KSJ fellows Archives - Knight Science Journalism @MIT

by Mackenzie White / January 7th 2025 / Fellowship Life

Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi on Climate Change and Deaf Communities

Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi has spent over two decades documenting some of the world’s most pressing crises. He has trained his lens on resilient communities facing political upheaval, natural disasters, and the growing impacts of climate change. A photojournalist with the Associated Press and two-time CNN Africa Photojournalist Award winner, Mukwazhi has ventured across Africa, Europe, and Asia, and his photographs have brought global attention to underrepresented voices.

Now, as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, Mukwazhi is exploring new ways to bridge linguistic and sensory divides. He is working on a project at the intersection of climate science and sign language: He is collaborating with linguists, educators, and technology experts to create sign language adaptations for essential climate terms that currently have no sign-language equivalent. By building tools for more inclusive communication, Mukwazhi aims to fully involve Deaf communities in discussions about climate change.

This work stems from Mukwazhi’s personal and professional experiences, including his photographic coverage of Cyclone Idai — a record-breaking storm that struck the coast of Southeast Africa in 2019. During this event, he saw firsthand how the absence of standardized, up-to-date climate terminology in sign language created barriers to accessing essential information.

I spoke with Mukwazhi about his storytelling journey, commitment to inclusivity, and the evolving role of journalists in addressing climate change. (The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

Mackenzie White: You’ve covered major climate disasters like Cyclone Idai. How has witnessing the direct impact of climate change on communities shaped your storytelling approach?

Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi: I think when you’re on the ground, you are confronted with all sorts of feelings and emotions that prompt you to try and find ways of communicating how dire the situation is. It ignites that passion and the need to bring to light how lives can be affected by climate change.

I think communicating about climate change is not an individual thing. It’s about collective and creative efforts to try and showcase the impact of climate change in an engaging manner. One has to evolve as a journalist, as a photographer, as a writer, and incorporate different aspects of storytelling. And I think I’m on that path of evolution in my career, in terms of how best to communicate any stories, but in particular, focusing on climate change.

MW: Your project at MIT focuses on bridging the gap between the evolving language of climate change and sign language. How did you first become aware of the linguistic and communication barriers faced by the Deaf community, and why did this become such an important focus for your work?

TM: The issue of the Deaf community is deeply personal to me.

When I was about eight years old, I lost my eyesight–my ability to see–for a very long time. I think it was about a year or so. My parents took me to special schools where I learned with the Blind, with the Deaf. And that was my first contact with sign language and with people with various disabilities and challenges. And this went on all the way to my high school and through to university. So it has been a part of me, in a way. I connect with it.

About two years back, we underwent training webinars within the Associated Press on climate, education, science, and how to report on climate change. I was trying to digest all this language, which was very foreign to me, which was very complex. And I was trying to sign that. I was trying to put myself in the shoes of someone who’s deaf and trying to understand various terms. How do you break that down?

We should not just wait for a crisis to happen, but we should address that predicament now more than ever, with the same agency that the world’s attention is focusing on the need to address carbon emissions and various issues in terms of trying to bring down pollution.

Mukwazhi takes a photo as KSJ fellow Jori Lewis practices with a microscope at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

MW: Climate fatigue is a growing challenge in today’s media landscape. How do you balance documenting the harsh realities of climate change while still providing a sense of hope and a call to action?

TM: I think striking that balance is up to us as journalists. It’s up to us as the media to find success stories where climate initiatives and various programs are making a positive impact in the community.

You go to these meetings, and you read all these stories across the media. It can be depressing, really, to say the least. I think every now and then, the media should really shift their attention.

Let’s throw in a bit of gloom and doom. That’s fine. It’s real. I want something lighter, and it’s a call on us as journalists to do our homework, to look for those stories within our communities. And it doesn’t have to be hugely impactful. But those small steps that people, that my grandmother, that my nephew are doing to at least show that they are aware of the threat of climate change. Those need to be highlighted. There are lots of stories there.

MW: In your teaching roles, you’ve mentored young journalists from around the world. How do you see the next generation of photographers innovating in how they tell climate stories, especially with new technologies emerging?

