"A heroic and important work " -- Bryan Appleyard Sunday Times "An excellent book... Vince writes with great freshness and vigour, and her stories are hard to stop reading" Daily Telegraph "It holds a mirror up to humanity and says: look what you have done to the world, the only world you will ever have... in every sense a good book, as well as a compelling read" Guardian "A masterpiece... a wondrous, remarkable, but heart-rending story" Ecologist "A masterpiece... a wondrous, remarkable, but heart-rending story" Ecologist

PATTERNED PLANET: SPECIAL EDITIONS OF GROUNDBREAKING SCIENCE BOOKSIn recent decades human beings have altered the planet beyond anything it has experienced in its 4.5 billion-year history. We have become a force on a par with earth-shattering asteroids and planet-cloaking volcanoes. As a result, our planet is said to be crossing a geological boundary – from the Holocene into the Anthropocene, or the Age of Man.Gaia Vince quit her job to travel the world and to explore what all these changes really mean to our daily lives. She discovers the shocking ways in which we have reshaped our living planet and reveals the ingenious solutions we’ve evolved to engineer Earth for the future.