Overview

Despite efforts to sustain civilization, humanity faces existential threats from overpopulation, globalized trade and travel, urbanization, and global climate change. In A Darwinian Survival Guide, Daniel Brooks and Salvatore Agosta offer a novel--and hopeful--perspective on how to meet these tremendous challenges by changing the discourse from sustainability to survival. Darwinian evolution, the world's only theory of survival, is the means by which the biosphere has persisted and renewed itself following past environmental perturbations, and it has never failed, they explain. Brooks and Agosta trace the evolutionary path from the early days of humans through the Late Pleistocene and the beginning of the Anthropocene all the way to the Great Acceleration of technological humanity around 1950, demonstrating how our creative capacities have allowed humanity to survive. However, constant conflict without resolution has made the Anthropocene not only unsustainable, but unsurvivable. They reveal a middle ground, with two options: alter our behavior now at great expense and extend civilization or fail to act and rebuild in accordance with those same principles. If we take the latter, then our immediate goal ought to focus on preserving as many of humanity's positive achievements as possible to shorten the time needed to rebuild.

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Daniel R. Brooks is Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto, Senior Research Fellow, H. W. Manter Laboratory of Parasitology, University of Nebraska State Museum, and Fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS). He is coauthor of The Stockholm Paradigm and The Major Metaphors of Evolution. Tim Fannon is an actor, director, and teaching artist living in Los Angeles. He received his MFA in acting from Brooklyn College and has studied Shakespeare at the Royal National Theatre and the British Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, and in Stratford-upon-Avon with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Tim Fannon is an actor, director, and teaching artist living in Los Angeles. He received his MFA in acting from Brooklyn College and has studied Shakespeare at the Royal National Theatre and the British Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, and in Stratford-upon-Avon with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

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