The Weekly Anthropocene Reviews: What Would Nature Do? by Ruth DeFries
A The Weekly Anthropocene Book Review
The Weekly Anthropocene published a review of Ruth DeFries’ What Would Nature Do? in May 2021. The interview is now republished (with a few text & image updates) for Substack!
In "What Would Nature Do?", Columbia University professor of ecology and sustainable development Dr. Ruth DeFries zooms through the stories of human civilization and the nonhuman world to identify key strategies that help systems, from organs to individual creatures to nation-states, survive disruption. It's a slim volume, at 6 chapters and under 200 pages, but positively packed with fascinating history, science, and analysis. The "wow, that's awesome!"-moment-to-page ratio is very high. Dr. DeFries' writing is delightfully playful and variegated, willing to incorporate in-depth analogies and examples from cases as diverse as Isaac Asimov's fictional Galactic Empire, real-world economist Elinor Ostrom's research,…
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