KSJ fellows

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? 

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?

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.