TM: When I started teaching my first teaching role in Bangladesh, it was the very beginning of digital photography, so it was very exciting times.

But things have gone to another level altogether, where the next generation of photographers have to be fully equipped in terms of their skills. It’s about them learning new skills and, most importantly, embracing technology, embracing AI, we cannot run away from it.

I think there’s always room for someone to be behind the camera, someone to be on the ground, someone to give us a feel of the environment and tell colorful stories. I think just being a photographer is not enough. You have to do more. We’re living in an era where you’re called upon to do more.

Mukwazhi enjoying conversation with the other KSJ fellows on the Gemma, a research vessel at the Marine Biological Laboratory.

MW: How can they work to make stories resonate across cultures and communication barriers?

TM: I think it’s a combination of so many factors, and it’s challenging, but it can be done. It’s just about finding the right voice, the connections, placement. Climate change has brought the whole world together because everybody’s affected. I think we need to tap into technology and ensure that everybody has access to such information.

MW: You’ve dedicated your career to storytelling, teaching, and pushing journalism forward with more inclusivity. How can journalists improve accessibility and diversity in climate communication, and how do you see your work contributing to this in the future?

TM: Diversity and inclusion are very important when it comes to climate voices, but also when it comes to how we approach our stories. As journalists, we need to be aware of that minority. Essential groups of people – the Blind, the Deaf, the Disabled – need to be a part of these conversations.

I feel that when you are talking about climate change issues there’s a need to be able to ensure that the persons who are at the forefront of telling climate stories are from that community or from that particular region.

I think I’ve forged very strong relationships with my home community, with people from other regions of the continent, and it’s because I connect with them. It’s because I identify with them. So I think it’s all about building those relationships that foster how you tell the stories.

Mackenzie White is a student in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing.

by Anika Jane Beamer / December 5th 2024 / Fellowship Life

Aaron Scott is Looking Back to Look Forward

Portrait of Aaron Scott is shown over a black and white photo of trees.

Knight Science Journalism Fellow Aaron Scott says he suffers from “existential indecision coupled with omnivorous curiosity.” In other words: he’s a multimedia journalist. Throughout a decade-long career in radio, television, podcasting, and writing, Scott has resisted pigeonholing. His beat, he says, is wonder.

Scott’s award-winning podcast series for Oregon Public Broadcasting, “Timber Wars,” immersed listeners in a precarious chapter in American environmental history: the battle over old growth trees in the Northwest. Scott spent more than nine months reporting on the U.S. environmental movement, the decline of the logging industry, and how together they forever changed our understanding of the forest. “Timber Wars” was the first audio work to receive the MIT Knight Science Journalism Program’s Victor K. McElheny Award.

Most recently a host of NPR’s “Short Wave” podcast, Scott has transported listeners to deadly caves, dinosaur graveyards, and the bottom of the ocean. Now at MIT as a 2024-2025 Knight Science Journalism Fellow, Scott continues to pursue stories about the wondrous, often messy, overlap of the natural world and the human experience. As we navigate the climate crisis, he believes there is a lot to learn from looking back at the science that’s shaped us.

I sat down with Scott to talk about what history like the Timber Wars can teach us and the power of narrative journalism to change our relationships to each other and to life everywhere. (The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

Anika Jane Beamer: “Timber Wars” goes behind the scenes of the environmental conflict that exploded the northwest logging industry in the 1990s. When did you first learn about the Timber Wars?

Aaron Scott: I didn’t realize it at the time, but the Timber Wars were going on while I was in middle school in Colorado. So it wasn’t until I was reporting on the environment for Oregon Field Guide and spending time in the woods in the Pacific Northwest with biologists and ecologists that I started really learning about the way that we as humans had reshaped the landscape through decades of logging. And how, ever since legal fights over the spotted owl and the Northwest Forest Plan and the resulting changes in logging practices in the 1990s, how much the landscape had changed again — that most the forests around us weren’t “natural,” they were replanted second or third growth.

AJB: It’s easy to look back on the logging protests as an environmental win. But in “Timber Wars,” it becomes very clear that the stakes on both sides of the conflict were extremely high. At one point, you say “For the loggers, it was like their very existence was under attack.” As a journalist, how do you approach covering environmental problems that threaten people’s ways of life?

