Ferris Jabr (Picador (UK);
Ginkgos were first planted in Seoul about 800 years ago. Today, over 100,000 of these giant trees take in carbon dioxide spewed out by the city’s traffic, exhaling the oxygen humans need to live. It is a coexistence with which we are familiar, yet it exemplifies a principle beyond daily experience.
In Becoming Earth: How our planet came to life, science writer Ferris Jabr weaves a tapestry out of the complex relationships that life forms have not only with each other, but also with the stuff of Earth itself. As we travel with him, moving from the Amazon rainforest in northern Brazil and the tiny Siberian settlement of Chersky to a sunken mine shaft in South Dakota, we discover that Jabr sees our planet as a living entity. Just as our bodies comprise multiple organisms and chemical transformations, so, too, does the body of Earth.
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For those who know a little about Gaia, the hypothesis put forward by chemist and inventor James Lovelock and co-developed with microbiologist Lynn Margulis, this idea isn’t new. What stands out in Jabr’s book, however, is his focus on the ever-changing state of the relationships that make our planet what it is today.
Central to this view is that humans and other living beings “are Earth – an outgrowth of its physical structure and an engine of its global cycles”, writes Jabr. “Earth and its creatures are so closely intertwined that we can think of them as one.”
The book’s title also moves us there by evoking “becoming”, a concept outlined by philosopher Gilles Deleuze, which argues that unceasing change is fundamental to existence. To show how this fits with the story of Earth, Jabr draws on research into its fiery formative years through to microbial mats – the earliest form of life – and on to today’s climate catastrophe.
He visits many research sites, fitting them into a structure that covers rock, water and air, which mirrors the planet’s elemental components and three of its four spheres – the lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere.
Jabr deftly draws links between processes at different scales. To discover how microbial action on the ocean floor may have created continents, he talks to researchers such as Robert Hazen, an earth scientist at the Carnegie Institution in Washington DC. At the other end of the scale, he meets Sergey Zimov and his family, who run the Northeast Science Station in Chersky, one of the Arctic’s largest centres of science. Zimov’s experiments show how the grazing habits of large mammals enlivened soil in the tundra.
Jabr also takes us to challenging sites, such as the plastic-strewn beaches of Kamilo, Hawaii. We see how Earth’s complexity inevitably means that our actions have far-reaching consequences. So while plankton made Earth habitable for oxygen-loving organisms, our exploitation of their remains (fossil fuels) has created a climate crisis and plastic pollution.
Alongside formal research, he gives weight to the knowledge of groups such as the Indigenous Peoples of the Pacific Coast, which emphasises planetary complexity. These different forms of knowing let Jabr build a compelling account of interconnectedness. While human entanglement with the planet isn’t limited to the recent industrial era, as a committee of geologists decided in rejecting the Anthropocene as an epoch, Jabr is clear that our unprecedented disruption to Earth’s finely balanced systems is catastrophic.
And we can forget the much-discussed option of escaping to a new home, he says: it is unfeasible because we don’t know enough. Instead, we should look to climate mitigation strategies, which governments – and crucially corporations – have the means to deploy. Not to do so would be an “unforgivable folly”, he writes.
I am reminded of philosopher Donna Haraway, who urged us to accept the foolishness of human exceptionalism and embrace “becoming with” other species. Why stop there? With Jabr’s guidance, we are becoming with Earth itself.
Kat Austen is an artist and composer based in Seoul, South Korea
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