Becoming Earth
If you’re an inquisitive, persistently curious, and talented communicator wanting to write a book on how life on Earth began, evolved and is being impacted by human activities, you might synthesize hundreds of science articles, interview many people, and adventure around the world depending on your time and budget. You could obtain grants and fellowships along with publishing a series of articles in popular magazines. Since you're also considering human impacts, you’d want to purchase carbon offsets to mitigate travel emissions. There’s the technical craft as well as the business side of producing a book involving dozens of people to check facts, review, edit, prepare illustrations, and engage in marketing, sales, and distribution in multiple languages.
Ferris Jabr spent 10 years compiling over 300 publications and traveling extensively worldwide to meet famous and obscure scientists to immerse himself in natural science research. He donated a part of his book advance to environmental groups including the Indigenous Environmental Network, Coalition for Rainforest Nations, Clean Air Task Force, and Carbon180.
He explored a mile-deep former gold mine in South Dakota to collect million-year old microbes, including the original one-celled bacterial inhabitants, pioneers in surviving harsh environmental conditions without air and light, capable of carving caverns, concentrating metals, and regulating the global cycling of carbon and nutrients.
On the Arctic’s Wrangel Island, he observed how reintroducing large mammals can restore the ecological balance by consuming grasslands, providing nutrient-rich dung, reducing melting permafrost and ultimately cooling the planet. He saw a graveyard of extinct mammoths and ancestors of bison, lions, elk, and rhinoceros with remains not petrified but frozen after tens of thousands of years.
He collected diverse plankton species in Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island to understand how these photosynthetic consumers of carbon dioxide produce oxygen and provide food to larger consumers from the smallest fish larvae to largest whales. Two categories of “free-swimming” plankton evolved, plant-like phytoplankton and animal-like zooplankton with some species possessing characteristics of both. Single-celled algae diatoms contain silica dioxide and coccolithophores use calcium carbonate for structure formed the White Cliffs of Dover, England. Entire ecosystems are dependent on consuming plankton with it’s 16:1 ratio of nitrogen to phosphorous maintains the same ratio in seawater. One drop of seawater may contain tens of thousands of microscopic plankton!
Ferris went scuba diving near Santa Catalina Island, 22 miles off the California coast, to swim in a giant kelp forest that can grow at the rate of 3 feet per day and provide storm-proof habitat to approximately 150 fish species. This experience led him to a kelp-oyster farm operated by Running Tides in Portland, Maine. They are experimenting with growing and floating kelp to remove carbon from the atmosphere and deposit carbon in the seafloor. Sea kelp are more significant photosynthesizers than terrestrial forests due to the size of the oceans.
He nervously climbed the 1066 foot Amazon Tall Tower Observatory in Brazil to observe the rainforest canopy and collect air samples. He learned how trees release substances into the air that seed clouds to generate rain with about half of the rainfall transpired from the rainforest at the rate of 20 billion tons of water per day! This self-generating process must be factored into our concepts of the hydrologic cycle where evaporation typically comes from the oceans to provide rain and snow. Amazon rainforests also contribute precipitation to the western and midwestern United States and Canada.
He met advocates in northern California displaying the benefits of fire to control forest ecology and specifically prescribed burns to remove pests and undergrowth at an acorn-oak orchard. Then in Iceland, he visited the Climeworks direct-air capture plant removing carbon by injecting CO2 into basaltic rocks.
The result of all his travels, discussions, and research reveals the thesis that not only is there Life on Earth but Life is Earth. Everywhere we look we find life so abundantly intertwined in the rocks, soil, water, and air that this makes us question the idea to separate inorganic from organic molecular structures.
Ferris and a collaborator illustrate the evolution of our living planet showing the origins of the planet 4.6 billion years ago with one-celled bacteria evolving into multicellular microbes indicating fossil evidence of stromatolites 3.5 billion years ago. Photosynthesis provided oxygen to create the atmosphere about 2.5 billion years ago (trapping gases in space mostly due to Earth’s gravity), divergence of plant and animal species about 1 billion years ago, and fungi, lichen, and plants spreading on land beginning about 700 million years ago. The more “recent” 500 million years of geologic history is very well documented by fossil evidence but I was not aware of wildfires occurring over 420 million years ago.
Impacts from human activities may have begun with hunting megafauna (e.g. mammoths) to extinction 50,000 to 10,000 years ago. Ferris Jabr documents other impacts including loss of habitats, destruction of the rainforest and devotes an entire chapter to plastics washed up on Kamilo Beach, Hawaii and integrated into sea life. He provides extensive discussion of greenhouse gas emissions drastically changing our climate and the urgency for action.
As challenging it must be to write on this enormous topic as well as to provide a very terse summary in this blog, I would have like to read more about how prescribed burns can contribute to climate change. I agree with the benefits of prescribed burns to prevent bigger wildfires when they can be controlled. Unfortunately, changing the established US Forest Service policy for the past 80+ years to put out small fires (see my blog on Did Smokey the Bear Get the Axe) does not account for climate-induced droughts and numerous uncontrolled burns seems to me can make our situation (from homeowners to all species) much worse.
I highly recommend getting and reading this book and not relying on my summary which I compiled mostly for my own educational purposes to share with middle and high school students. It’s very difficult taking complex, detailed, science information and making it understandable to a general audience. I own any potential mistakes or compressions in logic contained in my summary that do not relate to the excellent book being reviewed. Ferris Jabr’s new Random House book published this year is titled Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life.
Updated: December 3, 2024
Received the following email response from the author:
From: Ferris Jabr <ferris.jabr@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Dec 2, 2024 at 12:30 PM
Subject: Re: My blog on your book Becoming Earth
Dear Bill,
Thank you so much for reading and engaging with my work. I don't have a newsletter at present, but you can find a continually updated list of events and appearances on my website: https://www.ferrisjabr.com/events
Thanks again!
Ferris
Ferris Jabr
Author, Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life (Random House, 2024)
Contributing Writer, The New York Times Magazine and Scientific American