AS: To me, that’s where narrative story telling is so powerful, because you can spend time listening to people. It’s not like a news feature where you parachute in, and you ask a couple questions, and then you have to try to make meaning out of it. “Timber Wars” is a decades long story that played out over multiple states and dozens, if not hundreds, of communities. Being able to do a long form narrative story about it meant that I could go and spend weeks talking to people, listening to their stories, and going back to them when I had more questions. The beauty of narrative journalism is that you then can really let those stories breathe and try to share them with your audience in as rich and nuanced ways as possible.

AJB: Environmental issues can feel so pressing, so urgent, that it’s hard to look anywhere other than the here and now. What do you think is the role of history and looking back when it comes to understanding current crises?

AS: In order to get past the deep division we have on the environment today, I feel like it’s incredibly important to understand how we got here — to understand how we went from the environment being a thing that the majority of people wanted to protect to a thing that tears people apart, often along political lines. I think these historical narratives give people a greater understanding of both their position, but also that of the “other side.”

Our desire with “Timber Wars” was very much to try to get people to empathize with folks that they would normally disagree with. And we can do that through history. We can do that by telling the stories of what the environment means to people, how that’s changed, and how they came to these foundational ideas that are now so deeply stitched into our cultural fabric.

Aaron Scott takes a photo of the horizon from aboard the Gemma, the Marine Biological Laboratory’s research vessel working in the waters off Woods Hole

AJB: Are there other chapters in environmental history that you think are due for reexamination?

AS: In some way, all of them. Building off “Timber Wars,” I did a piece for the Outside Magazine podcast looking back at the Endangered Species Act, which has become one of the most consequential pieces of environmental legislation in the world. To me, it’s a fascinating story. It’s something everybody agreed on at the time because we thought it was just going to be protecting big, beautiful things like blue whales and cool animals like grizzly bears. Nobody thought that this law would also be used to protect tiny little fish that nobody has heard of, or things like snails, or lichen, or small flowers that grow in the desert.

But now, the Endangered Species Act and other environmental laws are also being used to stop renewable energy and grid infrastructure projects that most experts say are necessary to save us from the existential threat of climate change. So, I’m interested in looking at how some of these laws that were the best that policymakers could conceive at the time, to protect the earth as we understood it at the time, have become challenges as we move forward to dealing with big global issues like climate change.

Aaron Scott bends to look closely at a tank at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA.

AJB: Much of your work has examined how, as humans, we walk the line between seeing other living things as a resource and also as our kin. Right now, how do you define your relationship to the things around us?

AS: That’s a great question, because three of the courses I’m taking at MIT and Harvard right now are very much about considering how our fellow species on this earth perceive the world, and trying to branch out from our human centric narratives into thinking about how other creatures experience, utilize, participate, and inhabit this planet.

There’s so much more to the world than what we’ve presumed. I’m really just scratching that surface of understanding that science, and I think scientists are just scratching that surface of understanding the world. And I’m delighted and enthusiastic about what we’re learning and what we still have to learn.

The thing that I find so exciting and intoxicating about science journalism is that it’s kind of like our beat is wonder. It’s our job to go out and encounter the world and try to find the most interesting, wondrous secrets about how it works and then to share them with people.

Anika Jane Beamer is a student in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing.

by Celina Zhao / November 26th 2024 / Fellowship Life

Jane Zhang on covering China’s tech beat for a global audience

Jane Zhang is shown in front of a graphic of networks.

Until 2008, the only way Jane Zhang could go from her rural mountainous hometown of Enshi, Hubei, to the province’s capital, Wuhan, was a 24-hour-long bus ride. This relative isolation meant that the first time she interviewed for an international journalism program, she felt woefully unprepared. “That was the first time I felt the information gap between people from big cities and people from poverty-stricken counties like me,” she says.

But armed with a fierce desire to do journalism that made a difference, Zhang came to soar far above those mountains. Now, she’s emerged as an inimitable voice covering the fast-paced international tech boom. With stints at the South China Morning Post (SCMP) and Bloomberg, Zhang has homed in on political tensions in the U.S.-China tech war and China’s historical crackdown on its largest tech corporations — while simultaneously navigating unique ethical and political sensitivity concerns for everyday workers caught in the crossfire.

