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I’m honored to have Professor David Beerling on the podcast this week, to talk about his book Making Eden, which is a deep history of the evolution of land plants. We’ve talked a bit about environmental history in the past, but I’ve been curious about the longer history of the planet. Professor Beerling’s book is a fantastic look into one of the greatest stories of this history: how plants came to evolve and turn a rocky, eroding planet green. If you—like me—know nothing about plant biology, don’t worry. Professor Beerling guides us through our latest understanding of how plants enslaved bacteria, put on coats, learned to breathe, and started making seeds.
Professor Beerling is the director of the Leverhulme Center for Climate Change Mitigation. They just have a new article out in NATURE about how we might mitigate climate change by adding ground up rocks to soil, and thus harnessing the power of plant roots to eat up carbon dioxide.
The title is inspired of course by the great Dylan Thomas poem, which Professor Beerling quotes in the book.
Picture of a Liverwort, a non-vascular plant! Photo by MDC Staff, courtesy Missouri Department of Conservation.
A reconstruction of Cooksonia, one of the first vascular plants. By Matteo De Stefano/MUSEThis file was uploaded by MUSE - Science Museum of Trento in cooperation with Wikimedia Italia., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48122033