Think Out Loud

Portland author sheds light on understanding Earth as a living system

By Sage Van Wing (OPB)
Nov. 5, 2024 4:38 p.m.

Broadcast: Tuesday, Nov. 5

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In the 1970s, some scientists proposed that Earth and its life forms are a single, self-regulating system. At the time, the “Gaia hypothesis” was widely criticized. But since then, the concept of Earth as a vast interconnected living system has gained acceptance. Portland-based science writer Ferris Jabr’s new book, “Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life,” describes how the living and nonliving components of the planet work together as an integrated whole. Ferris Jabr joined us at the 2024 Pickathon Experiential Music Festival.

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Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. In the 1970s, some scientists proposed that earth and its life forms are a single, self-regulating system. They called this idea the “Gaia hypothesis” and it was widely criticized. But in the decades since then, the concept of Earth as a vast interconnected living system has gained a lot of acceptance. The Portland-based science writer Ferris Jabr’s new book, “Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life,” describes how the living and nonliving components of the planet work together as an integrated whole. Jabr also has a parallel focus. He explores how early organisms didn’t just adapt to life on our planet, but actively changed the planet, creating the water, the air, and the earth that we know today.

I talked to Ferris Jabr in front of an audience at the 2024 Pickathon Experiential Music Festival in August. At one point in Jabr’s research, he climbed to the top of a more than 1,000 foot tall research tower in the middle of the Amazon Rainforest. I had him read a section of the book about what he saw.

Ferris Jabr [reading excerpt from “Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life”]: Gazing at the unbroken expanse of rainforest beneath us was a decidedly different experience than exploring it by foot. On the ground, I had been overwhelmed by the beauty and lushness of life all around me and the opportunity to examine it in detail, by the ferns and bromeliads frothing on every branch, and the intricate tapestries of moss and lichen, by the tantalizing shimmer of a blue morpho butterfly and the delicacy of a ghost plant’s milky flower, trembling on a wiry stalk.

At more than 1,000 feet in the air, the concept of individual organisms began to blur and dissolve. From this vantage point, the forest seemed less like a place or ecosystem in and of itself than the skin, the fleece of a much larger entity, one whose true scale, I was only beginning to glimpse. It felt as though I’d been trapped in a drop of pond water on a microscope slide, confusing a strand of algae from a jungle and was only now switching places with the eye behind the lens.

We are so used to thinking of the environment governing life’s evolution and sculpting its endless forms. Conventional wisdom maintains that rainforests and other highly biodiverse regions of the planet are the result of fortuitous circumstances. Yet, just about everything I could see from the top of the tower, I was coming to understand, was to some extent created by life. Most of the tens of thousands of documented animal species in the Amazon and all those as yet undiscovered would not exist if plants and fungi had not populated and transformed the planet’s land services half a billion years ago. Complex life may never have evolved, let alone emerge from the sea, if single celled microbes had not started reforming the ocean and atmosphere several billion years earlier.

The soil from which the trees below me grew, the rain-heavy clouds preparing to burst, the color of the sky, the air itself, we owe it all to life.

Miller: As you were reading that, a spider got all over me, a beautiful little red spider. Why did you go to the top of that tower?

Jabr: So the seed for this book was learning that the Amazon Rainforest does not just receive the rain on which it depends, it actually generates about half of the rain that falls on its canopy each year. And the entirety of life in the forest is involved in this process. The forest is throwing up these invisible plumes of pollen grains, and microbes, and fungal spores. And all these tiny biological particles give something for water vapor to condense onto. That accelerates cloud formation and really speeds up the whole water cycle. And the Amazon ends up influencing weather around the world. It’s changing weather in North America and Canada as well.

So learning that really changed the way I think about the relationship between earth and life, and made me look for other examples of life dramatically altering its environment. This research tower in the Amazon, as you said, is the tallest in all of South America. Scientists come there from all over the world to study gasses and particles above the Amazon Rainforest and their relationship to the soil, to the water cycle, to the forest. So I wanted to go there and experience that for myself. I had to wait about two-and-a-half years because it was shut down during the early stage of the pandemic and they weren’t allowing any visitors. But I waited and eventually made it there.

Miller: So let’s go back four or five billion years before life changed basically everything on earth as we know it now. What was earth like pre-life?

Jabr: So if we go back three to four billion years, Earth probably had this hazy, smoggy orange atmosphere with no oxygen whatsoever. And it was a true water world. It had a vast ocean that was dotted with volcanic islands but did not have substantial land masses. And then life was really integral to the transformations that made the planet we know today.