Zhang is now spending time at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. This year, she’s centering her attention on the incipient AI industry and its impacts on journalism. She spoke with me recently about finding her footing in global platforms and the world of tech giants. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Celina Zhao: Most of your education was in China, where viewpoints on news and journalism are often quite different than in the U.S. How did that shape your understanding of the two?

Jane Zhang: When I started at Wuhan University, I began to learn about topics and ideas I’d never been exposed to before. We were also required to read English books. What’s freedom? What’s news? And I got access to VPN for the first time in my life.

But at that time, VPN was not as important as it is today. When I first started journalism, there were still good investigative reporters in China who wrote in-depth pieces that drove positive social change, including the coverage of the Wenchuan earthquake and the Wenzhou high-speed railway accidents. Deep in my heart, I knew this was the type of work I wanted to do in the future.

Jane Zhang is sitting in what looks like a bus seat and holding up her phone to take a picture. Bryce Hoye is doing the same in the seat behind her. Out the window, the Charles River is visible. Above their seats are life jackets. — KSJ fellows Jane Zhang and Bryce Hoye take photos out of a Duck Tour on the Charles River. A “Duck Tour” is a tour of the Boston area in a vehicle that doubles as a bus and a boat.

CZ: How did that then lead you into the tech beat?

JZ: During my time as a graduate trainee at the South China Morning Post, I rotated through many desks. I liked tech, so I joined the tech team for my full-time job.

It was totally by coincidence that not long later, Huawei was put on the U.S. Entity List, and the whole U.S.-China tech war began. That was the start of the golden time to write about the U.S., China, and tech, and it’s still going on today. There are so many changes, and you get to write about so many different perspectives. So I really joined the right beat at the right time.

CZ: Your career has lined up with breakneck changes in the tech industry, including the Chinese government’s historic crackdown on e-commerce giant Alibaba. What was the most challenging part of reporting something with so many unknowns?

JZ: The tech crackdown started with the cancellation of an initial public offering by Ant Group, an affiliate of the e-commerce giant Alibaba, and a subsequent antitrust probe into Alibaba. The biggest challenge was that it was an unprecedented case. I must have gone through hundreds of China’s antitrust litigation cases in history. There were industrial, banking, electricity, utility, and not a single internet case. This was really the first one. Did the Chinese government single out Alibaba, or was the Chinese government not satisfied with China tech in general at that time? No one had a clue.

The other challenge is that in China, they tend to publish big news on Friday nights or over the weekend. When they announced the amount of Alibaba antitrust fine, it was a Saturday morning. I was still in bed, and my phone started to ring. I checked my phone, saw a number, literally jumped out of my bed, and started to write a story.

Jane Zhang sits in a classroom with a white VR headset, holding controls. Nipam Patel looks on providing instruction. In front of them is a laptop showing a 3D scan of a cell-like structure. — Zhang views and “slices” a confocal microscope scan in virtual reality with Nipam Patel, director of the Marine Biological Laboratory.

CZ: You’ve also done extensive on-the-ground reporting, talking to everyday people impacted by the crackdowns and wars. Many may not be familiar with how the press works. So how do you approach them?

JZ: Yes, they are the most vulnerable. For example, when I covered China’s crackdown on online education, many tutors who got laid off wanted to get their voices out, but didn’t know how foreign media works. If I use their real names, they might be put on a blacklist and can’t find jobs in the future.

I can try my best to protect them by saying they don’t have to answer hard questions and can refuse to give me personal or sensitive information. And I make it very clear in the beginning the ethical standards that I will adhere to. I will also tell them about who the audience of SCMP and Bloomberg is, and why I’m writing this story — that it’s important for people to know the real situation on the ground, and how it’s necessary to hold relevant parties accountable.

But for many China reporters, we know it’s more important to protect a source than break news. I have so many stories unwritten because I just need to protect my source.

CZ: Reporting in China is uniquely tricky because of the strong national tensions between Washington and Beijing, which can bleed into the cultural viewpoints towards tech. How do you balance that when writing for a global audience?

