Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean

A stunning history of how we’ve come to understand environmental change on Earth and on other worlds in our solar system. But Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean also offers so much more than that. Degroot masterfully illustrates how science progresses - its past misapprehensions and failures as much as its triumphs of elucidation - and how our growing knowledge of the cosmos has shaped human affairs. A rich, eye-opening tapestry, and beautifully told! – Lewis Dartnell, author of OriginsA cosmic panorama of how the solar system has molded our past and may spell our end. From comets hitting Jupiter to vast explosions on the Sun, Dagomar Degroot masterfully shows that our understanding of some of the world’s greatest threats has come from watching the stars – Luke Kemp, author of Goliath’s CurseThis dazzling book is an enormous contribution, challenging us to re-envision the universe and our place in it. With exquisite insight, Dagomar Degroot reveals how our environment is much more expansive than our own planet, and indeed ripples out into the cosmos – Sarah Stewart Johnson, author of The Sirens of MarsDagomar Degroot has boldly taken environmental history where no historian has gone before. In this beautifully written and handsomely illustrated book, Degroot shows how dynamic components of the solar system have affected both earthly environments and human ideas over the last five centuries. Part history of astronomy and astronomers, part super-macro environmental history, the book brims over with both interesting anecdotes and arresting perspectives on our place within the cosmos – J. R. McNeill, author of The Webs of HumankindRipples on the Cosmic Ocean brings us a new arena of history, the history of our collective engagement with our planetary neighbors in the inner solar system. Dagomar Degroot has constructed an amazing synthesis of how cultural projections, and gradually the observational sciences, have brought the environmental histories of the Sun, the Moon, Venus, Mars, and the asteroids into sharper and sharper focus. Simultaneously, Degroot shows how our explorations of environments in the inner solar system have illuminated the critical features of our home planet Earth. This is a book that will be widely read as we grapple both with our emerging efforts to inhabit near-earth environments and with the pressing problem of planetary sustainability here on Earth. – John L. Brooke, author of Climate Change and the Course of Global HistoryA beautifully illustrated and flowing account of the place of our world in the vastness of the cosmos. Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean offers a stark warning about the interplanetary hazards our world faces, but it also offers hope: about our potential to explore the cosmic high seas and our potential to save our own little island. Degroot sets some awesome challenges, but he opens up some liberating possibilities – John Haldon, author of The Empire That Would Not Die

Dagomar Degroot is Associate Professor of Environmental History at Georgetown University. A contributor to the Washington Post, Nature and Aeon, he is the author of The Frigid Golden Age- Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560-1720, named one of the ten best history books of 2018 by the Financial Times.