The following recently published books in part developed from the darnel project and have much to say about the origins of our food and how it has shaped the nature, history and prospects of humanity.

How and why humans have come to be in thrall to – maybe even enslaved by – grasses is the subject of The War Between Trees and Grasses.  Here’s an extract that introduces the story:
This book begins by asking where did the first forests come from, what does it take to make a tree and how has the tree life-form become refashioned by evolution as the terrestrial environment varied over geological time. The later arrival of grasses on the evolutionary scene was both a response to, and an agency of, new and potent environmental challenges – identified by the title of this book, with only a slight degree of melodrama, as a declaration of war. Much later, evolution propelled Homo sapiens into the midst of the age-old conflict between grass and tree, a conflict that rages to this day and which…has shaped the nature of human psychology, physiology and culture.

Here’s a paper summarising the argument that the primaeval grass-tree confrontation played a decisive part in human evolution.
H Thomas. 2017. A green epoch in the evolutionary history of biological energy sources. Nature Ecology and Evolution 1: doi:10.1038/s41559-017-0302-8

 

The most recent book is The Tale of the Three Little Pigments. It concerns the colours of the natural world and in particular the ways that plants and light interact and influence human needs and behaviour. Extracts from the book will be posted on this site subsequently.

Books by Howard Thomas are available in Europe from AmazonUK and worldwide from Summerfield Books.