JZ: It’s really difficult, but the good thing about working in a global newsroom is that your editors and colleagues are all from different cultures, backgrounds, and countries. There’s a diversity of opinions. That, by nature, makes the piece more neutral and balanced. And I try to interview as many people as I can.

CZ: This year, you’re keeping tech at the forefront of your work, studying the effect of generative AI on the newsroom. What’s the current state of things?

JZ: There are divided opinions in the industry and global news rules. But AI is not a tool that just helps polish writing.

It’s also impacting content generation and content distribution. We already see the power of social media platforms like TikTok. Right now, the purpose of SEO editors is to change the headline so that when people search in the bar, it’s easier to find the story. But soon, people won’t search in the search bar. They’ll just chat with a chatbot or consume short videos in a video flow.

So how people consume news will be disrupted. It has already been disrupted.

CZ: Since this is already happening, should journalism lean into AI then?

JZ: Yes, newsrooms should embrace generative AI. We shouldn’t be too behind in adopting new tech. But we need to do it in a very, very cautious way.

Accuracy is the core of news. Even if a number is slightly different, there are consequences. Generative AI can create so much crap. The value for people, for reporters, for newsrooms, is the credibility of the information they generate. So that’s the thing we cannot compromise.

Celina Zhao is a student in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing.

by Anna Cass / November 15th 2024 / KSJ News & Events

KSJ Opens Application Cycle for 2025-26 Fellowships

Every year, the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT offers fellowships to science journalists from around the globe, giving them an opportunity to learn at some of the top research universities in the world and explore science, technology, and the craft of journalism.

A fellowship at KSJ is an unparalleled opportunity to hone your skills, deepen your knowledge, and tap into the rich network of experts in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Fellows’ time is divided between activities arranged by the KSJ staff and self-directed activities.

This year, KSJ will run simultaneous application cycles for two of its fellowship programs. Both the Academic-Year Fellowship and the Africa and Middle East Fellowship are accepting applications until January 15, 2025.

Knight Science Journalism Academic-Year Fellowship

Apply before January 15, 2025

The Academic-Year Fellowship program is a nine and a half month fellowship open to journalists from around the world who demonstrate a high level of professional excellence and accomplishment as well as a long-term commitment to their craft.

More about the Academic-Year Fellowship →

Jump to the application →

Fellowship for Advancing Science Journalism in Africa and the Middle East

Apply before January 15, 2025

The Africa and the Middle East Fellowship is a one-semester fellowship designed to help reporters and editors from the region to further develop a successful career in science journalism through a combination of study and specialized training.

More about the Africa and Middle East Fellowship →

Jump to the application →

by Anna Cass / October 15th 2024 / Fellowship Life

Field Trip: Down in Woods Hole

In early October, KSJ fellows visited the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Woods Hole is a hub of marine research capitalizing on the rich biodiversity available in the area.

The busy summer season had already wound down once the fellows arrived, but there was no shortage of enthusiasm from the staff and researchers who warmly welcomed KSJ to the shore. The following photos capture some of the highlights of the trip — one that saw the fellows traverse land and sea to learn about the past and future of marine research.

Sharon Begley Fellow Anil Oza and KSJ Fellow Bryce Hoye pose with specimens collected aboard the Gemma, the MBL’s research vessel working in the waters off Woods Hole. Oza holds “sea pork,” the common name for a colonial tunicate, a globular structure made up of many tiny animals. Hoye holds stack of slipper limpets, this species is a sequential hermaphrodite, meaning it will change sex throughout its lifetime.

Jane Zhang and Yarden Michaeli look closely at a sea star collected aboard the Gemma. Any specimens that were not collected for study at MBL were returned to the water.

Andrew Gillis, who leads an interdisciplinary lab of embryologists, physiologists, engineers and paleontologists, shared a short presentation with KSJ fellows on cartilage growth and repair in the skate. He contextualized his research by describing how mammals have poor capacity to repair that cartilage, especially as we age. In contrast, the skate continues to make new cartilage throughout its lifespan. Gillis’s team hopes this research will ultimately help advance techniques for encouraging cartilage repair in humans.

