Eating the Sun
How Plants Power the Planet
By Oliver Morton
(Harper Perennial, Paperback, 9780007163656, 480pp.)
Publication Date: December 2009
Other Editions of This Title: Hardcover
Categories: Ecology, Life Sciences - Ecology, Light
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Wherever there is greenery, photosynthesis is working to make oxygen, release energy, and create living matter from the raw material of sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide. Without photosynthesis, there would be an empty world, an empty sky, and a sun that does nothing more than warm the rocks and reflect off the sea.
Eating the Sun is the story of a world in crisis; 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 largest things, the oceans, the rainforests, and the fossil fuel economy. Oliver Morton offers a fascinating, lively, profound look at nature's greatest miracle and sounds a much-needed call to arms—illuminating a potential crisis of climatic chaos and explaining how we can change our situation, for better or for worse.
Award-winning science journalist Oliver Morton is the author of Mapping Mars, a contributing editor at Wired, and a contributor for The New Yorker, Science, and The American Scholar. He lives with his wife in Greenwich, England.
“A rare delight....Oliver Morton writes so engagingly that [Eating the Sun] reads as a well-crafted biography of the earth on behalf of the plant kingdom.”
-Prospect Magazine
“A fascinating and important book”
-Ian McEwan, author of Atonement, Saturday, and On Chesil Beach
“I enjoyed this book as much for the crazed asides as for the upsetting insights.”
-Sunday Times (London)
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