Elemental : how five elements changed Earth's past and will shape our future

Elemental How five elements changed Earth's past and will shape our future

Stephen Porder

Book - 2023

"Over the past four billion years of Earth's history, three organisms-cyanobacteria, plants, and humans--have altered the planet in profound ways by harnessing the availability of five key elements. Hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus are the most common elements in all forms of life on Earth, and all five circulate between the biotic and abiotic world in biogeochemical cycles. When organisms tap into stores of these elements and change these cycles, they change the atmosphere, climate, and, by extension, the trajectory of life on earth. In the first part of the book, Porder explains how cyanobacteria and plants harnessed critical elements and how their success in doing so was followed by environmental collapse in t...he form of ice ages. Porder then turns to human-caused climate change. He explores the dramatic ways humans have altered the cycles of these five essential elements and explains the profound effect our actions have on the planet. Porder concludes by exploring how we can reduce our impact on the Earth-both individually and societally-by reorienting ourselves toward recycling critical elements instead of extracting them from more and more obscure sources. Ultimately, understanding the role of element cycling is essential to understanding how humans came to be so successful and to putting us on a path to a sustainable future"--

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Subjects
Evolution (Biology)
Life > Origin.
Ecology.
Civilization.
civilization.
SCIENCE / Life Sciences / Biology.
Published
Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press [2023]
Language
English
Main Author
Stephen Porder (author)
Physical Description
viii, 227 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9780691177298
  • Introduction: World-Changers
  • PART I. LESSONS FROM THE PAST
  • The Biggest Environmental Change of All
  • Plants Colonize the Continents
  • PART II. ARE WE SO DIFFERENT? Life's Battery and Earth's Blanket
  • How We Know What We Know About Climate Change
  • The Goldilocks Element
  • White Gold, Finite and Irreplaceable
  • Water, the Key to Life on Land
  • PART III. A WAY FORWARD? Biogeochemical Luck
  • Some Remaining Puzzles.
Review by Choice Review

Five elements--carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus--are essential to all life on Earth. People rarely think about the importance of these elements individually and in combination in the products they consume each day to sustain their lives. The dynamics of each element is a delicate balance between the positive and negative roles in the environment across time scales from centuries to seconds. For example, carbon dioxide is an essential gas for photosynthesis but also a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming when released from fossil fuels. In the process of photosynthesis appears the unique aspects of combining CO2 and H2O to create glucose and release O2 back into the atmosphere. When people consume these plant products, they release CO2 along with N, P, and H2O back to the environment. The biogeochemistry of the C, N, H, O, and P combines into the various compounds that make up life-forms. It shows the need to more completely understand the roles these elements play in everyday life and be better stewards. Summing Up: Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty. --Jerry L. Hatfield, formerly, USDA-Agricultural Research Service

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review

Porder focuses on linkages between hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, phosphorus, and oxygen and how these elements impact life, atmosphere, and climate. Professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Brown University, Porder begins with a question, "What does it take to change the world?" From here, he reviews major events that caused mass extinctions and spawned new life. Beginning with the great oxygenation event 2.5 billion years ago, Porder shows how early ancestors of cyanobacteria developed and, through photosynthesis, generated an abundance of oxygen. Over millions of years, this caused the earth to change. Plants migrated to land. Powerful root systems evolved abilities to extract phosphorous from rocks. Nitrogen-fixing bacteria developed alongside certain plant groups, providing them with a usable form of nitrogen. Victims of their own success, plants pulled so much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere that the earth plunged into successive ice ages. Now, as humanity disrupts the slow carbon cycle and pumps extreme levels of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the earth may be entering a new, warmer phase that could disrupt, well, everything.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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. (Sept.)

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