We are Earth: Ferris Jabr’s remarkable book

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We are Earth: Ferris Jabr’s remarkable book

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Ferris Jabr’s “Becoming Earth,” is a must-read

Few stories in the annals of scientific heresy are as compelling as Galileo’s confrontation with the Catholic Church. Four centuries ago, he dared to challenge the prevailing wisdom that Earth was the center of the universe. Today, we face a similarly profound intellectual revolution — one that reimagines our relationship with our planet.

Ferris Jabr’s remarkable book Becoming Earth offers a radical proposition: We are not merely inhabitants of this planet but living extensions of it. This is not a book on mystical thinking from a bongo drummer at a Stonehenge sunrise. It is about an emerging scientific argument that challenges our most fundamental understanding of life itself.

The illusion of separation

For centuries, Western scientific thought has treated Earth as a passive backdrop — a stage upon which life performs. We’ve seen ourselves as separate, dominant, and capable of manipulating our environment without consequence. As we learn with each new flood or firestorm, this worldview has been catastrophically wrong.

Jabr’s book focuses on the Gaia Hypothesis, first proposed by James Lovelock in the 1970s. The former NASA scientist, who died in 2022 at the age of 103, posited an idea that is as controversial and profound as the 16th-century astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus’s religion-defying heliocentric theory, which placed the Sun rather than Earth at the center of the universe.

Lovelock posited that life doesn’t just exist on Earth; life is Earth. We are not visitors or managers but integral components of a complex, self-regulating system.

Consider the audacity of this perspective: Every breath you take and every ecosystem you interact with is part of a planetary metabolism. Earth supports your existence, and it expresses itself through you.

An otherworldly idea

His vision provoked a tremendous outpouring of acclaim and derision. First published in 1979, Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis was eagerly embraced by a growing environmental movement but mocked and ridiculed by many in the scientific community. Robert May, future president of the Royal Society, declared Lovelock “a holy fool.” Microbiologist John Postgate wondered, “Am I the only biologist to suffer a nasty twitch, a feeling of unreality when the media invite me yet again to take it seriously?”

But time has been gentle on Lovelock. His idea that life transforms the planet and is integral to self-regulating processes is now seen by many as prescient. According to Jabr, Lovelock’s ideas have become modern Earth system science tenets. The earth system scientist Tim Lenton at the University of Exeter has written that he now believes that he and a growing number of scientists “now think in terms of the coupled evolution of life and the planet, recognizing that the evolution of life has shaped the planet, changes in the planetary environment have shaped life, and together they can be viewed as one process.”

The climate crisis as planetary fever

But this is more than an academic debate. Lovelock’s framework transforms how we understand the escalating climate crisis. Climate change isn’t something happening to us—it’s a systemic response, like a fever in a living organism. Our carbon-emitting industrial activities have triggered an immune reaction from the planetary system we inhabit. When we burn fossil fuels, destroy forests, or pollute oceans, we damage the external environment and the systems that sustain us. This is akin to an organism attacking its own regulatory mechanisms.

A new scientific paradigm

The implications are profound. Traditional Darwinian evolution viewed organisms as competing entities adapting to environments. Jabr offers a perspective that suggests a more integrated system as organisms continuously reshape their surroundings, creating intricate feedback loops of transformation. This isn’t environmental romanticism. It’s a scientifically grounded understanding of planetary dynamics that demands a complete reimagining of our economic, technological, and social systems if we are to survive, he writes.

Separate and destroy

This means redesigning everything: how we produce energy, grow food, build cities, and conceive of economic value. Most profoundly, it means acknowledging we are no longer external extractors of natural resources but integral components of a living system. Human activity has not simply raised global temperature or “harmed the environment,” warns Jabr, “it has severely imbalanced the largest living creature known to us [Earth], pushing it into a state of crisis.”

As a new climate-denying American administration begins its second week, we face a fundamental choice: Will we continue on our current path of destructive separation or embrace a new understanding of our role? For the next four years, the answer is obvious. The only question now is just how much destruction will be required before we recognize that we are not separate from Earth; we are Earth – dynamic, evolving, and profoundly alive – until we are not. Understanding the earth better from Jabr’s remarkable book is a start.

Written by

Peter McKillop

Peter McKillop is the founder of Climate & Capital Media, a mission-driven information platform exploring the business and finance of climate change.