Description

A Scientific American Top Ten Book of 2023

If forests are the lungs of the planet, then animals migrating across oceans, streams, and mountains-eating, pooping, and dying along the way-are its heart and arteries, pumping nitrogen and phosphorus from deep-sea gorges up to mountain peaks, from the Arctic to the Caribbean. Without this conveyor belt of crucial, life-sustaining nutrients, the world would look very different.

The dynamics that shape our physical world-atmospheric chemistry, geothermal forces, plate tectonics, and erosion through wind and rain-have been explored for decades. But the effects on local ecosystems of less glamorous forces-rotting carcasses and deposited feces-as well as their impact on the global climate cycle, have been largely overlooked. The simple truth is that pooping and peeing are daily rituals for almost all animals, the ellipses of ecology that flow through life. We eat, we poop, and we die.

From the volcanoes of Iceland to the tropical waters of Hawaii, the great plains of the American heartland, and beyond, Eat, Poop, Die takes readers on an exhilarating and enlightening global adventure, revealing the remarkable ways in which the most basic biological activities of animals make and remake the world-and how a deeper understanding of these cycles provides us with opportunities to undo the environmental damage humanity has wrought on the planet we call home.

Publisher Review

One of those rare books that truly changes the way you look at the world — Lucy Cooke * Scientific American * Fascinating. Deserves the widest possible readership — Elizabeth Kolpert You read it with an entirely new appreciation and respect for the animals on this earth — Bill McKibben A series of great and important stories about the threads that bind together the living world … and his writing is so good that he sweeps a reader along — Carl Safina With expert knowledge and wry humor, Roman returns animals to their rightful place at the center of the environment * Kirkus *