Every time you breathe out, you are playing a part in Peter Brannen’s new book.

Entitled The Story of CO2 is the Story of Everything: How Carbon Dioxide Made Our World, the book was published in August and takes on, well, everything.

It’s a huge topic, one with ramifications for all of life — and death — here on fragile planet Earth. Thankfully, Mr. Brannen will be on the Island next week to help break it down for everyone. The Vineyard Haven library is hosting the talk with Mr. Brannen, which will take place at the Katharine Cornell Theatre on Tuesday, Oct. 7 at 6 p.m.

Mr. Brannen is a longtime seasonal resident of the Vineyard, and for a time was a year-rounder when he was a reporter for the Vineyard Gazette from 2009 to 2012.

Since then his career has focused on science writing, offering up the arcane and complex in informative, thoughtful, and even witty, books that the layman can understand and enjoy — even when he is writing about extinction, human extinction that is. His previous book is titled The Ends of the World.

In an interview earlier this summer, Mr. Brannen talked about his thoughts on the future of the human race.

“I’m a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist, because it’s hard to squint at anything in the world today and be encouraged about how things are going,” he said. “But I think eventually humans will find a more sustainable way to live on this planet, because either we will do it proactively ourselves, or the planet will make us.”

May it be so.