Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction

One of the world’s most influential ecologists tells the remarkable story of how nature is fighting back on our human-altered planet

It is accepted wisdom today that human beings have irrevocably damaged the natural world. We have altered our climate, acidified our oceans, and we are in the process of causing the sixth mass extinction. Yet what if this gloomy narrative obscures a more hopeful truth? In Inheritors of the Earth, renowned ecologist and environmentalist Chris D. Thomas overturns this loss-only view of the world’s biodiversity, revealing how many animals and plants have benefited from the human-altered planet.

Taking us on a round-the-world journey to meet the enterprising animals and plants that are thriving in the Anthropocene, from York’s ochre-coloured comma butterfly to the hybrid American bison and the scarlet-beaked New Zealand pukeko, Thomas questions why we resist the success of so-called ‘invasive species’, and why we see human activities as fundamentally unnatural. Combining a naturalist’s eye for wildlife with an ecologist’s wide lens, Chris Thomas forces us to re-examine humanity’s relationship with nature, and reminds us that the story of life is the story of change.