Photosynthesis is hard to describe without sounding like a hand-waving mystic. By blending water from below with sunlight and carbon dioxide from above, photosynthesis links Earth to the sky. The crops in every farmer’s field are air and sunlight in cold storage. So are the trees around the field and the algae in nearby ponds. Every dot of green on the landscape is a ceaselessly active photosynthetic factory. If this furious microscopic churning stopped, Oliver Morton, the science writer, has remarked, “so would everything else that you care about.” The planet would survive. But it would no
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