Discipline
Environment
Lessons across the journey that lean on environment, in the order they appear in the story.
- 4.7 Earth as a systemPlanned
Rock, water, air and life as one connected machine.
- 5.1 What is life?Planned
Definitions of life, and the last universal common ancestor of everything alive today.
- 5.2 How chemistry became biologyDraft
The hypotheses and evidence for the origin of life.
- 5.3 Evolution by natural selectionPlanned
The mechanism, stated precisely, and the evidence that it works.
- 5.4 The Great Oxidation EventPlanned
How microbes remade the planet's atmosphere.
- 5.5 The complex cellPlanned
Endosymbiosis and the origin of the eukaryotic cell.
- 5.6 The Cambrian explosionPlanned
Animal body plans appear in the fossil record.
- 5.7 Mass extinctionsPlanned
Five great dyings and the age of reptiles.
- 5.8 Mammals in the shadowsDraft
How small mammals survived the dinosaurs and inherited the Earth.
- 7.1 Why farm?Draft
Climate, population and the Holocene: why farming began where and when it did.
- 7.2 DomesticationPlanned
How wheat, rice, cattle and dogs were remade by people, and people by them.
- 7.3 Villages to citiesDraft
Surplus, hierarchy, writing and the first states.
- 7.5 The price of farmingPlanned
Disease, inequality and shorter lives: what agriculture cost.
- 8.1 The Columbian ExchangePlanned
1492 and the joining of the world's biological and human systems.
- 8.2 The Scientific RevolutionPlanned
A new way of knowing: evidence, instruments and doubt.
- 8.3 Fossil fuels and the Industrial RevolutionPlanned
Coal, steam and the release of stored sunlight.
- 8.4 The Great AccelerationPlanned
Population, energy and information since 1950.
- 8.5 The AnthropocenePlanned
Humans as a geological force.
- 9.1 The next century: climatePlanned
What the climate models say, what is settled, what is not, and what is still up to us.
- 9.2 Energy after fossil fuelsPlanned
Sun, wind, atoms and storage: the transition that decides what the next century looks like.