by Adele A.Wilby
Books on nature abound. More recently, physicist Helen Czerski’s deep knowledge of the seas functioning as an ‘ocean engine’ in Blue Machine: How the Ocean Shapes the World, elevates our understanding of the ocean and provides us with a new appreciation of its integral role in the Earth’s ecosystem. Volcanologist Tamsin Mather ‘s Adventures in Volcanoland: What Volcanoes Tell Us About the World and Ourselves is also another beguiling journey into the awesome history of the ‘geological mammoths’ that are volcanoes and their dynamics, that have changed the surface of the Earth and impacted on its environment.
But these books are more than the science of the specialist subject being explored: they have literary value also. The authors are to be lauded for the elegance of their prose that make the books not only fascinating and illuminating, but accessible and a real joy to read. Deeper knowledge of the planet’s ecosystems is made available to us, and they excite a sense of wonder and awe at the complexity of life on planet Earth. Cumulatively, these books highlight just how far the interrelatedness of different aspects of the natural world is. Ferris Jabr’s Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life is in that tradition. His book is a real feast for readers of books about life on Earth and for those who appreciate literary work: Jabr is not only knowledgeable, but a master of lyrical prose also.
Jabr’s book does not specialise on one aspect of the planet, such as volcanoes or the oceans. Instead, Jabr is concerned about the planet and how it came to ‘life’. In that sense he breaks with what could be considered the more conventional wisdom that posits life on the planet as being subject to its environment, and the Darwinian scientific paradigm that the changing demands of the environment dictate how life evolves and those best able to adapt will survive. Instead, Jabr focuses on what he considers the ‘underappreciated twin’ of evolution and posits a more interrelated view that ‘life changes the environment’. His book is, he says, ‘an exploration of how life has transformed the planet, a meditation on what it means to say that Earth itself is alive’.
To claim that the ‘Earth itself is alive’ truly does demand that a reader stretch the perimeters of conventional views of the Earth as an inanimate planet where the conditions for life were possible. Although the earliest iterations of an understanding of the planet as a living entity were mooted centuries ago, it is only since the 1960s when scientist and inventor James Lovelock and his association with the little known and unrecognised Dian Hitchcock, introduced the ‘Gaia hypothesis’ and later developed by American biologist Lynn Margulis, that more seriousness was given to the idea. Initially scientists subjected the ‘hypothesis’ that ‘life transforms the planet and is integral to its self-regulating process’ to rigorous criticism, but it remains, according to Jabr, the fundamental tenet in earth system science today.
Scientists would argue that Earth cannot be seen to be alive precisely because it does not exhibit the features of life: it does not eat, grow or reproduce, but then again, Jabr points out, the definition of life itself remains inconclusive. For Jabr life is ‘a process – a performance. Life is something matter does’. ‘Life’ he says, ‘absorbs, stores, and transforms energy’ and the ‘Earth has a body with organised structures, membranes, and daily rhythms’, it is a ‘vast interconnected living system’. Couched in such terms, conceptualising the Earth as being alive seems plausible. However, his view of the Earth being alive is given more clarity in the concept ‘co-evolution’, a concept Jabr introduces in Chapter 2 and frequently returns to throughout his book. ‘In its simplest terms’, Jabr says, ‘co-evolution means evolving together ‘(italics in original). He acknowledges that natural selection happens through genetics and species adapt to their environment, but the crucial aspect in Jabr’s thinking is that as living creatures evolve, they alter their surroundings significantly. In this way, Jabr argues, ‘life becomes an agent in its own evolution’. Although the changes in the environment are not genetically coded, they do nonetheless devolve from one generation to the next. He concludes therefore that, ‘life and environment continuously shape one another and the Earth as a whole’ and it is in this interaction of life forms acting to change the environment that Jabr sees Earth as being alive.
For Jabr to advance his argument he takes us on a fascinating journey to different regions of the world, engages in dialogue with scientists and others and draws on his own personal experience also. We visit nooks and crannies above and below the surface of the Earth and we are introduced to microscopic life forms as well as mammoths. We travel across steppes, visit mountains and icy regions and climb to treetops. All of this is set out in three parts of the book: Rock, Water and Air, because, he says, ‘they are the three elemental components of the three spheres: lithosphere, hydrosphere and the atmosphere’.
