Material World is my book of 2024 and more – a decade at least. An impassioned riposte to the idea that we live in a post-industrial world, it illuminates our current essential technologies and points the way to a transformed future. Focusing on just six materials: sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium, Conway reveals the deep historical roots and present-day reach of these materials in startling ways. Salt, for instance, is not only more than a condiment and road de-icer, it has been, through taxation, a major element of government power – excessive taxation being a major factor in the French Revolution and Indian Independence – and a feedstock for a plethora of chemical products that enable our lifestyle. All of these substances are mined and Conway roams the world, probing the deep processes that take us from rocks in remote place to the silicon chips in our phones and computers, the batteries in electric vehicles, the hidden power of these commodities and the geopolitics that surrounds them. You will learn for instance how Taiwan become the world’s leading silicon chip maker, surprisingly overtaking both America and China in the process. You will learn more in this one book about the way the world really works than any other currently available source.
Deep history is the subject in non-fiction today, just as travel writing was in the ’80s, the new nature writing following Robert Macfarlane in the noughties. With 4 billion years of life on earth to play with, it’s a rich field. Ferris Jabr’s book covers similar broad ground to my Thinking Small and Large, but the examples in the two books are mostly different, a demonstration of the burgeoning information now available on the evolution of life. Jabr takes James Lovelock’s Gaia theory as his touchstone, demonstrating the one-ness of life and the earth’s physical features and continuing evolution. At every size scale – from microbes at work deep in the earth to the terrain-forming in the tundra of the now extinct mammoths, Jabr shows us the joined up world in all its glory and also the tide of destruction spread by human technology.
A vivid account of a major shift in how we understand Earth, from an exceptionally talented new voice. Earth is not simply an inanimate planet on which life evolved, but rather a planet that came to life.
“Glorious . . . full of achingly beautiful passages, mind-bending conceptual twists, and wonderful characters. Jabr reveals how Earth has been profoundly, miraculously shaped by life.”—Ed Yong, Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author of An Immense World
One of humanity’s oldest beliefs is that our world is alive. Though once ridiculed by some scientists, the idea of Earth as a vast interconnected living…
Life on earth today is mostly a matter of photosynthesis and it is this that is at the heart of the environmental crisis. Photosynthesis powers the carbon cycle through the air, living things, the soil and the waters. But although photosynthesis feeds on CO2, it can no longer balance the carbon equation now that so much more CO2 is released by human technologies. Working at MIT, Jovine has researched attempts to improve photosynthesis to remediate the earth. The process is understood at the molecular levels and synthetic biology techniques should be able to improve on nature. We are not there yet but read Jovine’s book as an antidote to despair.
"Read this book and you will learn how photosynthesis was discovered, how it works, and how we can produce more food to feed the world." - PAUL NURSE, Nobel Prize winner and author of What is Life?
In Light to Life, biologist Raffael Jovine takes us on a journey of discovery into the intricate, beautiful and often surprising processes that convert energy from the sun into life and how all-important these are to our survival.
Despite the unprecedented challenges the Earth faces from global warming, habitat loss, air pollution and population growth; Jovine shows us that there is hope to…
Thinking Small and Large is about the quest to go beyond what we can see with the unaided eye and how this has revealed the 4 billion year history of life on earth. The deep workings on a nanoscale – the ‘Giants of the Infinitesimal’, the biological nanomachines that are the engines of life – are linked to the great movements of the geological development, the ecosystem, climate, and the evolution of the diversity of life forms.
We developed as a technologically transforming species before we understood any of this so there is a rich story to tell. Being middle-sized creatures, our limited vision has hampered out understanding of life on earth. This sapiocentrism has now become dangerous and threatens our survival on the planet.
The book is top-and-tailed by a remarkable convergence of origin-of-life research and bacterial technologies to reduce CO2 emissions and remediate the natural cycles of the planet. This is embodied in the equation: CO2 + hydrogen = all of the earth’s biomass.
This simple reaction, hydrogenating CO2 to make the astonishing plethora of organic compounds, is now being used to make fuel, food, chemicals an materials by a bacterial, fossil-feedstock-sparing route. This 4 billion-year convergence signals the emergence of a benign epoch that could follow the Anthropocene if we understand its implications and act on them. The book shows how our knowledge of the nature’s nanoworld and the great global cycles has emerged through the work of thinkers, scientists and technologists such as the Roman poet Lucretius, Einstein, Schrodinger, James Lovelock, Lynn Margulis, Richard Feynman, Chaim Weizmann. Their stories and the connections between them create the narrative.
