Biocivilisations is a fascinating, original and important exploration into how complex civilisations existed on Earth long before humans. What is life? This is arguably the most important question in all of science. Many scientists believe life can be reduced to ‘mechanistic’ factors, such as genes and information codes. Everything can be sequenced and explained. But in a world as rich and complex as this one, can such an assertion really be true? A growing army of scientists, philosophers and artists do not share this mechanistic vision for the science of life. The gene metaphor is not only too simplistic but also misleading. If there is a way to reduce life to a single principle, how does that principle acknowledge the creativity of life that turns both genetic and information determinism on their heads? Biocivilisations is a groundbreaking book exploring the mysteries of life and its deep uncertainty. Dr Predrag Slijepčević turns anthropocentric scientific thinking on its head, showing how the humble bacteria created the equivalent of cities and connected them with information highways, bringing our planet to life three thousand million years ago. He explains how bacteria, amoebas, plants, insects, birds, whales, elephants and countless other species not only preceded human beings but also demonstrate elements of complex civilisation – communication, agriculture, science, art, medicine and more – that we associate with human achievement. More than 99.99 percent of life on Earth has existed without humanity, and life will continue without humans long into the future. Biocivilisations is an important rethinking of the current scientific paradigm. It challenges us to reconsider the limited scope and time-window of our current ‘scientific revolution’ and to fundamentally reimagine what we call ‘life on Earth’.

Die Weltgemeinschaft ist heute mehr denn je mit gewaltigen Herausforderungen konfrontiert. In vielen Regionen der Welt wird diskutiert, welche Entwicklungsparadigmen ethisch verantwortbar, politisch vermittelbar und zugleich nachhaltig sein können. Der Band versammelt Beiträge eines interkulturellen Dialogs über zukünftige Entwicklungsparadigmen. Dieser Dialog wird sowohl auf der konzeptionellen wie auf der praktisch-politischen Ebene geführt, denn die Dringlichkeit der globalen Krisen erfordert ein gemeinsames Nachdenken über alternative Entwicklungsmodelle und ihre politische Umsetzung.

The award-winning journalist Lisa Margonelli, national bestselling author of Oil on the Brain: Petroleum’s Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank, investigates the environmental and economic impact termites inflict on human societies in this fascinating examination of one of nature’s most misunderstood insects. Are we more like termites than we ever imagined? In Underbug, the award-winning journalist Lisa Margonelli introduces us to the enigmatic creatures that collectively outweigh human beings ten to one and consume $40 billion worth of valuable stuff annually—and yet, in Margonelli’s telling, seem weirdly familiar. Over the course of a decade-long obsession with the little bugs, Margonelli pokes around termite mounds and high-tech research facilities, closely watching biologists, roboticists, and geneticists. Her globe-trotting journey veers into uncharted territory, from evolutionary theory to Edwardian science literature to the military industrial complex. What begins as a natural history of the termite becomes a personal exploration of the unnatural future we’re building, with darker observations on power, technology, historical trauma, and the limits of human cognition. Whether in Namibia or Cambridge, Arizona or Australia, Margonelli turns up astounding facts and raises provocative questions. Is a termite an individual or a unit of a superorganism? Can we harness the termite’s properties to change the world? If we build termite-like swarming robots, will they inevitably destroy us? Is it possible to think without having a mind? Underbug burrows into these questions and many others—unearthing disquieting answers about the world’s most underrated insect and what it means to be human.

This book presents the result of an innovative challenge, to create a systematic literature overview driven by machine-generated content. Questions and related keywords were prepared for the machine to query, discover, collate and structure by Artificial Intelligence (AI) clustering. The AI-based approach seemed especially suitable to provide an innovative perspective as the topics are indeed both complex, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary, for example, climate, planetary and evolution sciences. Springer Nature has published much on these topics in its journals over the years, so the challenge was for the machine to identify the most relevant content and present it in a structured way that the reader would find useful. The automatically generated literature summaries in this book are intended as a springboard to further discoverability. They are particularly useful to readers with limited time, looking to learn more about the subject quickly and especially if they are new to the topics. Springer Nature seeks to support anyone who needs a fast and effective start in their content discovery journey, from the undergraduate student exploring interdisciplinary content, to Master- or PhD-thesis developing research questions, to the practitioner seeking support materials, this book can serve as an inspiration, to name a few examples. It is important to us as a publisher to make the advances in technology easily accessible to our authors and find new ways of AI-based author services that allow human-machine interaction to generate readable, usable, collated, research content.

In an age of climate catastrophes and extinction, we need to turn back to nature and learn, once again, how to live sustainably on planet Earth—beginning with our relationship to food. Four billion years ago, Earth was a hot, lifeless planet. Through the process of evolution, the Earth and its diversity of living organisms gradually reduced the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. About 200,000 years ago, the conditions aligned for our own species—Homo sapiens—to emerge and thrive. But what will it take to continue to survive? In The Nature of Nature, world-renowned environmental thinker and activist Vandana Shiva argues that food is the currency of life, a thread woven throughout the web of all life, indivisible from Earth and its natural systems. When this interdependence is ruptured—as it is now—the conditions for the “metabolic disorder” of climate change and countless other ecological imbalances come into being. Proposals put forward by Big Ag and Big Tech to solve the intertwined climate and food crises will only exacerbate both. With clarity and a detailed analysis, Shiva unpacks the false promises made by technology-oriented, lab-intensive digital agriculture, revealing the dangers posed by fake and ultra-processed foods—dangers to the environment, to increasing greenhouse gas emissions, to the health of animals, and to our health and food security. In The Nature of Nature, Shiva takes a powerful stand, arguing with urgency and passion for a food and climate future based not on techno-optimism, hallucination, and corporate delusions, but on the natural regeneration of biodiversity in partnership with the biosphere. Praise for Vandana Shiva: “She’s been called the ‘Gandhi of grain,’ the ‘rock star’ of the anti-GMO movement and an ‘eco-warrior goddess.’ . . . Above all, [she] is a staunch believer that the food we eat matters. It makes us who we are, physically, culturally and spiritually.”—BBC

An unprecedented look at the complex and beautiful world of underground ant architecture Walter Tschinkel has spent much of his career investigating the hidden subterranean realm of ant nests. This wonderfully illustrated book takes you inside an unseen world where thousands of ants build intricate homes in the soil beneath our feet. Tschinkel describes the ingenious methods he has devised to study ant nests, showing how he fills a nest with plaster, molten metal, or wax and painstakingly excavates the cast. He guides you through living ant nests chamber by chamber, revealing how nests are created and how colonies function. How does nest architecture vary across species? Do ants have "architectural plans"? How do nests affect our environment? As he delves into these and other questions, Tschinkel provides a one-of-a-kind natural history of the planet's most successful creatures and a compelling firsthand account of a life of scientific discovery. Offering a unique look at how simple methods can lead to pioneering science, Ant Architecture addresses the unsolved mysteries of underground ant nests while charting new directions for tomorrow’s research, and reflects on the role of beauty in nature and the joys of shoestring science.

"EMPOWERING...KINARI WEBB IS AN INSPIRATION." --BILL MCKIBBEN "A WONDERFUL BOOK." --JANE GOODALL A TIMELY, HOPEFUL MEMOIR ABOUT A WOMAN SPEARHEADING A GLOBAL INITIATIVE TO HEAL THE WORLD'S RAINFORESTS AND THE COMMUNITIES WHO DEPEND ON THEM Full of hope and optimism, Kinari Webb takes us on an exhilarating, galvanizing journey across the world, sharing her passion for the natural world and for humanity. In our current moment of crisis, Guardians of the Trees is an essential roadmap for moving forward and the inspiring story of one woman’s quest to heal the world. When Webb first traveled to Indonesian Borneo at 21 to study orangutans, she was both awestruck by the beauty of her surroundings and heartbroken by the rainforest destruction she witnessed. As she got to know the local communities, she realized that their need to pay for expensive healthcare led directly to the rampant logging, which in turn imperiled their health and safety even further. Webb realized her true calling was at the intersection of medicine and conservation. After graduating with honors from the Yale School of Medicine, Webb returned to Borneo, listening to local communities about their solutions for how to both protect the rainforests and improve their lives. Founding two non-profits, Health in Harmony in the U.S. and ASRI in Indonesia, Webb and her local and international teams partnered with rainforest communities, building a clinic, developing regenerative economies, providing educational opportunities, and dramatically transforming the region. But just when everything was going right, Webb was stung by a deadly box jellyfish and would spend the next four years fighting for her life, a fight that would lead her to rethink everything. Was she ready to expand her work to a global scale and take climate change head on?

