Donald Worster looks back at over 200,000 years of Homo sapiens sapiens to show how human nature, especially the drive for food and sex, has responded to environmental conditions throughout history. Examining how this process led from a foraging lifestyle to the agrarian revolution and then to the capitalist way of life, Worster brings us face to face with a third transformation of human society that is beginning to take shape in China: an ecological civilization.

This meticulously researched book explores how human desires have driven us to overrun our environments, and how we have adapted by creating new relationships with Earth. Tying the past to the future and humans to the planet, Worster acknowledges that we are at a potentially dangerous tipping point. Yet he offers a surprisingly optimistic vision, full of faith in the strength of our human desires, to help us develop exciting futures in a changing world--as we have done time and again--and achieve a good life for the billions of us trying to survive on a finite planet.