Making Eden
How Plants Transformed a Barren Planet
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- 22,99 €
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- 22,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
Over 7 billion people depend on plants for healthy, productive, secure lives, but few of us stop to consider the origin of the plant kingdom that turned the world green and made our lives possible. And as the human population continues to escalate, our survival depends on how we treat the plant kingdom and the soils that sustain it. Understanding the evolutionary history of our land floras, the story of how plant life emerged from water and conquered the continents to dominate the planet, is fundamental to our own existence.
In Making Eden David Beerling reveals the hidden history of Earth's sun-shot greenery, and considers its future prospects as we farm the planet to feed the world. Describing the early plant pioneers and their close, symbiotic relationship with fungi, he examines the central role plants play in both ecosystems and the regulation of climate. As threats to plant biodiversity mount today, Beerling discusses the resultant implications for food security and climate change, and how these can be avoided. Drawing on the latest exciting scientific findings, including Beerling's own field work in the UK, North America, and New Zealand, and his experimental research programmes over the past decade, this is an exciting new take on how plants greened the continents.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Beerling (The Emerald Planet), a University of Sheffield natural science professor, explores many of the most pressing open questions about how plants, by moving from sea to land, transformed Earth at an early point in its history, in a well-written but overly technical study. He demonstrates how advances in genomics are reshaping the field by providing information about the evolutionary relationships among species and the nature of early plants. Areas of research covered include the adaption of plant genomes to permit survival on land, the evolution of stomata (the pores permitting plants to obtain carbon dioxide from the air), and the origin of the crucial symbiotic relationship between plants and mycorrhizal fungi. Beerling wisely acknowledges that "these intricate molecular details of the goings on inside plant cells seem rather esoteric and far removed from reality" to a general audience, noting that "nothing could be farther from the truth." He goes on to explain that plant genetics has had "real world importance," such as by allowing agronomist Norman Borlaug to breed more compact and durable (and thus far more fruitful) crops, thereby bringing about the 1960s Green Revolution. Despite this attempt to make the book's subject more urgent and relatable, lay readers are likely to find Beerling's knowledgeable work inaccessible.
