He looks at ways we might do this - one is to control nature so that the Earth becomes one giant intensive farm, but "it would lack the resilience and energy budget to keep Earth habitable". The other is to try to heal the wounds, the damage stretching back 50,000 years that our species has inflicted - not, Flannery says, something that can be done quickly, but should be an "intergenerational ambition" ... to have a "rewilding... a reconstruction of vital exosystems on a scale sufficient to allow them to operate optimally without intrusive human management ... vanished ... ecosystems... more productive and stable than the degraded ones" we have now. And, Flannery says, for Siberia that might need to include bringing back the mammoth, for only it would also allow other grazers to flourish. That, in a way, is only a small part of Flannery's ambition, but it is at least a vision, a model, of how the world we know might survive, and flourish.
* Published in the US with a different subtitle, "A Natural History of the Planet".
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