I would have read Oliver Morton’s Eating The Sun: How Plants Power the Planet based on the plaudits alone— “A book that may reorder the way you think about the world,” “a well-crafted biography of the earth on behalf of the plant kingdom,” for example. My favorite was from a long-ago employer of mine, the London Sunday Times: “I enjoyed this book as much for the crazed asides as for the upsetting insights.” Crazed asides? Oh yeah. I knew Eating the Sun was going to be my kind of book.
Like many plant lovers, I’m a geek about science as much as horticulture. My bookcase is filled with tomes on the technical aspects of sustainability and ecological issues related to plants and landscaping. I was drawn to those topics because of my work, but as a citizen of Planet Earth, it didn’t take Al Gore to tell me that nature’s giving us a big heads’ up. Eating the Sun explains photosynthesis and global warming in language that is alternately technical and entertaining.
The book is broken into three parts, and is in some ways no less than a brief history of our planet. In part one, Morton discusses carbon, energy, and light in relation to a human lifespan. Part two “puts photosynthesis into a planetary perspective,” while part three relates the discovery of photosynthesis and points out that fossil fuels “are not a source of energy—they are just a way of storing it.” Don’t be intimidated by the length of the book, since a good fifty pages are glossary, footnotes, and acknowledgements (which I always read compulsively).
The award-winning author writes intelligently on a controversial subject, and he’s uniquely qualified as a spokesman. Morton has degrees in history and the philosophy of science from Cambridge University; he is Chief News and Features Editor at Nature, and has edited the science and technology pages of The Economist. His work has appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic, the New Scientist, and he was a keynote speaker at the Fifth Conference on Clean Energy in Massachusetts last month. Morton’s grandfather worked at a coal mine in South Wales, his father helped establish a system of emergency oil reserves in Britain and later worked for the Oil and Natural Gas Directorate of the European Commission. His wife’s grandfather even had a Sinclair gas station in Minnesota.
I must admit, I was expecting a cautionary tale of gloom and doom, like so many of the global warming-related books I’ve read. I was pleased and surprised to find, instead, what the author calls “a celebration of the power of human intelligence” as well as a fascinating story of photosynthesis: “an everyday miracle needing nothing but sunlight, air, and leaves.” I wasn’t surprised to find that Morton has also won awards for his fiction—his voice is engaging and he manages to educate the reader without being didactic.
Eating the Sun left me feeling positive about the future, even though Morton makes no bones about the very real threat: “’Global warming’ . . . lacks both accuracy and a sense of danger,” he reports in the section on the carbon/climate crisis. “Warming sounds both gentle and broadly pleasant; what we are doing is unlikely, for most people, to be either.” He makes sense of this topic in a manner that no way diminishes the crisis, but places his hope in humanity’s ability to reason. I highly recommend this book.
Becke Davis is the senior writer for The Landscape Contractor magazine, a member of Garden Writers of America and the Ohio Nursery and Landscape Association. She has written well over 1,000 published articles and is the author of five garden-related books in addition to being the moderator of B&N's Garden and Mystery book clubs.
