{"product_id":"the-oldest-living-things-in-the-world","title":"The Oldest Living Things in the World","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe Oldest Living Things in the World is an epic journey through time and space. Over the past decade  artist Rachel Sussman has researched  worked with biologists  and traveled the world to photograph continuously living organisms that are 2 000 years old and older. Spanning from Antarctica to Greenland  the Mojave Desert to the Australian Outback  the result is a stunning and unique visual collection of ancient organisms unlike anything that has been created in the arts or sciences before  insightfully and accessibly narrated by Sussman along the way.  Her work is both timeless and timely  and spans disciplines  continents  and millennia. It is underscored by an innate environmentalism and driven by Sussmans relentless curiosity. She begins at year zero  and looks back from there  photographing the past in the present. These ancient individuals live on every continent and range from Greenlandic lichens that grow only one centimeter a century  to unique desert shrubs in Africa and South America  a predatory fungus in Oregon  Caribbean brain coral  to an 80 000-year-old colony of aspen in Utah. Sussman journeyed to Antarctica to photograph 5 500-year-old moss; Australia for stromatolites  primeval organisms tied to the oxygenation of the planet and the beginnings of life on Earth; and to Tasmania to capture a 43 600-year-old self-propagating shrub thats the last individual of its kind. Her portraits reveal the living history of our planetand what we stand to lose in the future. These ancient survivors have weathered millennia in some of the worlds most extreme environments  yet climate change and human encroachment have put many of them in danger. Two of her subjects have already met with untimely deaths by human hands.  Alongside the photographs  Sussman relays fascinating  and sometimes harrowing  tales of her global adventures tracking down her subjects and shares insights from the scientists who research them. The oldest living things in the world are a record and celebration of the past  a call to action in the present  and a barometer of our future.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44953466339381,"sku":"ByrdShop_022605750X","price":34.28,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780226057507.jpg?v=1770235156","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-oldest-living-things-in-the-world","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}