A new book by Possibly’s founder Stephen Porder titled Elemental: How Five Elements Changed Earth’s Past and Will Shape Our Future, explores the rare times in Earth’s past when organisms changed the world. Understanding how they did it might help us build a more sustainable future.
Megan Hall: Welcome to Possibly, where we take on huge problems like the future of our planet and break them down into small questions with unexpected answers. I’m Megan Hall.
Earlier this year, Possibly’s founder and Brown University’s Provost for Sustainability Stephen Porder published Elemental: How Five Elements Changed Earth’s Past and Will Shape Our Future.
His book explores the rare times in Earth’s past when organisms have changed the world. He argues that understanding how they pulled off this remarkable feat might help us build a more sustainable future.
Senior Reporter Janek Schaller sat down with him to talk about his book – here are some excerpts from their conversation:
Janek Schaller: What sort of inspired you to take on this project in the first place
Stephen Porder: There’s sort of two motivations. One, we live in a moment of existential environmental concern, and it feels as if what we’re doing is really unprecedented and really unstoppable. I realized, that we could learn something from the geologic past about organisms that have changed the world before us. By understanding how our predecessors have changed the world and how we humans are changing the world and the common thread between those two things, we could actually use that knowledge to build a more sustainable future.
Megan Hall: About a third of Elemental is about organisms that changed the world 2.5 billion years ago. But Stephen says that modern-day humans are not all that different from the other world-changers that came before us.
Stephen Porder: So all of us, from humans, to bacteria, to fungi to plants, we’re all made of roughly the same stuff, hydrogen, and oxygen, which are the components of water, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. Those elements also play a critical role in determining what the environment is like, So when life evolves a new way of gathering these elements from the environment, it can actually change the environment profoundly. And that’s the common thread that links us to the cyanobacteria, who precipitated the biggest environmental change of all time to 2.2 billion years ago, to the land plants who pulled so much carbon dioxide out of the air that they froze the planet 300 million years ago, to humans who dug up those land plants, which are now fossilized as coal and liberated the carbon that was stored in their bodies, injected it back in the atmosphere and are now causing climate change.
Megan Hall: Still, Stephen says that there are two things about the way humans are changing the planet that set us apart from cyanobacteria and land plants
Stephen Porder: One, on the downside, is the rapidity with which we’re doing it. So it took the cyanobacteria, hundreds of millions of years to change the world, it took the land plants 100 million years to change the world, it’s taking us a century and a half, So a million times faster. and adapting to a very slow change is easy. But adapting to a really fast change is hard.
On the upside, unlike our world changing predecessors, whose effects were linked directly to the chemistry of their bodies, our effects are linked to the chemistry of our society. And those we can change. It’s not internal to us, it is external to us. And therefore, it gives us an opportunity to be wiser in our management of the flows of these elements in a way that gives us what we want, like energy and food without the negative environmental consequences that we don’t want. And that is the challenge of the 21st century.
Janek Schaller: I’m curious about what broader actions and messages folks who are reading this book might take away from it?
Stephen Porder: The first thing I want people to get from this is that there is hope that we can make a difference. The second thing I want people to get is that everyone has a role to play. The third thing is we can simplify the conversation around sustainability to wise management of energy, food, and water. And for what individuals can do, a few major changes can make a huge difference. Your next car should be an electric car. Your furnace should not be replaced with combustion, it should be replaced with heat pumps. Cut down or eliminate red meat and dairy. Fly less. And after that, like give yourself a break. The transformations that we need requires, more than anything, a winning of hearts and minds, which is not necessarily about science, but is about making bridges with whatever community you’re a part of, and working towards a solution.
Megan Hall: That’s it for today! To hear Janek and Stephen’s complete conversation, or to ask a question about the way your choices affect our planet, go to askpossibly.org, or subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts.
You can learn more about Elemental, or purchase the book here.
You can also follow us on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn or X at “askpossibly”
Possibly is a co-production of Brown University’s Institute for Environment and Society, Brown’s Climate Solutions Initiative, and the Public’s Radio.
The post What can organisms that changed the world teach us about climate change? appeared first on TPR: The Public’s Radio.