Elemental
How Five Elements Changed Earth’s Past and Will Shape Our Future
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Narrated by:
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Christopher Ragland
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By:
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Stephen Porder
About this listen
This audiobook narrated by Christopher Ragland reveals 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 listeners 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.
Critic Reviews
“What makes life on Earth possible? A simple question, but as Stephen Porder shows us, the answer is fascinating, complex, and absolutely vital. Told through the relationship of microbes, plants, and humans to the elements that make us—from phosphorus to carbon—this book introduces the chemical innovations that have shaped our planet. Part engaging tour through science at the intersection of biology and chemistry, part deep history that gives us tools for the future, Elemental gives us a lively look at the stuff of life itself.”—Bathsheba Demuth, author of Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait
“In Elemental, Stephen Porder explains why humans are both part and parcel of an Earth system that has endured for billions of years and a rare departure from the norm. His engaging, accessible, and ultimately optimistic account illuminates the remarkable innovations of modern humans, their consequences for the Earth as a whole, and what we can do to safeguard our environmental future.”—Andrew H. Knoll, author of A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters