Elemental: How Five Elements Changed Earth’s Past and Will Shape Our Future

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.)