Miller: Let’s start with the rock part of that. How did early life, microbes, change the literal geology of our earth?

Jabr: The continental land masses are made of granite. And we’ve never found granite, in any significant quantity, anywhere else in the solar system that we’ve looked, only on our planet. And granite is much less dense than basalt, the oceanic crust. So it floats on top of it. And that’s part of how we got these giant exposed land masses.

There’s a theory, it’s not definitive, but the theory is that ancient microbial life may have been really crucial to the initial formation of the granite that formed the continents because microbes were inhabiting and dissolving this ancient crust. And by doing so, they were hydrating it. They were bringing in these wet clay mineral by-products. So they were hydrating and lubricating the crust and they were accelerating the process by which it was subducted, melted, and converted into granite.

Some scientific models suggest that were it not for the presence and activity of ancient life, we would have ended up with just tiny islands or tiny continents, and not the substantial land masses we have today.

Miller: That theory is dependent on one of many things in the book that blew my mind, which is that these microbes could eat, or maybe the better word is breathe or take in and process rock. How do they do that?

Jabr: Breathing or respiration, as it’s known in science, is all about moving electrons around in order to do different kinds of cellular work. We use oxygen as kind of our final dumping ground for electrons, because it’s a highly reactive element that wants a lot of electrons. If you don’t have access to oxygen, if you live in the deep crust of the Earth, you have to turn to something else. So some of these microbes have turned to rock and metal around them to dump electrons onto. Some of them will even form these tiny wires outside their cells and then shuttle electrons off, onto these nanowires onto the metal and rock around them.

Miller: You mentioned that reading just now, that microbes are also responsible for reforming the ocean and the atmosphere. Let’s start with the ocean first – how did tiny prehistoric creatures create the ocean as we know it today?

Jabr: If we go back 2.5 billion years ago, the atmosphere had no oxygen in it and the ocean also was fairly oxygen-depleted. So these ancient microbes are called cyanobacteria. They invented photosynthesis we know today, the kind that takes in sunlight and water, and puts out oxygen as a byproduct. They lived in the ocean and they formed these thick mats, and they started to suffuse both the ocean and the atmosphere with oxygen.

And very gradually over time, through the combined effort of cyanobacteria and then later land plants, that really oxygenated the ocean and atmosphere to the level that we have today, actually even beyond the level we have today and, in some parts, in the past. And then other ocean creatures, like plankton, really define the chemistry of the oceans. So basically, through these complex ecological loops, through which they are recycling nitrogen and phosphorus and other essential elements, they are creating and calibrating the chemistry of the ocean.

Miller: What’s at stake, in the big reframing of your book, to say not just that the Earth is teeming with life, but that the earth and life sort of created the Earth … in some ways, flip it around. What follows from that?

Jabr: For a really long time, we have essentially characterized Earth as this giant rock, which happens to have life on it because it’s in the right place in the cosmos for life to emerge. And we’ve segregated geology from biology. And now that’s really starting to change within the world of science. We’re seeing this growing recognition that, in fact, Earth and life continually co-evolve, each changing the other very profoundly, and that the geological and biological cannot be neatly separated. And I think there’s a huge difference between thinking of ourselves simply as inhabitants of the world or passengers on this spaceship earth, versus being literally materially continuous with the planet. I now think of life, not as something that resides on the surface of the planet, but literally as an extension, an expression of the planet. And that’s true for us and for all life.

Miller: The phrase that I’ve heard in the past to describe Earth, just as a planet in our solar system or in the universe, is that we’re a “Goldilocks” planet – that it’s just the rare, maybe unique, who knows, a place where the atmosphere is right, the water is right, the temperature is right, the gravity is right, for life to exist. When I was reading your book, it made me think that it’s as if – to stick with the “Goldilocks” metaphor – Goldilocks was a carpenter who sat at the table and said, “Oh, actually, this isn’t the right bowl. I’ll change the bowl. I’ll become a potter or I’ll change the table or the bed.” Which is a very different way to think about life.

Has that changed the way you think about the possibility of life outside Earth?

Jabr: Yeah. It’s really interesting to consider what science tells us about life throughout the universe. And there’s a lot of astrobiologists and planetary scientists who are very interested in it for that reason. Earth is 4.5 billion years old, give or take. The universe is more like 13 to 14 billion years old. So there could be planets out there that are twice as old as our planet. So there could be life out there that is twice as old as life on Earth. So it’s really interesting to think about what life would have become, had it been evolving for that long.

