Eat, Poop, Die: How Animals Make Our World

Books

NAMED A TOP-TEN BEST BOOK OF 2023 BY SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN A "fascinating" exploration (Elizabeth Kolbert) of how ecosystems are sculpted and sustained by animals eating, pooping, and dying-and how these fundamental functions could help save us from climate catastrophe. If forests are the lungs of the planet, then animals migrating across oceans, streams, and mountains-eating, pooping, and dying along the way-are its heart and arteries, pumping nitrogen and phosphorus from deep-sea gorges up to mountain peaks, from the Arctic to the Caribbean. Without this conveyor belt of crucial, life-sustaining nutrients, the world would look very different. The dynamics that shape our physical world-atmospheric chemistry, geothermal forces, plate tectonics, and erosion through wind and rain-have been explored for decades. But the effects on local ecosystems of less glamorous forces-rotting carcasses and deposited feces-as well as their impact on the global climate cycle, have been largely overlooked. The simple truth is ...