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Elemental

Science and Nature

Audio only

Elemental

How Five Elements Changed Earth's Past and Will Shape Our FutureBy Stephen PorderNarrated by Christopher Ragland

Elemental

Length7h

About this audiobook

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 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.

Audiobook details

GenreScience and Nature

Length7 hrs

Narrated byChristopher Ragland

FormatAudiobook

Publish dateSep 12, 2023

LanguageEnglish

Table of contents

1Opening Credits, Dedication

7Chapter 5 - The Goldilocks Element

2Introduction, World-Changers

8Chapter 6 - White Gold, Finite and Irreplaceable

3Part 1 - Lessons From the Past, Chapter 1, The Biggest Environmental Change of All

9Chapter 7 - Water, the Key to Life on Land

4Chapter 2 - Plants Colonize the Continents

10Part 3 - A Way Forward?, Chapter 8, Biogeochemical Luck

5Part 2 - Are We So Different?, Chapter 3, Life's Battery and Earth's Blanket

11Chapter 9 - Some Remaining Puzzles

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6Chapter 4 - How We Know What We Know about Climate Change

12Closing Credits

About the author

Stephen Porder

View all by Stephen Porder

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