A lot of scientists think probably the cosmically most common type of life is analogous to our microbial life, that a lot of planets kind of get stuck at the microbial stage. For most of Earth’s history, it was an exclusively microbial planet, and took a long time to get to sort of the multicellular, more complex stage. And a lot has to happen in order to cross that threshold. But part of the thinking is that oxygen itself accelerated the evolution of multicellular life and oxygen came from microbial life. So, in many ways, life is transforming the planet in ways that makes it further habitable, increasingly habitable, for future waves of life.

Miller: All right, let’s go from out there in space to your backyard in Portland, not that far from here. Can you describe what your backyard was like when you and your partner bought your house like four or five years ago?

Jabr: My partner Ryan and I live in North Portland and we bought a house there four years ago. All that was there, in terms of a garden, was just a derelict grass lawn [which had] been rolled out a year earlier. It was pretty much dead in those places. We knew we wanted to rip that out and create the garden of our dreams from scratch. As soon as I did that though, we discovered the soil was in really bad shape. It was clay heavy like a lot of soil is in Portland. But it was also full of rubble because that site had been a construction site and even a parking lot in the not too distant past.

I had to steep myself in soil science and learn what to do about the situation. I had only ever done container gardening or tiny raised beds before, so I just went to the nursery and bought a couple of bags of high quality soil. Now, we had a much larger area. So the only resolution really was, I thought, to remediate this soil, to add nutrients back to it. But what I discovered over time is that that was actually the wrong way to think about it because you can’t just take nutrients out and dump nutrients back in. You have to actually recognize soil as an ecosystem, as a living entity, a living network itself and learn how to revitalize it, how to bring it back to life.

I did a lot of research about regenerative agriculture and we tried to apply those methods on our property in Portland. It’s basically all about heightening biodiversity and protecting soil, reducing its exposure to things that will destroy its unique architecture and network of life. So we brought in a huge number of healthy native plants that grew very rapidly. They cover the soil with their vegetation, providing a shielding cloak and their roots permeate the soil and become havens and kind of watering grounds that bring in their symbiotic, microbial and fungal partners.

And then we’ve seen larger wildlife come in because of that – birds, insects, even mammals like raccoons and field mice. So where there was just grass, we now have a wildflower meadow, a rockery, a wildlife pond, raised beds for herbs and vegetables, and we’ve noticed the soil itself has become much looser and darker and softer over time.

Miller: In only four years?

Jabr: Yeah, it’s pretty amazing, if you give plants the time, and opportunity, and space, what they will do on their own and with their symbiotic partners will truly astound you.

Miller: What’s at stake in this? I mean, why does soil matter?

Jabr: I think there’s a saying like if it weren’t for soil and rain, human civilization would not be possible. Agriculture depends on soil. All complex terrestrial life depends on soil. And for most of Earth’s history, we didn’t have soil. Actually, there was just a barren crust that was very gradually being weathered by the elements. It wasn’t until complex life came onto land, which was only in the past 400 to 500 million years, that it started to enrich that weathered rock with its by-products and organic compounds, creating the kind of fertile soil that we recognize today and depend on. And if it weren’t for that soil, we couldn’t grow anything, really. And we would not be here right now talking to each other.

Miller: To go back to your trip up the 1,000 feet above the floor of the Amazon Rainforest, you’d gone there because you wanted to learn more about how organisms of various kinds – bacteria, plankton, algae, lichens – put out little proteins that get floated up and then become the sort of nucleus of rain, or sleet, or snow, or hail. What’s in it for them? I guess I’m just wondering how that fact fits into classical ideas of evolution?

Jabr: So the Amazon, and really all forests, are doing two things simultaneously. They’re pulling huge volumes of water from the soil for themselves. But what they don’t use is getting pulled up into the atmosphere by evaporation, by transpiration. That’s providing a huge volume of water above any forest canopy. And at the same time, just the fact that there is this sheer density of life means that, inevitably, the winds are going to sweep up all these biological particles into the atmosphere.

It’s not necessarily that they’re doing it on purpose at first. But over time, the fact that it’s happening becomes advantageous to the forest ecosystem. And that’s something we see again and again in evolutionary history. Something that happens as a by-product or by accident gets co-opted for an advantage. It provides an unintended advantage that is then selected for.

