Over twenty people collected at EQLT’s offices in Hardwick on Sunday to discuss the book “Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life” by Ferris Jabr which was published in 2024. The book is divided into three segments, focusing on Rock, Water and Air.
Mr. Jabr shares his years of research and visits to locations around the world where he learns more about the ways that life influences the physical world around. For instance, he visits the Pleistocene Park in Siberia where large mammals are being reintroduced to mimic the impact of large grazing species from long ago, the Kamilo beach in Hawaii that collects plastic pollution because of its location on the ocean currents, and the Amazon Tall Tower Observatory which monitors and researches the air patterns and connections with microbes that are found in the air around the world, Pseudomonas syringae.
We live on a wonderful planet with an amazing ecosystem. The earth is not static, things are connected, the infinity concept is an appropriate concept to remember that everything is connected. “Life and its environment evolve together, too. Darwinian evolution by natural selection happens through changes to the genetic composition of populations whose members vary in their traits. Those individuals best able to survive and reproduce in their particular environment leave behind the most offspring and pass on the genes coding for the very traits that made them so successful. Generation by generation, those genes and traits become more common in the overall population. Thus, species adapt to their environments. But their physical environments do not remain fixed during this process, nor are they subject to purely geological change. As living creatures evolve, they alter their surroundings extensively. Some of those changes persist and inevitably influence any evolution that follows. In this way, life becomes an agent in its own evolution. Although the enduring changes organisms make to their environments are not themselves genetically encoded, they are nonetheless passed from one generation to the next, becoming an important part of long-term coevolutionary processes. Natural selection is embedded within, and influenced by, the reciprocal transformation of organisms and their domains. Life and environment continuously shape one another and Earth as a whole.” – page 31.
The final paragraphs from the book:
“When most people speak of the balance of nature, I doubt that they mean a strict equilibrium or an unlimited capacity for recovery, as some scientists have implied. Rather, the “balance of nature” is typically shorthand for, as Rachel Carson phrased it, “a complex, precise, and highly integrated system of relationships between living things” that is “fluid, ever shifting, in a constant state of adjustment.” Although this system is susceptible to disruption, it can be also be restored or rearranged. “Balance” is meant to evoke this simultaneous intricacy, vulnerability, and resilience. Some scholars have argued that this characterization is self-contradictory, but complex living systems demonstrate precisely this multidimensionality.
The living entity we call Earth is in effect a highly complex balancing act sustained by the reciprocal evolution of organisms and their environments. Any living planet requires its animate and inanimate components to maintain certain relationships, rhythms, and cycles — a planetary physiology, so to speak. If Earth’s atmosphere were in a state of perfect chemical equilibrium–like the atmospheres of Mars and Venus–it would not contain any free oxygen. Life pushed the atmosphere into a state of chemical disequilibrium that ultimately made the planet more habitablity, however, certain thresholds must not be crossed. Without sufficient oxygen in the sea and air, large complex life cannot exist. Too much, and the whole world erupts in flames. Not enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and the planet freezes from pole to pole. An excess, and Earth becomes a hellish swampworld. The especially stable and clement version of Earth that our species and so many others have enjoyed these past twelve thousand years necessitates an even more specific set of environmental conditions.
For some time now, our planet has been moving toward a new equilibrium, a potential hothouse state, in which global temperature will be significantly higher and the consequently tempestuous climate will be devastating not only for human civilization but for scores of nonhuman species as well. If humanity continues to exhume and burn inordinate amounts of fossil fuels–thickening the planet’s heat-trapping cloak and further imbalancing the Earth system–an appallingly inhospitable future is assured. If, instead, the nations most responsible for the climate crisis and most capable of resolving it finally act with the urgency it demands, they can still prevent global catastrophe. We may never be able to faithfully re-create the planetary rhythms and melodies of the past, but we don’t need to. We can still perpetuate a rendition of Earth as we have known it–a variation on a theme.”