With a new epilogue about Bill Gates’s global agenda and how we can resist the billionaires’ war on life “This is what globalization looks like: Opportunism. Exploitation. Further centralization of power. Further disempowerment of ordinary people. . . . Vandana Shiva is an expert whose analysis has helped us understand this situation much more deeply.”—Russell Brand Widespread poverty, social unrest, and economic polarization have become our lived reality as the top 1% of the world’s seven-billion-plus population pushes the planet―and all its people―to the social and ecological brink. In Oneness vs. the 1%, Vandana Shiva takes on the billionaire dictators of Gates, Buffet, and Mark Zuckerberg, as well as other modern empires like Big Tech, Big Pharma, and Big Ag, whose blindness to the rights of people, and to the destructive impact of their construct of linear progress, have wrought havoc across the world. Their single-minded pursuit of profit has undemocratically enforced uniformity and monocultures, division and separation, monopolies and external control―over finance, food, energy, information, healthcare, and even relationships. Basing her analysis on explosive facts, Shiva exposes the 1%’s model of philanthrocapitalism, which is about deploying unaccountable money to bypass democratic structures, derail diversity, and impose totalitarian ideas based on One Science, One Agriculture, and One History. Instead, Shiva calls for the resurgence of: Real knowledge Real intelligence Real wealth Real work Real well-being With these core goals, people can reclaim their right to: Live Free. Think Free. Breathe Free. Eat Free.

The Earth has entered a new age—the Anthropocene—in which humans are the most powerful influence on global ecology. Since the mid-twentieth century, the accelerating pace of energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and population growth has thrust the planet into a massive uncontrolled experiment. The Great Acceleration explains its causes and consequences, highlighting the role of energy systems, as well as trends in climate change, urbanization, and environmentalism. More than any other factor, human dependence on fossil fuels inaugurated the Anthropocene. Before 1700, people used little in the way of fossil fuels, but over the next two hundred years coal became the most important energy source. When oil entered the picture, coal and oil soon accounted for seventy-five percent of human energy use. This allowed far more economic activity and produced a higher standard of living than people had ever known—but it created far more ecological disruption. We are now living in the Anthropocene. The period from 1945 to the present represents the most anomalous period in the history of humanity’s relationship with the biosphere. Three-quarters of the carbon dioxide humans have contributed to the atmosphere has accumulated since World War II ended, and the number of people on Earth has nearly tripled. So far, humans have dramatically altered the planet’s biogeochemical systems without consciously managing them. If we try to control these systems through geoengineering, we will inaugurate another stage of the Anthropocene. Where it might lead, no one can say for sure.

"Paul S. Martin's innovative ideas on late quaternary extinctions and wildlife restoration have fueled one of science's most stimulating recent debates. He expounds them vividly here, and defends them eloquently. A must-read."—David Rains Wallace, author of Beasts of Eden "This is a marvelous read, by a giant in American prehistory, about one of the greatest mysteries in the earth sciences."—Tim Flannery, author of The Eternal Frontier "Whether or not you agree with Paul Martin, he has shaped how we think about our Pleistocene ancestors and their role in transforming this planet."—Ross D. E. MacPhee, Curator of Mammalogy, American Museum of Natural History