Eat, Poop, Die: How Animals Make Our World

Joe Roman reveals how ecosystems are sculpted and sustained by animals eating, pooping, and dying--and how these fundamental functions could help save us from climate catastrophe.

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.

Author: Joe Roman
Publisher: Little, Brown Spark
Published: 11/07/2023
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Hardcover
ISBN: 9780316372923

About the Author
Joe Roman is a Harvard-trained evolutionary biologist based at the University of Vermont, where he is a fellow and writer in residence at the Gund Institute for Environment. Coverage of his work has been featured in the New York Times, The New Yorker, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, NPR, BBC, and other major media outlets. The winner of the 2012 Rachel Carson Environment Book Award for Listed, Joe writes for the New York Times, Audubon, New Scientist, Slate, Science, The Conversation, and other publications. He has also presented his work on endangered species conservation to the U.S. Congress, to the International Monetary Fund, at South by Southwest, and to the National Academy of Sciences. Joe received his PhD from Harvard University in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and his MS in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation from the University of Florida. Thereafter, he received a Fulbright Fellowship in Brazil, a Hrdy Visiting Fellowship at Harvard University, a McCurdy Fellowship at the Duke University Marine Lab, a Fulbright-NSF Arctic Research Scholarship at the University of Iceland, a Bellagio Residency, and a Science and Technology Policy Fellowship from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, among other awards