A world shaped by trees
Humans have changed the Earth in multiple ways, from the early hunters driving megafauna into extinction through to today’s global problems that have shifted seven out of nine Earth systems beyond the safe operating boundaries, including climate change, global cycles of phosphorus and nitrogen, chemical pollution, soil degradation, and most recently, ocean acidification.
Giant microbial threat
In this book, the author Thomas Levenson chronicles how the great scourges of the past, including cholera, childhood diseases such as measles and diphtheria, polio, smallpox and tuberculosis, were all eventually brought under control.