Sharon Muzaki, Africa and Middle East fellow, takes a picture of the horseshoe crabs in a tank at MBL. The lab is full of tanks with the ability to control temperature and other environmental variables.

Nipam Patel, director of the Marine Biological Laboratory, demonstrated a confocal microscope to a small group of fellows. The microscope can capture a three-dimensional object through two-dimensional scans at different depths. Researchers then run a software program to construct three-dimensional models of the sample.

Patel invited fellows to view the confocal microscope scan in virtual reality. Zhang is pictured learning to “slice” the scan and rotate the viewing angle. VR headsets are a relatively new addition to the MBL’s arsenal of technology. Patel expressed the hope that using VR would help scientists gain, quite literally, a new perspective on the organisms they’re studying.

Jennifer Walton, co-director of the MBLWHOI Library, brought fellows on a tour of the library’s rare books collection. Fellows viewed historical examples of efforts to document and classify organisms. Walton shared details about the origin and construction of texts from different eras of science between the 16th-20th century. Illustrations of organisms in these books were printed using a wood block or etching. Color illustrations would have been hand painted.

KSJ fellows listen to a presentation about the evolution of cephalopods from Caroline Albertin, who leads a lab studying evolution and embryogenesis using cephalopods as models. Fellows got hands-on experience with cephalopod research, using microscopes to look at developing bobtail squid.

KSJ Fellow Jori Lewis uses tweezers to remove the egg sac surrounding the juvenile squid while KSJ fellow Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi films her effort. Scientists perform this maneuver to better view the cephalopod in development. Fellows were fascinated by the tiny squid that emerged from the egg sacs and murmurs of excitement echoed in the lab.

KSJ fellows had the privilege of peeking at Patel’s personal collection of butterfly specimens featuring hundreds of species from around the globe. Patel’s fascination with butterflies began when he was a child and his collection is the result of a lifelong pursuit. He now studies structural color on their wings. While many pigments produce color by absorbing certain wavelengths of light, structural colors scatter light to produce color.

by Knight Science Journalism / October 1st 2024 / Alumni News

Ferris Jabr on How the Planet Came to Life

In his inaugural book, “Becoming Earth,” Ferris Jabr (KSJ ’22) upends the notion that Earth is an inanimate object merely garnished with life and illustrates how the Earth exhibits qualities of a living thing. Published in June 2024 by Random House, “Becoming Earth” already has rave reviews from science communication aficionados such as Ed Young and Hank Green.

For over six years Jabr traveled the globe, visiting the faces and places that tell the story of Earth. He found himself in a gold mine a mile underground and atop one of the tallest towers in the Amazon rainforest. Of course, that was all part of the plan for the book, Jabr explains, “the book was adopting an explicitly holistic perspective—because it concerned not just one locale or ecosystem, but rather the interactions between all of Earth’s components—its settings and characters needed to reflect that scope, scale, and diversity.”

KSJ fellows had the privilege to hear Jabr talk about his book in late September. As he described elements of Earth’s living systems—from plankton becoming mountains to the Amazon making its own rain—Jabr’s driving curiosity was plainly apparent. Prior to his visit, he spoke to KSJ about the “Becoming Earth” over email. With deft clarity, he described the science between the pages, and the book’s journey from idea to publication. The following interview has been edited for length.

Knight Science Journalism: Your book explores the idea that Earth is alive. What criteria does something need to meet to be alive? How does Earth meet those criteria?

Photo courtesy of Ferris Jabr.

Ferris Jabr: To this day, despite millennia of reflection and debate, science has still not settled on a consensus definition of life. Instead of a precise definition, textbooks typically offer long lists of characteristics that tend to distinguish the animate from the inanimate: growth, metabolism, reproduction, evolution, and so on. Yet there are numerous complicating examples: both inanimate entities with fundamental features of the living and vice versa. There’s growing recognition that life is more of a spectrum than a category and more of a verb than a noun. Life is a process—and it is one in which our planet is thoroughly engaged.