Jabr uses anthropomorphic language also to make his points more relatable, and we see this in the opening sentence, ‘Rock’. ‘Earth’s skin,’ he tells us, ‘is full of pores and every pore is a portal to an inner world’ and he initially finds an entry portal to that ‘inner world’ in the middle of North America, as just one example. Down we go to a depth of one mile in an old gold mine pit to 370 miles of tunnel to arrive at a large subterranean laboratory. In this dark inner sanctum of planet Earth, Jabr finds life ‘literally gushing from rock’. He discovers that the water trickling from the rock is full of ‘stringy white material’, microbes that store sulphur in their cells. In fact, it is in this subterranean world, we are told, where 90 percent of microbes live.
Much is written about the importance of plankton to life on the planet and Jabr is no exception; he does this in the second part of the book, ‘Water’. Hundreds of thousands of these species are thought to exist in all types of liquid environments on the planet and they are the earth’s original photosynthesizes. As Jabr points out, without plankton, ‘Earth would have no complex life of any kind’. But it is not plankton only that have brought life to Earth. Aquatic forests have also contributed to bringing the Earth to life. With their potential to sequester carbon they are crucial to the climate and the chemistry of the oceans. Similarly, commentary on life in the ocean would be remiss without reference to the plastic that has almost become part of the ‘natural’ environment of the seas. But here it is not the interaction of the plankton and aquatic forests with carbon that is adding to life on the planet, but homo sapiens who are dramatically changing the environment.
News reports and commentaries on the pile up of plastic in the ocean and its devastating impact on marine life is well-known and troubling, and Jabr also refers to the issue. Nevertheless, it appears that some microbes, fungi and other organisms are evolving to digest plastic. Still, such rare events should not lure us into thinking that eventually organisms will evolve and solve the problem of plastic waste in oceans, and plastic more generally on the planet. The rate at which the evolution of organisms takes place to be capable of digesting the vast quantities of plastic in the ocean is unlikely to offset the extensive harm caused to sea life, and, as Jabr and others also emphasise, it is unequivocally best practice to prevent plastic from entering the ocean in the first instance.
Jabr finally ends his trilogy of elemental compounds chapters with ‘Air’, the creation of a stable atmosphere being one of the most important events since Earth’s infancy, thanks to photosynthetic process of cyanobacteria billions of years ago suffusing the atmosphere with oxygen. He also points out how microbes influence the weather and make the atmosphere breathable. Fire too has been a major player in the co-evolution of life on the Earth. He finally comes to wind in ‘Winds of Change’, where the emphasis is on climate change and the impact of fossil fuels in the past and in the present, where he delivers some impressionable statistics on the impact of fossil fuels on the climate such as one gallon of petrol represents one hundred tons of ancient life. In what could be considered effective use of hyperbole, Jabr asserts that ‘a fossil fuel is essentially an ecosystem in an urn’. He ends the chapter acknowledging the seriousness of the impact of human activity in accelerating climate change and the consequences for the environment.
We are treated to snippets of a conversation between Jabr and the ageing James Lovelock, the originator of the ‘Gaia hypothesis’ in the ‘Epilogue’ to the book. Lovelock remains confident that his ‘thesis’ will eventually become more accepted, although Jabr recognises Lovelock frequently shifted his understanding of Gaia, even contradicting himself at times.
Still, for Jabr life on Earth is an interdependent process and co-evolution is crucial to that process. But as is the case with many authors writing on nature, Jabr is concerned about the present and long-term effects of human activity on the planet’s potential to sustain and enhance the Earth’s habitability. Human activity, such as burning fossil fuels and destroying forests, he argues, is pushing the Earth to another crisis in its long history. Nevertheless, all is not hopeless, or lost, for Jabr. Despite the present environmental crisis that the planet copes with, Jabr remains confident that ‘we are not in danger of killing the creature we call Earth’; that would involve the destruction of life itself, for as he sees it, ‘life does not merely exist on Earth – life is Earth’ (italics in original). Jabr has certainly provided substantial evidence to support his argument, an argument that is written with great elegance and is fascinating to read.