Includes bibliographical references (pages 469-505) and index.

Itch to civilize -- 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.