Thinking Small and Large: How Microbes Made and Can Save Our World

The environmental crisis will not be solved by battery technology. We are looking for answers in the wrong places.

Life began with the hydrogenation of CO2, and this is the process we must return to in order to heal the planet. Ground-breaking ongoing research into bacterial processes means our knowledge of bacterial processes is ever-expanding, and we can harness this new knowledge to develop a parallel carbon economy using engineered bacteria for fuel, food, and materials. This would enable rewilding on a vast scale, with the small land footprint of bacterial technologies solving the current conflict in land use between farming and fuel and materials production.

In this fascinating and illuminating book, Peter Forbes shines a light on this crucial technology and offers a tantalizing glimpse at what is possible. To solve the big problems, sometimes you have to think small.

Peter Forbes is a science writer and journalist writing mainly on life sciences and natural history. He read chemistry and worked for the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain and in natural history publishing before becoming a freelance writer.

His first full-length non-fiction book, The Gecko’s Foot: How scientist are taking a leaf from nature’s book, a ground-breaking introduction to the new field of engineering and materials solutions inspired by nature, was longlisted for the Royal Society/Aventis Prize. He followed this with Dazzled and Deceived: Mimicry and Camouflage, which won the Warwick Prize for Writing.