Eating the Sun

"That’s right. If you put an iron nail in an oxygenless atmosphere it won’t rust, but in ordinary air it will. The book I’m talking about now is Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet by Oliver Morton. This book is basically about the discovery of how photosynthesis works. So, photosynthesis is turning carbon dioxide, water and sunlight into something useful to both plants and to us: sugar and oxygen. The process of photosynthesis evolved in these things called blue-green bacteria three billion years ago and this is the foundation on which everything else has been built by evolution. It’s the same process in those blue-green bacteria and algae in the sea and the plants on land – they all use a version of the process that evolved three billion years ago. It’s an amazing story and this is why botanists feel hard done by because you think: well, actually, it’s interesting this stuff, and we depend on it – so don’t ignore it! The blue-green bacteria, by a process that we are still unravelling, passed the genes that make the photosynthetic machinery on to other organisms and that one aspect of evolution gave rise to such a great diversity of things that are green. I am sitting here in my study at home and I can see a palm and cacti and other plants and the relationship between these plants is ancient but they are all green and they all use the same way of capturing energy. That’s also true of the algae in the sea and in your fish tank. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . This is a very readable book, less technical than The Emerald Planet . It does get into biochemistry but you can skip bits! He makes the story personal by talking about the lives of the people who discovered photosynthesis, or, rather, how it works. There is a whole series of people and he only chooses some of them. He tells the story as a narrative and then he goes on to talk about the kind of stuff that Beerling talks about, the red beds and things like that."

"Oliver Morton. I can’t say he’s a friend of mine – I’ve only met him about three times – but we’ve always had very friendly meetings and he’s certainly one of the most clever people I’ve met. He used to work for The Economist magazine and now is working for Nature magazine and he’s news editor and a special feature editor. And I think that he could become the new really wonderful writer on science. This book is about photosynthesis and the gifts of the sun to the earth. Photosynthesis is just this extraordinary thing that even now scientists don’t know all they wish to know about – how just the sun shining on plants in the earth can create the means by which we live. And it’s an extraordinarily complex process which Morton writes about gloriously. And again the passages – one when he’s writing a mere footnote in the book about CO2. He says, you know, CO2 doesn’t have the same ring as a word like, say, water or even oxygen. And if it had a more poetic or sympathetic title, whatever damage it does to the world, we would realise fully the fantastic good it does. Anyway he goes off on a riff about what CO2 does. And it’s almost poetic. But it’s also totally convincing. Another time he talks about how trees belong to the sun, to the air, to the atmosphere, more than they do to the earth in which they’re rooted. He says that, for instance, if in the fall you stop a few yards from a tree and bend down and view the tree through your legs, you’ll see it’s now bare branches set into the sky. And you’ll say to yourself, yes, it’s as if those branches are rooted in the sky rather than its roots in the earth. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I saw this written – I’m not telling stories out of school – that Oliver is still in the process of leaving behind some of his science way of writing, but there’s enough of the poet and certainly the person who can take science and what is happening in science to a new audience for me to feel he’s a person I can urge people to read. It’s a continuation of that. I didn’t name any of Darwin’s books: I thought that he didn’t need the recommendation. But sure, you know the way in which sunflowers track the sun – turn on their stems to follow it – it’s no surprise that portraits from the 17th century onwards often put a sunflower into the painting as a sign that that the subject of the portrait is loyal to his or her king or queen. Although my surname is Cohen, the most Jewish of names, which I’m very proud of, my mother was Irish Catholic. So I was educated by Benedictine monks. And they didn’t have much time for science. And certainly if you were arts oriented, as I was, I think I did one year of physics and no other science at all. So I’d been carrying around this ancient guilt of not having any sense of what science is about. I wanted to read a book about the sun and I went to New York Public Library and there are just under 6,000 books indexed under the sun – probably more by now – but none of them, and some were really interesting, none of them was the book that I wanted to read. I thought, well if I want to read this book I’m going to have to write it myself. It’s taken eight years. Thank you very much."