Gallery: The Earth and I: A Gorgeous Picture Book From Famed Scientist James Lovelock
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*The Earth and I* is a slender book with an ambitious aim: to explain to readers how the world works
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This happens over the course of 12 chapters, written by renowned scientists. Vivid illustrations by Jack Hudson accompany all that educational text. Lisa Randall, a Harvard theoretical particle physicist and best-selling author, who wrote a chapter on the scale of the universe, from atoms to objects in outer space.
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Einstein and his theory of general relativity, which showed space-time to be an elastic entity, get a shout out in Randall's chapter.
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*The Earth and I* is loosely based on a a 1998 essay Lovelock wrote for *Science* titled “A Book for All Seasons.” In the event of a near-apocalyptic disaster, that book would be a primer to survivors on how the world works.
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*The Earth and I* is not that book. But it does explain in digestible terms how the earth behaves, and how we humans impact it. This handy chart shows the average number of children women are having in countries around the world. Overall, that number is dropping.
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Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and naturalist Edward O. Wilson wrote about the biosphere and the gradual extinction of certain species. In it, he explains that our biosphere is so small, that if you were to start at the earth's center and walk outwards—metaphorically—towards the surface, you would walk for 12 weeks. As you walk through and climb onto the earth's surface, you spend just a few minutes encountering all of life. That's how big the earth is compared to the space life inhabits.
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Hudson's gorgeous illustrations These assist Lovelock’s goal for The Earth and I, which is to synthesize, not complicate, the facts. Lovelock’s target audience isn’t the scientific community, but rather the every-person who’s lost touch with nature. That happens more and more, Lovelock says, as humans live in cities.
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More and more, that makes us creatures of consumption. Economist Tomáš Sedláček writes about how governments and economies rules our behavior. This fairly realistic illustration looks at the world when everything is viewed with as an economic resource.
