About this item
In Nature, there is little chemical waste; nearly every atom is a resource to be utilized by organisms, ensuring that all the available matter remains in a perpetual cycle. By contrast, human systems of energy production and manufacturing are linear; the end product is waste. In Brave Green World, Chris Forman and Claire Asher show what our linear systems can learn from the efficient circularity of ecosystems. They offer an unblinkered yet realistic and positive vision of a future in which we can combine biology and manufacturing to solve our central problems of waste and pollution.
About the Author
Hi, I am a British physicist with a passion for fixing the planet with science. I currently work in the US at Northwestern University in Evanston near Chicago. The book "Brave Green World" began life as a talk that I wrote during my PhD at Cambridge University UK, called "Can iPods Grow on Trees? ". I gave that talk to many, many students, professors and members of the public over the years of my PhD and subsequent postdocs. In the talk, I take a smart phone to pieces (metaphorically) and identify biological analogues of the components. I challenged the audience to think of how we might change the way we make things so they are more like biology. The talk is a great way of introducing the basics of biology and ecology to engineers. Many of the ideas and thoughts in the book have therefore been field tested and honed by the questions and observations of many Cambridge graduates and professors over many years. So fifteen years of learning from the very brightest and best is now beautifully packaged and available to you!After I gave the talk to the public at the Cheltenham Science Festival in 2015--under the title "Natural Nanotechnology"--Claire, the book's co-author approached me and said let's write a book. So we did. The process of writing a book with such a consummate professional as Claire, is, I expect, analogous to the moment when mitochondria first joined forces with bacteria to create a whole new source of energy for living organisms. As well as having a PhD in genetics, Claire is a fantastic science communicator--she's also a comedian and dead funny. If I'd written the book on my own, firstly I would never have finished it, but secondly it would have been incomprehensible. Claire breathed life and soul into the book and added a huge amount of information, ideas, details and colorful examples from genetics all the while insisting on understandable and well translated academic rigor. All these components act together to really bring the book to life. The book of the talk is so much more than anything either of us could have written alone. We are both super-happy with it and very proud of what we have written together, as are the publishers UniPress (world wide) and MITPress (US) who have worked hard to create the layouts and graphics and publicize the book. Rob Brandt the artist is a true hero and had not very long to produce some incredible images that we hope will delight and inform you, your family and friends for years to come. The title "Brave Green World", is an awesome title, suggested to us by Kate Shanahan from Unipress. While Huxley was obsessed with utopias and distopias, we paint a picture of a real version for how the world could be, and whether or not that comes to pass depends on you and you alone. But first you have to read the book! Hope you enjoy reading it and learn as much as we did as we wrote it. Took us four years to write in total. Should only take a
