In most books dealing with the history of life, fossil plants comprise the fuzzy backdrop to a zoological drama of ‘hopeful monsters’. At best, they may be permitted to give a static performance and mumble through a few disjointed lines. That's why David Beerling's new book – which brings plants onto centre stage – is so refreshingly novel. Through three hundred well written pages and seven geological case studies, Beerling emphasizes plants as a dynamic agent in the Earth's system, simultaneously shaping the global environment while responding to extrinsic selection pressures.

Over the past fifteen years, Beerling's research group has spearheaded a powerful new movement in the field, uniting plant physiology experiments with traditional palaeobotany to help interpret the vagaries of geological history. His thought-provoking book is essentially a popular review of that singular perspective – though none the worst for that. What is slightly awkward is the way he always discusses his own research in the third person, thereby excluding the possibility of personal anecdotes that might have enlivened the text. However, this is not a big issue because the book is replete with historical references, which in telling the story, manage to weave together an improbable miscellany of characters from birth control pioneer, Marie Stopes, to the Antarctic explorer, Robert Falcon Scott.

The seven chapters that comprise the core of this book address some of Beerling's main contributions to the field. The first considers how plants acquired leaves in order to resist ‘suffocation’ in an atmosphere scrubbed of carbon dioxide. The next two deal with a blip in planetary regulation that resulted in oxygen levels shooting up and promoting gigantism in insects and then plummeting, leaving the ozone shield vulnerable to depletion. Three more chapters focus on the Mesozoic greenhouse world and amongst diverse topics explore how forests managed to flourish at the poles beneath the midnight sun. A final chapter describes the metabolic innovation that allowed grasses to take over the planet in late Miocene times.

As Beerling freely admits, his book is not a traditional story of plant evolution, nor is his outlook free from controversy or critics. Nevertheless it does neatly capture the prevailing zeitgeist. The underlying motivation for Beerling's work is that by better understanding the role that plants played during extreme episodes in Earth history we are better equipped to understand the changes that might occur in response to global warming, or some other environmental excursion. For David Beerling, and for palaeobotany, ‘the past is the key to the future’.