Living Planet: A new, fully updated edition of David Attenborough’s seminal portrait of life on Earth

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A new, fully updated narrative edition of David Attenborough's seminal biography of our world, The Living Planet.

This is a revised and updated edition of the book published in 1984 which was a companion piece to a documentary Attenborough did of the same name. As they get higher, they get colder and can no longer bear their loads of moisture, shedding them as torrents of rain that make the lower stretches of the Kali Gandaki one of the best-watered places on earth.The accompanying book, The Living Planet: A Portrait of the Earth by David Attenborough ( ISBN 0-563-20207-6), was published by BBC Books on 2 February 1984. How this came about was, until the middle of the 20th century, the subject of great controversy among geologists and geographers. But the grazing is so poor that it can only sustain a very small number of individual animals, and those species that do manage to survive here are all scarce. The dust jacket is clipped, and there is a very small amount of ware to the front upper corner of the inside jacket, and a small bit of damage to the spine, as shown in images.

If you approach upwind, much of the heat as well as the ash is blown away from you, so that you can stand within 50 metres of the vent without scorching your face, though when the wind veers, ash will begin to fall around you and large red-hot lumps land with a thud and a sizzle in the snow nearby. The birds had to be reared by hand from birth so that they would respond to the voice of their 'mother', and this eventually enabled them to be photographed as they flew alongside a moving open-top car. This leads to a similar abundance of predators, and the Merle people ambush white-eared kob as they cross a river. Other estuary wading birds, which have developed a multitude of techniques for gathering food from mud flats, include godwits, curlews, dunlins, ringed plovers and avocets. Tibet, which before the collision of the continents had been a well-watered plain along the southern edge of Asia, was not only pushed upwards but gradually deprived of its rainfall by the young mountains and so changed into the high cold desert that it is today; the upper reaches of the Kali Gandaki lost much of the rain that had given the river its initial erosive power and shrank inside its vast valley; and on the site of the ancient sea there now stood the highest and newest mountains in the world containing, within their fabric, the remains of ammonites.Many are declining at alarming rates and almost all of it is because of direct human action or as a consequence of human actions resulting in things like climate change. Finally, further south still, Attenborough discovers the effects of forest fires, which are not so destructive as they appear – the areas affected rejuvenate themselves within a couple of months, with more flowers than before. Polynesians reached Hawaii well over a thousand years ago, and their sea-going culture enabled them to reach many Pacific islands, including Easter Island, where they carved the moai, and New Zealand: the ancestors of the Māori. Broadcast 1 March 1984, this episode deals with the air and those creatures that spend most of their lives in it.