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Miller: How is what you’re writing about the same as or different from a decades old concept called the Gaia hypothesis?

Jabr: The Gaia hypothesis was proposed by the British scientist James Lovelock in the 1960s and then later co-developed with American biologist Lynn Margulis. And they were proposing that wherever life emerges, it will inevitably transform its home planet. And that together, life in the greater planetary environment forms a single, self-regulating living system. This idea was really harshly criticized and ridiculed by many scientists at the time, especially the Richard Dawkins of the world. Evolutionary biologists who really did not like the idea of Earth being a living thing or conflating Earth with an organism.

But quietly, the core tenants of Gaia became the pillars of a well-accepted mainstream field called earth system science, which explicitly studies the planet as this holistic integration of the animate and inanimate. It’s now universally accepted within science that life has been this major geophysical force on the planet for billions of years, that together life and earth form a single, highly interconnected system, and that they are indeed changing each other all the time. And many scientists recognize that life is intertwined with this planet’s innate capacity to regulate its climate. So the planet really does have these sort of innate, self-regulating mechanisms and life is a very important part of that. That’s where we’re at now.

There’s still, within science, sort of a stigma attached to Gaia because of the 1960s, ‘70s version and the reaction to it. But it really has matured in a lot of ways, and many scientists recognize the sort of intellectual debt and legacy they owe to Gaia.

Miller: Well, what is the biggest reason for the push back? I mean, it’s always interesting when an idea gains more traction as time goes by. And I’m wondering what has changed and what specifically scientists, ecologists, evolutionary biologists, whoever, disagreed with 50 years ago?

Jabr: Lovelock himself has admitted that he made some mistakes in the way he originally articulated the Gaia hypothesis. In the beginning, he was kind of saying that all living things were deliberately working together in sort of this goal-directed way to make the planet comfortable for themselves. That did not vibe well with evolutionary biologists because that’s not really how evolution works.

So over time, he and Lynn Margulis clarified that what they’re really talking about is an emergent phenomenon. It’s rather the fact that all of life is acting in concert with the Earth’s systems and innate mechanisms, that results in these larger phenomena emerging. And also a lot of new evidence has come to light in the past 50 years because it’s been almost 50 years since he published his first book on it, and more than that since he started talking about it and publishing research literature. So we now understand these planetary-scale systems quite a bit better than we did 50 years ago.

Miller: You point out that all of the big, iconic human-built structures that are built with limestone – the Great Pyramid of Giza, Notre Dame, the Empire State Building – they’re all from tiny sea creatures that fell to the bottom of a prehistoric ocean, tens or hundreds of millions of years ago. How did working on this book affect the way you think about time?

Jabr: Yeah, this really blew my mind when I learned about this. So if you go to the White Cliffs of Dover in the UK, and you chip off a tiny piece of it and look at it under a powerful microscope, you will see the remains of ancient single-celled plankton that lived in the ocean more than 60 million years ago and encased themselves in these intricate skeletons of chalk. And then they sank to the seafloor and they accumulated in deep sea sediments that were, over time, petrified into stone. Then when sea levels changed, that’s what exposed the White Cliffs of Dover, this massive fossil bed of ancient chalky plankton.

Plankton, in general, are sort of suffused throughout the Earth’s system and throughout Earth history. They stay in the Earth system for a very long time. There are dust storms that blow over from Africa to the Amazon, and fertilize the Amazon with nitrogen and phosphorus. Those dust storms are themselves largely made of ancient plankton, coming from an ancient lake bed in Africa. So these plankton are really remaining in the earth system for tens to hundreds of millions of years and are still vital for ecosystems that are around today.

That, to me, is just mind blowing. It totally changes the way I think about deep time, as many geologists or scientists like to call it. The fact that life can not only have such a profound influence in the moment, in its own evolutionary history, but then through deep time, even long after those individual organisms have died, is just really incredible.

Miller: To me, the phrase “mind blowing” is a really apt one. Do you feel like you can truly even conceive of the time scales that we’re talking about? It’s one thing just to say the word 100 million years ago, 4 billion years ago. But, I guess I’ll just lay my cards down – I don’t feel like I can truly even grasp what that means.

