The book
This small book tells the story of life on planet Earth, from its primordial beginnings several thousand million years ago up to the present time. Special attention is paid to the highly significant impacts of humankind on the living world and to the ecological unsustainability of present patterns of human activity across the globe. It is hoped that the book will encourage individuals to become involved in discussion and debate about the future of civilisation, and to explore ways of becoming actively involved in the transition to an ecologically sustainable, healthy and equitable society of the future.
From the Introduction
The preparation of this book has been motivated by the conviction that a basic understanding, right across the community, of the story of life on Earth and the emergence of humankind as a product and part of nature is a prerequisite for successful transition to an ecologically sustainable and equitable society.
The book is based on an approach to understanding human situations that has been called biohistory. This approach takes knowledge of the processes of life as its starting point, and is concerned with the evolutionary history of life on Earth, and with fundamental biological and ecological principles. It also recognises the enormous significance in the history of life on Earth of the relatively recent emergence of humankind’s most distinctive biological attribute, our capacity for culture. As soon as human culture came into existence it began, through its influence on people’s behaviour, to affect not only humans themselves, but also other living systems. It evolved as a new kind of force in the biosphere, destined eventually to bring about profound and far-reaching changes across the whole planet. Some of these effects of culture would be seen by nearly everybody as desirable from the human point of view, some would be seen as desirable by some people and undesirable by others, and some would be seen as undesirable by nearly everybody.
Biohistory recognises the reality that the processes of life permeate, underpin and make possible the whole social system and everything that happens within it. Without them no human situation would exist, and if they go wrong, then the whole system goes wrong. Keeping them healthy must, in the long run, be our first priority, because everything else depends on them.
157 pages, 15 figures/diagrams, glossary, bibliography, index. ISBN 0 9585674 4 1
The author
Stephen Boyden received his PhD in immunology from the University of Cambridge in 1951 and carried out research in immunology in the USA, Europe and Australia. After 1965 he played a leading role in developing the new field of human ecology and biohistory at the Australian National University. He has published a number of books, and since his retirement, at the end of 1990, he has been an active member of the Nature and Society Forum.
An independent review of The Big Picture is available here, and a review from our own journal is here.
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