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The Chemical Age - How Chemists Fought Famine and Disease, Killed Millions, and Changed Our Relationship with the Earth (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R807
Discovery Miles 8 070
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The Chemical Age - How Chemists Fought Famine and Disease, Killed Millions, and Changed Our Relationship with the Earth (Hardcover)
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Donate to Against Period Poverty
Total price: R827
Discovery Miles: 8 270
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For thousands of years, we've found ways to scorch, scour, and
sterilize our surroundings to make them safer. Sometimes these
methods are wonderfully effective. Often, however, they come with
vast unintended consequences--typically not truly understood for
generations. The Chemical Age tells the captivating story of the
scientists who waged war on famine and disease with chemistry. With
depth and verve, Frank A. von Hippel explores humanity's uneasy
coexistence with pests, and how their existence, and the battles to
exterminate them, have shaped our modern world. Beginning with the
potato blight tragedy of the 1840s, which led scientists on an
urgent mission to prevent famine using pesticides, von Hippel
traces the history of pesticide use to the 1960s, when Rachel
Carson's Silent Spring revealed that those same chemicals were
insidiously damaging our health and driving species toward
extinction. Telling the story of these pesticides in vivid detail,
von Hippel showcases the thrills and complex consequences of
scientific discovery. He describes the invention of substances that
could protect crops, the emergence of our understanding of the way
diseases spread, the creation of chemicals used to kill pests and
people, and, finally, how scientists turned those war-time
chemicals on the landscape at a massive scale, prompting the vital
environmental movement that continues today. For fans of Jared
Diamond and Rachel Carson, The Chemical Age is a dynamic and
sweeping history that exposes how humankind's affinity for
pesticides made the modern world possible--while also threatening
its essential fabric.
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