Be Fruitful and Multiply: How Fertility and Innovation Have Changed Humankind and the Earth

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Donald Worster

Be Fruitful and Multiply

Name: Be Fruitful and Multiply
Price: 51.95 AUD
Availability: OutOfStock
ISBN: 9780300278972

How Fertility and Innovation Have Changed Humankind and the Earth

Donald Worster

$51.95

Hardback

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English

Yale University Press
28 February 2026

General & world history; Human geography; Applied ecology

A groundbreaking history that explores how human desires have affected our relationship with the natural world, and why this is a cause for hope

Donald Worster looks back over 200,000 years of Homo sapiens sapiens to show how human nature, especially the drive for food and sex, has responded to environmental conditions throughout history. Examining how this process led from foraging to the agrarian revolution and then to a capitalist way of life, Worster brings us face to face with a third transformation of human society that is beginning to take shape in China: an ecological civilization.

This meticulously researched book explores how human desires have driven us to overrun our environments, and how we have adapted by creating new relationships with the earth. Tying the past to the future and humans to the planet, Worster acknowledges that we are at a potentially dangerous tipping point. Yet he offers a surprisingly optimistic vision, full of faith in the strength of our human desires, to help us develop exciting futures in a changing world—as we have done time and again—and achieve a good life for the billions of us trying to survive on a finite planet.

By: Donald Worster
Imprint: Yale University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9780300278972
ISBN 10: 0300278977
Pages: 328
Publication Date: 28 February 2026
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Donald Worster is an award-winning author and one of the founders of the field of environmental history. His many books include Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s, winner of the Bancroft Prize. He lives in Corvallis, OR.

Reviews for Be Fruitful and Multiply: How Fertility and Innovation Have Changed Humankind and the Earth

“Donald Worster’s book is far-reaching, ambitious, and exciting, a new classic in the field of environmental history.”—Edward D. Melillo, author of The Butterfly Effect: Insects and the Making of the Modern World