(Photo: Ryan G)
Ferris Jabr has spent his career writing about our planet and its creatures: a beluga whale who escaped the Russian navy, the Earth’s solar umbilical cord, botanical remedies to antibiotic resistance. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, National Geographic, Harper’s, Wired, Outside and now The New York Times Magazine and Scientific American, but in his first book, “Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life,” Jabr applies research and firsthand observation to argue that living things don’t just live on Earth – they are Earth, whether it’s microbes shaping continents or giant animals forming the landscape of their habitats. The book came out June 25, and Jabr speaks at Porter Square Books on Tuesday. We interviewed him on Friday; his words have been edited for length and clarity.
What made you want to investigate the world in this way?
The seed of the book started about 10 years ago, when I was researching plant behavior and communication – this idea that plants are much more active agents in their environments than is typically believed. I learned how the Amazon rainforest generates half of the rain that falls on its canopy each year in a process that involves the entirety of life in the forest. It breathes out all these tiny biological particles such as pollen grains, fungal spores and microbes, then combines them with water vapor release to accelerate cloud formation and turn the Amazon into a rain-generating system. That made me think differently about life’s power to change its environment, and when I started searching for other examples, I discovered the Amazon was just one example of this phenomenon. Life has shaped the world as we know it and is responsible for many of Earth’s defining features, things like a breathable atmosphere, a blue sky, fire, mineral diversity and ocean chemistry. It seemed to me that this notion had not really permeated public consciousness.
What did the research process entail?
It involved a lot of desk research, like reading published studies and interviewing experts, but it also involved reporting trips around the world. Because the book takes a planetary, holistic perspective, I wanted it to be representative of the planet’s ecosystems and its peoples. I traveled to Siberia and to the middle of the Amazon, I went a mile underground to a former gold mine, I explored the Hawaiian Islands to study plastic pollution. Since I traveled to diverse regions, I tried to feature diverse voices in the book as well. Every chapter centers on a character, often a scientist, and there are Indigenous characters, LGBT characters, people of color. With a combination of reporting trips and desk research, it took me about six years from crafting the book proposal to now. I officially started writing the book in 2019, but then the early stages of the pandemic slowed things down a bit.
How did you compress so much research into a palatable narrative for nonscientists?
I’ve always been in a state of awe about the natural world, and for me, learning how the world works through science heightens that sense of wonder. I’m always trying to get that across to readers, to make my writing emulate that internal experience I have. There’s this basic level of translation, where I’m trying to make the research lucid and understandable to anybody, but I’m also trying to go beyond that to evoke that deeper feeling. I think that’s especially important right now, because if we’re not enraptured by the natural world and we don’t appreciate just how marvelous and complex and precious this planet is, what will motivate us to save it?
Are there takeaways we can use to inform how we think about climate change?
The book focuses on earth system science, which explicitly studies the animate and inanimate parts of the planet as an integrated whole by looking at planetary scale, cycles and connections, and I think if you want to truly understand anthropogenic climate change – the current planetary crisis – there is no single field of science that is more clarifying than this one. It shows you how everything that life does loops back to change the planet as a whole, and how all of our actions on a day-to-day basis have an effect on the planet. It’s easy to think about what we’re doing in terms that distance us from reality, but looking at it in this earth system science way is a truer depiction of what’s really happening. We have this idea that humans are bad, that we’ve harmed “the environment,” but it’s much more complex, and more poignant, than that. We are a physical extension of the planet, and throughout Earth’s history, life has tended to coevolve with the planetary environment in ways that stabilize and ensure mutual persistence, but we have now done the opposite. Recognizing how we stand out from this longer coevolutionary saga of life and the planet changing each other is important because it shows us exactly what we’ve done and what we need to do better.
Was there a relationship between a certain species and the Earth you found particularly interesting?
I would have to say microscopic life and photosynthetic life. I think we owe a great debt to microscopic life because microbes are the oldest, the earliest and the smallest form of life on our planet, and for more than half of the planet’s history, it was an exclusively microbial planet with no multicellular life of any kind. The microbes laid the groundwork and made some of the most profound transformations to the planet. Photosynthetic cyanobacteria, for instance, initiated the oxygenation of Earth’s atmosphere, which changed the entire chemistry of the planet, dyeing the sky blue and giving us a breathable atmosphere where fire is possible. More broadly, photosynthetic life in general – land plants, but also algae, kelp and all the photosynthetic plankton and microbes in the ocean – are huge because in addition to oxygenating the planet, they have evolved an intimate relationship with fire that seems to regulate the level of oxygen in the atmosphere and has come to define terrestrial ecosystems. To give an example, fire will burn down large amounts of vegetation, but then it will come back, because each adapts to the other. How plants and fire have coevolved has become especially important with the current wildfire crisis.
Ferris Jabr reads at 7 p.m. Tuesday from “Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life” in conversation with Deborah Blum at Porter Square Books, 25 White St., Porter Square, Cambridge. Free. Information is here.
A stronger
Please consider making a financial contribution to maintain, expand and improve Cambridge Day.
We are now a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and all donations are tax deductible.
Please consider a recurring contribution.