My Spring semester course at HNC entitled ‘Challenges in the Global Environment’ covers a wide range of environmental topics, beginning with a description of the Anthropocene; an exploration of ‘planetary boundaries’ (including worrisome biogeochemical flows such as nitrogen and phosphorus); and the broader topic of biodiversity, including extinction rates and the loss of ecological functions. It thus gives me a ready excuse – as if one was needed! – to delve into a wide range of natural history readings…. & over recent weeks, I’ve pretty much hit the jackpot.

Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at CalTech, has written The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself – a nice overview that tackles exactly the complex issues described in its subtitle. Carroll describes a “poetic naturalism” which recognizes multiple ways of talking about reality — as long as they are based within a scientific/naturalism framework and are consistent with one another. Carroll does an exceptionally good job of discussing his ideas within a philosophical framework – something not always found in science writing – and does so in a clear, succinct and very engaging style.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind was written by Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli historian…. and I can honestly say it has been a long, long time since I’ve read such a fact-filled and thought-provoking book that is so entertaining! Harari starts out his book with a chapter entitled “An Animal of No Significance” – and ends with an afterword entitled: “The Animal that Became a God.” In between came three major human revolutions: cognitive, agricultural & scientific, and – sometime around the first millennium BC – the appearance of three “potentially universal orders” associated with myths & imagined ideas about money, imperialism and religion. You probably won’t agree with everything Harari says…. but you’ll certainly have a lot of fun along the way.

Finally, Nick Lane’s The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life requires a lot more heavy-lifting on the science side…. but it’s well worth expending the effort. The author is a biochemist at University College London, and posits that life didn’t arise out of some “primordial soup.” Instead, the key ingredients were to be found in deep-sea alkaline hydrothermal vents – and there, the most important factor was an energy flux operating across a natural (rock) membrane. He suggests how the three principal domains of life on the planet (bacteria, archaea and eukaryotes) interacted and evolved, again focusing primarily on energy fluxes…. and how “the use of proton gradients is universal across life on earth.” These might in turn drive the development of complex biochemical mechanisms, and indeed such “chemiosmotic coupling ought to be literally a universal property of life in the cosmos.” There’s a competing hypothesis about RNA, so this isn’t the absolute final word…. but it’s a masterful look at a complex – & thoroughly fascinating – subject matter.