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

Name: Elemental: How Five Elements Changed Earth's Past and Will Shape Our Future
Brand: Princeton University Press
SKU: 9780691177298
Price: 20.99 USD
Availability: InStock

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Contributors:

Stephen Porder

Publisher:

Princeton University Press

Binding:

Hardcover

Book Category:

Science

Book Subcategory:

Environmental Science (see also Chemistry, Life Sciences

Book Topic:

Environmental), Ecology, Evolution

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The product is eligible for a complimentary return within 30 days from the date of purchase. Furthermore, individual items are shipped within 24 hours of receiving the order.

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Specifications +

Release Date:

09/12/23

ISBN 13:

9780691177298

Weight:

1.01 lbs

Size:

8.58 x 5.67 x 1.10 inches

Pages:

240

Mint Condition +

product description

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.

About the Author
Stephen Porder is the Associate Provost for Sustainability and the Acacia Professor of Ecology, Evolutionary and Organismal Biology, and Environment and Society at Brown University. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Time magazine, the American Scientist, and other leading publications. He is cofounder of Possibly, which airs on The Public's Radio and provides practical advice on sustainability to a general audience.

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

Description

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