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The Living Planet
The Living Planet
is the story of the Earth's surface and its colonization by animals and
plants. Changes proceed continuously. Volcanoes erupt, islands are
formed and disappear. Rivers clog and change their courses. Lakes fill
with sediment and become swamps, and eventually plains. As continents
drift over the face of the globe, moving toward the equator or up to
the poles, so jungle may turn to tundra, and grasslands bake into
desert.
In The Living Planet
David Attenborough explores the strategies different species use to
survive environmental change. He visits Nepal and the Himalayas and the
depths of the deep ocean. With techniques borrowed from mountaineering
he climbs to the uppermost branches of the Amazon jungle canopy, in
search for just a small handful of the hundreds of thousands of
individual creatures that may occupy a single hectare of forest.
The
picture that emerges is one of every conceivable relationship of
interdependence between plants, animals, and their environments. If a
habitat undergoes change, how do species adapt? As lake regions drain
to marsh, what is required of the occupants? How do they survive? This
is what David Attenborough shows us. Species' adaptations are often
extraordinary: fish that walk or lay eggs on leaves in mid-air; snakes
that fly; flightless birds that graze like deer; and bears that grow
hair on the soles of their feet.
Finally, Attenborough takes us
to the most confused and indecipherable of all world habitats: the city
of man. Here, in the artificial environment man has created for his own
habitation, adaptation continues to be the key to survival. The lesson
of The Living Planet
is the lesson of the jungle and the ocean: all creates must find
appropriate ways to live.
As
we study the exacting measures of nature on the world around us, all
too often ignored, we are granted some insight into the predicaments
and rewards of our own devising, and the naturalization of our own
artifices.
Hardbound in good condition
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