From the bestselling author of Lab Girl comes a slim, urgent missive on the defining issue of our time: here is Hope Jahren on climate change, our timeless pursuit of more, and how the same human ambition that got us here can also be our salvation.
Hope Jahren is an award-winning geobiologist, a brilliant writer, and one of the seven billion people with whom we share this earth. The Story of More is her impassioned open letter to humanity as we stand at the crossroads of survival and extinction. Jahren celebrates the long history of our enterprising spirit – which has tamed wild crops, cured diseases, and sent us to the moon – but also shows how that spirit has created excesses that are quickly warming our planet to dangerous levels. In short, highly readable chapters, she takes us through the science behind the key inventions – from electric power to large-scale farming and automobiles – that, even as they help us, release untenable amounts of carbon dioxide. She explains the current and projected consequences of greenhouse gases – from superstorms to rising sea levels – and the science-based tools that could help us fight back. At once an explainer on the mechanisms of warming and a capsule history of human development, The Story of More illuminates the link between our consumption habits and our endangered earth, showing us how we can use less and share more. It is the essential pocket primer on climate change that will leave an indelible impact on everyone who reads it.
Hope Jahren is an award-winning scientist who has been pursuing independent research in paleobiology since 1996. Recognized by Time in 2016 as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, she is the recipient of three Fulbright Awards and served as a tenured professor at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu from 2008 to 2016, where she built the isotope geobiology laboratories. She currently holds the J. Tuzo Wilson professorship at the University of Oslo, Norway.
"Hope Jahren is the voice that science has been waiting for."
– Nature
"A superb account of the deadly struggle between humanity and what may prove the only life-bearing planet within ten light years, written in a brilliantly sardonic and conversational style."
– E. O. Wilson