Author: Nathaniel Rich Humans have irrevocably altered nature, warns New York Times Magazine writer-at-large Nathaniel Rich (Losing Earth) in this vividly reported survey — Second Nature. The challenge now, he writes, is to harness those changes and conserve the parts of nature that are “beautiful and free and sacred, those that we want to carry with us into the future.” Frightening but with an undercurrent of humor, Rich’s study is packed with moving insight. Rich presents humanity’s war against nature in vivid detail, with nature nearly defeated. “It was a costly victory, however,” he writes. “The prize was civilizational collapse.”