Jabr: It is extremely challenging. We are this little primate species that evolved to understand things on a day-to-day, year-to-year basis, not to contemplate the cosmos and the 4.5 billion years of Earth history. And it is interesting, talking to a lot of geologists, they seem to toggle between these different modes of thinking where, sometimes, they’re so enmeshed in deep time thinking that, to them, we are but a blip in Earth’s history. But then other times they’re so concerned with what’s happening to the planet right now. And that sort of brings you into a whole new focus and way of thinking.

But I think if you want to understand how the planet became the way it is and what is happening right now, you have to understand Earth’s history, its entire history. And you have to contemplate deep time and at least try to take on that challenge.

Miller: Even if it’s hard for us to conceive of these time scales, we are creating things that can’t think about time, but will be around for way longer than we are. You have a whole chapter about plastic. Why did you want to focus on that?

Jabr: Plastic really fascinated and haunted me because plastic is made from petroleum. And petroleum is made of the ancient remains of plankton that have been compressed and cooked deep within the earth. And then we go and pollute the ocean with plastic and it turns into these innumerable microparticles that, themselves, start to mimic plankton in really bizarre ways. So predators will start to eat these tiny particles of plastic because they look and smell like their prey. And then these microplastic particles start to sink to the sea floor just like plankton do and warp the ocean’s carbon ecosystem in ways we don’t yet understand.

So I’ve come to think of plastic as this kind of chemical necromancy, as these ecological imposters in the ocean. And plastic has the ability to survive in both the rock record and fossil record for a very long time. Some scientists think that if there are human or alien anthropologists in the future, archaeologists, they will find plastic in the rock record as a unique signature of our time on this planet. It’s even possible for CD-ROMS, and pens and pencils to fossilize almost the way that dinosaur bones do. So you could even find their traces and silhouettes in the fossil record many millions of years from now.

Miller: I’ve become really used to hearing about the human changes to the environment as really starting with the industrial revolution and the mass burning of fossil fuels. How far back do you go now, when you think about the human version of changing the world?

Jabr: First of all, I see us as just the latest chapter in a really long co evolutionary saga of life, continually remaking the planet. And I think, for us specifically, we have to go way beyond the industrial revolution, at least to the point when our ancestors were hunting a lot of the megafauna species to extinction. Tens of thousands of years ago, there were giant herbivores and carnivores all across the planet, things like mammoths, and mastodons, and giant ground sloths, and cave lions.

And their extinction coincided with the ascendancy of our species and us spreading all over the globe. And the reigning theory is that we likely hunted many of them to extinction. That would have warped the global climate and many of the planet’s ecosystems at the same time, because animals, we now understand, are these really powerful engines of ecological systems, they are moving carbon and vital nutrients through the planet’s layers. If you wipe them out, you fundamentally alter how those systems work as well.

Miller: It’s a key point you’re making there, that we shouldn’t think of ourselves as wholly different from plankton, in terms that we are both organisms that are changing our world. What’s the difference though, in the time scale, the extent to which humans have changed the earth in the last say 200 years, compared to the way most creatures in the last 4 billion years have done so?

Jabr: So it’s the speed, the rapidity of our changes that really makes us unique. Most of the changes we’ve been talking about, unfolded gradually over millions of years through evolutionary processes. We have radically altered more layers of the planet in less time than any species before us. We’ve done this in just a few hundreds to a few thousands of years. And it is that combined scale and speed that makes us truly unprecedented, perhaps even geologically unprecedented.

Some scientists think that the volume of carbon we’ve released to the atmosphere, that amount of carbon has never been released that quickly to the atmosphere at any point previously in earth’s 4.5 billion year history.

Miller: That reminds me of a new way to think about filling up a gas tank … I think elephants is the animal you use. So, in the average gas tank, how many ancient elephants are in it?

Jabr: Fossil fuels are these ancient stores of ancient life that have been cooked deep within the planet. That’s why we call them fossil fuels. And a single gallon of gasoline is equivalent to about 20 adult elephants worth of ancient life. So a typical car with a 15-gallon tank is using a heck of a lot of ancient life just to keep itself running. So that’s a much more clarifying way to think about what we are doing. We are unearthing these incredibly powerful stores of ancient life and then pumping them into our cars, our factories and the entire energy infrastructure.

Miller: You explored a couple different biological strategies for mitigating what we’re talking about here, human-caused changes, and specifically spewing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. One of those strategies is using kelp to sequester carbon or using bioengineered microbes to metabolize plastic. How have you come to think about technology as a potential savior?

