In the winters I read books from the college library. Working in the nursery gave me a perspective on the natural world. As I potted plants during the late 70s and 80s I listened to the volume of birdsong decline. By the 90s the rush of spring migration seemed over; the birds drifted in. Slowly the familiar songs echoed from the woods. In the early 90s I lost several hundred plants whose leaf edges burned up: the Arctic ozone hole had drifted overhead. About 2005 the toads in my garden vanished and we had a plague of tiny slugs and snails. The calls of wood frogs still filled the night. Had the chytrid fungus moved through? Will the toad population recover? Or is this the new world? At the same time the falls got much longer, the killing frosts a month later. I could grow plants from a zone or two south. Since the 1970s I have believed we were changing the climate by burning fossil fuels. It seems to me anyone who knows the Keeling Curve of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and believes carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, has to suspect the combustion of fossil fuels is changing the climate. While I have believed this for forty years, I now fear we are in for a wild ride rather than a gradual warming. We were foolish to poke the climate beast! It'll be interesting, as my brother-in-law the ecologist says. But it may not be fun.