Civilizations : culture, ambition, and the transformation of nature / Felipe Fernández-Armesto.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Waste land: desert, tundra, ice: Helm of ice, ice worlds and tundra as human habitats--Death of earth, adaptation and counteradaptation in deserts of sand--Leaves of grass, barely cultivable grasslands:--Sweepings of the wind, prairie and grassy savanna--Highway of civilizations, Eurasian steppe--Under the rain, civilization in tropical lowlands and postglacial forests: Wild woods, postglacial and temperate woodland--Hearts of darkness, tropical lowlands--Shining fields of mud, alluvial soils in drying climates: Lone and level sands, misleading cases in the Near East--Of shoes and rice, transcending environments of origin in China and India--Mirrors of sky, civilizing highlands: Gardens of the clouds, highland civilizations of the new world--Climb to paradise, highland civilizations of the old world--Water margins, civilizations shaped by the sea: Allotments of the gods, small-island civilizations--View from the shore: nature of seaboard civilizations--Chasing the monsoon, seaboard civilizations of maritime Asia--Tradition of Ulysses, Greek and Roman seaboards--Breaking the waves, domestication of the oceans: Almost the last environment, rise of oceanic civilizations--Refloating Atlantis, making of Atlantic civilization--Atlantic and after, Atlantic supremacy and the global outlook.