In "The Natural History of the Present" I describe the influence of different sorts of material lives-hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists, agriculturalists, early industrialists, moderns-on the natural environment; how that came to be; the advantages and disadvantages of the commodification of nature, which began not with us but with the first agriculturalists who turned trees into logs and forests into fields. I describe the natural world and how we could live modern lives in it. Two hundred years ago the use of fossil fuels to smelt iron and power steam engines removed the limits of the...