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

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...