Although we typically think of Earth as a giant rock with life on its surface, the planet itself demonstrates many of the essential characteristics of the phenomenon we call life. We first need to recognize that life does not simply reside on the planet, but is in fact a physical extension of the planet. And because life is so ubiquitous, it endows Earth with a planetary-scale anatomy and physiology.

Furthermore, Earth and life are bound in reciprocal evolution. Over billions of years, this process of coevolution transformed a lump of orbiting rock into a cosmic oasis with a breathable atmosphere, a balanced chemistry, and an ecological pulse. Many experts agree that life’s most important defining quality is a capacity to sustain itself. Earth has an innate ability to regulate its climate over great spans of time, gradually recovering from extreme hothouse states and deep freezes. Life is an integral part of this self-regulation. Despite repeated catastrophes, our living planet has demonstrated astonishing resilience, enduring for more than four billion years. Thus, Earth is not simply a planet with life on it, but rather a planet that came to life: a vast, interconnected, self-regulating, living system.

KSJ: Historically, Western science has maintained that the ways in which life has shaped the planet are negligible compared to the planet’s power to mold life. Why did Western science overlook the former?

FJ: I think there are probably several reasons at play here. First, it’s important to acknowledge that the concept of a living world—and, more broadly, the idea that everything is literally connected—have ancient antecedents. We find these ideas in religions and mythologies around the world stretching far into prewritten history. Initially, such ideas seeped into early Western science without much resistance. From the ancient Greeks through the Renaissance and beyond, many thinkers were comfortable characterizing the planet as a living body.

By the time of Darwin, however, such notions had fallen out of fashion. Science was becoming increasingly reductionist, segregating the animate from the inanimate. Colonialism and capitalism conflicted with a worldview that emphasized the animacy and inherent value of the nonhuman, favoring more materialist and mechanistic interpretations—Earth as a body of inanimate resources ready for plucking, not a being with a life of its own. Twentieth century biology fixated on genetic inheritance, reproduction, competition, and natural selection as the hallmarks of life, inspired in part by the increasing sophistication of genetics and Richard Dawkins’s landmark book, “The Selfish Gene.”

When James Lovelock published his first book on Gaia in 1979, which challenged the prevailing thinking in biology at the time, evolutionary biologists mounted the most strenuous opposition. Today, the ancient notion that everything is connected, which has so often been dismissed as trite and New Agey, is rapidly gaining new scientific credibility.

KSJ: Catch us up: what’s the Gaia hypothesis? You mention that the original hypothesis had some errors, but the essential idea is now considered to be true. What is that essential idea?

FJ: Developed by British scientist James Lovelock and American biologist Lynn Margulis between the 1960s and ‘80s, the Gaia hypothesis proposes that wherever life emerges it inevitably transforms its home planet and that, together, life and its greater planetary environment form a single, self-regulating, living system.

As Lovelock and Margulis refined the Gaia hypothesis, they clarified that they viewed Earth not as a single organism, but rather as the largest known living system—the confluence of all other ecosystems—with structures, rhythms, and self-regulating processes resembling those of its smaller constituent life forms.

Today, it is universally accepted within science that life has indeed been a major geophysical force for at least 3.5 billion years, that Earth and life continually coevolve, and that the planet and its organisms form a single, highly interconnected system. Many scientists also acknowledge that life is integral to the planet’s self-regulation. These ideas are cornerstones of a relatively new mainstream field called Earth system science.

KSJ: As you learned more about the interplay between geology and biology, was there anything that really surprised you?

*“Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life*” by Ferris Jabr (Random House, 304 pages)

FJ: The role of plankton in the Earth system continually astounds me. Plankton initiated what is the single most profound transformation our planet has undergone: its long oxygenation. Early in its history, Earth likely had a hazy orange atmosphere with essentially no oxygen. More than 2.5 billion years ago, however, photosynthetic ocean microbes called cyanobacteria evolved the form of photosynthesis familiar to us today—the one that spins sunlight, CO2, and water into sugar and releases oxygen as a byproduct. Their collective activity, combined with various geological processes, suffused the ocean and atmosphere with oxygen, revolutionizing the planet’s chemistry. Much later, land plants pushed oxygen levels even higher. The oxygenation of Earth was a permanent shift with numerous enduring consequences: it dyed the sky blue, formed the ozone layer, made wildfires possible for the first time, and vastly increased the planet’s mineral diversity. It may have even accelerated the evolution of multicellular life.

