Who recommended Harvesting the Biosphere?

2 people have recommended Harvesting the Biosphere in the interviews, articles and reading lists we track, including Bill Gates. Each name links to their full reading list.

Is Harvesting the Biosphere worth reading?

2 people we track recommend it. It is best for: environmental-policy analyst drafting a land-use or food-security brief who needs concrete magnitudes and historical baselines to ground recommendations; the book supplies long-run data and comparisons to justify scale arguments.; energy-systems or ecology undergraduate trying to understand material flows across sectors and eras; the book supplies quantitative backstops to classroom concepts and sharpens intuition about orders of magnitude.; science-literate naturalist preparing a public talk on human impact who wants striking numeric contrasts and historical benchmarks rather than emotive anecdotes.. It may not suit: You’ll likely put it down when chapters turn into long runs of numbers, tables, and repeated conversions — readers who want narrative momentum often stop midway through the dense middle.; Annoying if you prefer character-driven storytelling, case studies, or prescriptive policy roadmaps; the book prioritizes measurement over human-scale stories and offers few actionable prescriptions.; Not suitable if you want hands-on exercises or a how-to guide — lacks practical exercises, step-by-step solutions, or interactive elements..

What books are like Harvesting the Biosphere?

Readers of Harvesting the Biosphere also turn to Accidental Presidents, Scale and Genome, based on the lists and recommenders these books share.

Harvesting the Biosphere: Recommended by 2 People

Name: Harvesting the Biosphere
Author: Vaclav Smil

An interdisciplinary and quantitative account of human claims on the biosphere's stores of living matter, from prehistoric hunting to modern energy production.The biospherethe Earth's thin layer of lifedates from nearly four billion years ago, when the first simple organisms appeared. Many species have exerted enormous influence on the biospher...