Jabr: The scientific consensus is that the main thing we have to do is address the source of greenhouse gas emissions. And the two big buckets would be fossil fuels and energy infrastructure, and then industrial agriculture. In addition to that, though, this kind of science underscores a complementary approach which is basically amplifying, stabilizing and protecting the Earth’s innate, self-stabilizing processes. And the best way to do that is by restoring and conserving and protecting ecosystems that already do this. The planet already has so many amazing ecosystems that sequester huge amounts of carbon and help regulate the climate.

As an adjunct to that, we can look at particular technological solutions or combining technology with nature-based solutions. For example, using marine vegetation that is already really good at sequestering carbon and trying to enhance that in some way. The problem is that a lot of these technologies just don’t work fast enough, at the scale we need, to really be that impactful right now. So we just have to make sure they’re not a distraction from the main task, while still exploring them as potential compliments in the future.

Miller: Do you mind reading one more passage from the book?

Jabr [reading excerpt from “Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life”]: Time and again, in the Anthropocene, we find that we have blundered into the same tragic predicament. Through increasingly sophisticated science, we are finally deciphering some of the planetary rhythms that life and environment have co-evolved over great spans of time, just as our widespread destruction of earth’s ecosystems and reckless consumption of fossil fuels threaten to distort or extinguish those very rhythms. We are rapidly gaining new appreciation for the many ways that life tends to stabilize and regulate earth, while finally reckoning with the fact that our species has too often done exactly the opposite – pushing the planet into a state of crisis.

Scrambling for solutions, we find that we know enough to recognize and even quantify the importance of the astoundingly complex ecosystems we inhabit, but not always enough to confidently intervene when they begin to collapse. Yet, the sheer complexity and staggering diversity of our living planet are also reasons for hope, courage, and perseverance because it is precisely this intricacy that makes Earth so resilient.

As the geological record reveals, the world’s ecosystems are replete with possibility, even when they’re on the precipice of obliteration. If our species finally learns to work with earth’s ecosystems as part of them, instead of trying to subdue them, if we address the source of the current crisis by fundamentally changing our relationship with the planet rather than clinging to industrial and economic systems that were never sustainable, we will avert total calamity in the decades to come, minimize suffering and ultimately create a better world. It won’t be exactly like the earth we’ve known. But it will be a world where spring is still full of song, snowmelt still feeds mountain streams and forests still soar to the sea.

[Audience applause]

Miller: I wanted you to read that because it encapsulates or crystallizes something about the book. Out of all the, the books I’ve read where climate change is one of the main themes of it,

just embedded in it, this is probably the most hope-filled book of all of them for me. And it’s not because you pull punches about what’s at stake or minimize the technological or the immense political challenges. It’s that you found hope in deep time. How did that work?

Jabr: Yeah, I have come to have a deep appreciation for the tenacity, the resilience of our planet through deep time because that is really where you see it come to. I mean, we have to ask ourselves, how has the earth endured for 4.5 billion years? That’s a lot of time for something to go catastrophically wrong and for the planet to die completely. So that incredible resilience, I’m really interested in what underlies that and how we can learn from that. And it’s really empowering to me to recognize that life does have the power to change the planet as a whole and that we are not an exception to that. We have this unique privilege and responsibility, being able to be consciously aware of that, to see what our actions do in the moment, and choose to change our behaviors.

Miller: As you look up here at these gorgeous trees – we’re in this bowl here of trees – or down at the wood chips or the dirt, everything around and all the stuff we can’t see, which is at least as important as the stuff we can, I’m just curious how writing, reporting and thinking about this book has changed the way you look out, even just at something like this?

Jabr: I think really good science writing can help you peel back layers, layers that are hiding, hidden realities that are there all the time, but we’re not always aware of. One of my favorite writers is Virginia Woolf. And I constantly return to her writing for inspiration. She described what she called “moments of being” in her autobiographical writings, where the cotton wool that clouds our everyday reality is pulled back and we can perceive a deeper truth. In one of those moments, as a child, she was staring at some flowers. And she suddenly realized that there was this ring connecting the flowers to the earth and that it had been there all the time, but she couldn’t see it most of the time. And that the true flower was part earth, part flower. And I feel like that’s really the gist of it. There is this ring connecting all of us to the planet and it’s there all the time. And I’m trying to sort of bring it into glowing focus for us.

Miller: Ferris Jabr, thanks very much.

Jabr: Thank you.

Miller: The Portland-based science writer Ferris Jabr’s new book is called “Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life.” We talked in August at the 2024 Pickathon Festival.

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