Book Reviewed: Becoming Earth: A Journey Through the Hidden Wonders that Bring Our Planet to Life by Ferris Jabr

Earth is a self-organizing system The author is influenced by the Gaia hypothesis; Earth is a self-organizing, co-evolving system in which living and non-living processes are inseparable, and earth itself changes because of life. Microbes help cycle minerals, generating and stabilizing continents, rocks and soil become “living archives.” Forests and oceans regulate rainfall. The author observes that life itself is made and continuously shaped; we are not just on Earth, but we are Earth. Life and the non-living components like rock, water, air have co-evolved for over four billion years making Earth a life-like self-evolving system. Cyanobacteria oxygenated the air, fungi and plants broke down rock to form soil, and marine organisms helped shape continents by precipitating calcium carbonate. The author points out that earth is a co-evolving with a vast network of feedback from rock, air, water, and biological life, the latter originated at around 3.8 billion years ago; they were bacterial prokaryotic microbes, likely anaerobic (no oxygen in atmosphere), and possibly chemoautotrophs that used chemical energy from Earth’s crust rather than sunlight for survival. Earth had five major mass-extinction events (the “Big Five”) over the past 540 million years. One of them is known to be caused by an asteroid impact and the rest are due to volcanic eruptions and rapid climate changes. For the first seven hundred million years in earth’s history, there were no living organisms, no oxygen, and extremely high CO₂ levels that kept earth warm enough to have liquid water. Because the Sun was young, seven hundred-million-year-old, and about 70% as bright as today. Author Ferris Jabr observes, “Yet our living planet has consistently demonstrated an astonishing resilience, an ability to revive itself in the wake of devastating calamities and find new forms of ecological consonance.” He continues, we also destroy part of our ecosystem, “it would be hubris to try and control such an immensely complicated system in its entirety. Instead, we must simultaneously acknowledge our disproportionate influence on the planet and accept the limitations of our abilities.” Then he goes on to say that climate crisis must be addressed by wealthy industrial and postindustrial nations. This is confounding; to start off, the author believes that Earth is a self-organizing and co-evolving system, and then he becomes the “captain planet” preaching the mantra of an environmentalist.