How Plants Power the Planet
An Appreciation of the Importance of Nature's Greatest Miracle
Oct 4, 2009
Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet is an appreciation of the importance of plants; a history of the earth and the feuds and fantasies of warring scientists; a celebration of how the smallest things, enzymes and pigments, influence the larger things. These include the oceans, the rain forests, and the fossil fuel economy.
The author, Oliver Morton, provides a lively, profound look at nature's greatest miracle while sounding a much-needed call to arms-illuminating a potential crisis of climate chaos. He explains how we can change the situation, for better or worse.
Eating the Sun Overview
Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Plant is written in three parts:
- Part one explains the role photosynthesis plays in the cycle of life. He starts with how the green leaves trap sunlight and use it to absorb carbon dioxide from the air and emit life-giving oxygen in its place. Morton traces scientists' quest to understand how photosynthesis works at the molecular level. In particular, he is impressed by the work of James Lovelock, author of the so-called Gaia theory.
- Part two addresses evidence of how plants may have kick-started the complex life cycle on Earth.
- The final part of the book considers photosynthesis in relation to global warming for the Earth's plant-based balance of carbon dioxide and oxygen is broken in burning vast amounts of fossil fuels and emitting more carbon dioxide than the plants can absorb.
Eating the Sun and Regaining Balance
Eating the Sun explores the possibility that an understanding of photosynthesis may be harnessed to regain the needed balance. Although the first part of the book deals with a more technical discussion, what follows is a vast, elegantly written synthesis of biology, physics and environmental science.
The book is filled with both wonder and worry. Worry because anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions outstrip the uptake capacity of plants. Wonder that plants have that ability in the first place. These two conflicting emotions recur throughout Eating the Sun as the author recounts discoveries about photosynthesis-an intricate chemical cascade that daily begins with sunlight and ends in the longest rhythms of geological time.
Although considered a science book, Eating the Sun is written for the layman with a sense of wonder and intellectual excitement, clear explanation and lyrical writing as it crafts a biography of the earth on behalf of the plant kingdom.
About the author
Oliver Morton is an award-winning science journalist. He is a contributing editor at Wired, and a contributor for the New Yorker, Science, and the American Scholar. He live with his wife in Greenwich, England.
Morton, Oliver. Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Sun. New York, New York, Harper, 2009.
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