Elemental
How Five Elements Changed Earth’s Past and Will Shape Our Future
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
An ecologist explores how life itself shapes Earth using the elemental constituents we all share
It is rare for life to change Earth, yet three organisms have profoundly transformed our planet over the long course of its history. Elemental reveals how microbes, plants, and people used the fundamental building blocks of life to alter the climate, and with it, the trajectory of life on Earth in the past, present, and future.
Taking readers from the deep geologic past to our current era of human dominance, Stephen Porder focuses on five of life’s essential elements—hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. He describes how single-celled cyanobacteria and plants harnessed them to wildly proliferate across the oceans and the land, only to eventually precipitate environmental catastrophes. He then brings us to the present, and shows how these elements underpin the success of human civilization, and how their mismanagement threatens similarly catastrophic unintended consequences. But, Porder argues, if we can learn from our world-changing predecessors, we can construct a more sustainable future.
Blending conversational storytelling with the latest science, Porder takes us deep into the Amazon, across fresh lava flows in Hawaii, and to the cornfields of the American Midwest to illuminate a potential path to sustainability, informed by the constraints imposed by life’s essential elements and the four-billion-year history of life on Earth.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Brown University ecologist Porder debuts with a probing exploration of how carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorous have shaped life on Earth. He focuses on three epochal events: the rise of cyanobacteria more than two billion years ago, the proliferation of land plants 400 million years ago, and the 19th-century industrial revolution. Cyanobacteria, ocean-dwelling single-celled microbes, were the first organisms capable of both photosynthesis and capturing nitrogen from their environment, processes that created oxygen as a by-product and changed the composition of the atmosphere. When land plants arrived, they used their roots to draw hydrogen, oxygen, and phosphorous from Earth's rocky surface and took in so much CO2 from the air that the tropical atmosphere cooled into an ice age, freezing out many of the forests that precipitated the temperature drop. Porder warns that burning fossil fuels adds carbon to the atmosphere at an unsustainable rate, threatening a cataclysmic climate shock on the scale of the one that wiped out many early land plants. The deep history offers a fresh perspective on climate change, and Porder's well-considered solutions include the expansion of wind, solar, and nuclear power, and replacing furnaces with heat pumps that capture the little available heat in cold air and transport it into the home. It's an illuminating account of how these elements and the organisms that rely on them have influenced the course of life. Photos.