KSJ: How does climate change fit into your book? Does the idea of Earth as an interconnected living system open up more avenues for solutions? Or did you find that it primarily illustrates just how disastrous humans have been to planetary balance?

FJ: I think it does both simultaneously. Earth system science is an excellent framework through which to understand anthropogenic climate change and the current planetary crisis. It shows us that Earth and life are not separate but are literally continuous. Life adapts to changes in the planet’s topography and climate, but at the same time, it profoundly alters the planet’s structure and chemistry.

All Earthly life is made of carbon, as is much of the planet itself. Where carbon is stored in the planet—and how it moves between various reservoirs such as the atmosphere, ocean, crust, and life itself—has a massive influence on global climate. Our living planet has evolved some extraordinary feedback loops that ultimately regulate global climate by gradually shifting carbon from one reservoir to another over vast periods of time.

In general, Earth and life have converged upon relationships and rhythms that ensure their mutual persistence. But sometimes life does something that throws the greater planetary system into chaos. We are the latest example of that. Our species has massively perturbed the Earth’s carbon cycle, unearthing huge quantities of carbon, combusting them, and flooding the atmosphere with carbon dioxide (CO2), thereby thickening its heat-trapping layer. That is the fundamental cause of global warming.

The two major sources of human-emitted CO2 and other greenhouse gases are fossil fuels and industrial agriculture. Therefore, managing this crisis therefore requires us to reshape those industries, for example by replacing fossil fuels with renewable and clean energy and by finding ways to use far less land and fertilizer for farming. In parallel, Earth system science underscores the importance of identifying, preserving, and amplifying the many ways by which the planet already absorbs and sequesters carbon on its own. The best way to do this is to conserve and restore carbon-trapping ecosystems, such as forests, grasslands, coral reefs, peatlands, and wetlands, to name a few.

KSJ: Overall, what is your hope for this book? Who should read this book, and what do you hope they’ll take away from it?

FJ: I wrote this book because the modern scientific understanding of our planet is undergoing a major reformation, but this new way of thinking has not yet permeated public consciousness. I wanted to play a part in bringing these new insights to greater public awareness. I think we’re going to see a wave of new books over the next decade describing the coevolution of Earth and life, reexamining the merits of the Gaia hypothesis, exploring the animacy of the nonhuman, and underscoring the importance of holistic, planetary-scale thinking. I tried to write this book in a way that anyone interested in these subjects can read and enjoy it, regardless of their scientific background. My hope is that readers will come away with a new way of looking at our planet and our relationship to it.

KSJ: This is your first book. What was it about this topic – the planet being alive – that you felt a book was the best medium to tell the story?

FJ: The seeds for this book planted themselves in my mind more than ten years ago. At the time, though, I had no idea they would eventually grow into a book. I was enthralled by the fact that the Amazon rainforest generated half of its own rain and changed weather around the world, which inspired me to search for similar examples of life dramatically altering its environment on a massive scale. Through several years of intermittent research and contemplation, I began to realize that all the different examples I was collecting, all the insights from disparate fields of science—oceanography, atmospheric science, geology, ecology and so on—were connected by the same fundamental truths: that contrary to conventional wisdom, life is an orchestrator of its environment and an agent in its own evolution; that Earth and life change together through a single integrated process of coevolution; and that life and the planet constitute a vast interconnected system that is itself alive in a meaningful sense. These were not ideas I’d been taught in high school or college. Given the complexity of these concepts, their rich and contentious history, and the many different fields from which they emerged, I knew only a book could properly elucidate them for the general public.

KSJ: If people want to keep up with your journey as an author and journalist, where should they follow you?

FJ: I’m currently on all major social media platforms—Twitter/X, Instagram/Threads, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Mastodon and so on—under the same username: ferrisjabr. I also keep my website, ferrisjabr.com, updated with links to my latest writing and a calendar of upcoming talks and other public events. Readers can also look for my work in The New York Times Magazine, where I am a contributing writer.