Eat, Poop, Die

How Animals Make Our World

By: Joe Roman PhD PhD

Narrated by: Claire Christie

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.

Critic reviews

"Joe Roman's argument that animals remake the world is a fascinating one. In our current age of extinction, it deserves the widest possible audience."—Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction

"Absolutely fascinating—and you will read it with an entirely new appreciation and respect for the role that all the other animals on this earth play in making it work.”—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

“Absolutely fascinating. A compulsively readable scientific exploration of earth's ability to sustain life, but also a collection of entertaining anecdotes from Joe Roman’s career as a biologist who has spent a considerable amount of time studying… well, poop. Eat, Poop, Die helped me better understand our planet and gave me a fresh burst of motivation to advocate for it.”—Shelby Van Pelt, New York Times bestselling author of Remarkably Bright Creatures

“Joe Roman knows how to handle words. In this, his latest book, he ventures afield and spins a series of great and important stories about the many surprising threads that bind together the living world. And his writing just happens to be so good that he sweeps a reader along.”—Carl Safina, author of Beyond Words and Alfie and Me

“With expert knowledge and wry humor, Roman returns animals to their rightful place at the center of the environment.”—Kirkus Reviews

WOW!

Listen to this book! Beautifully written, masterful interweaving of information and ideas. All the science grounded in human and animal stories that make the listening fun and fascinating and make the science understandable for the uninformed or little-informed reader. Warm-hearted, funny, deeply caring, helpfully alarming, hopeful. Excellent for scientists/ecologist and the lay-reader alike. THANK YOU, Joe Roman. What a gift! Also, the narrator, Claire Christie, is excellent. A very good choice. Thank you, Claire Christie.

Excellent!

I highly recommend this book! It's well rounded, informative and made me view the Earth in an even more unified way. 

- Also, nuclear destructive practices are an abhorrent human activity.

CO2 is not our enemy, it’s Fertilizer 

 A lot of good studies in the book however, the climate has been changing since the climate started

Uniquely brilliant 

Scientific. Fascinating. Dramatic yet levelheaded. It felt like a well done nature documentary. He takes a complex topic with high implications and makes it earthy and accessible.