In this episode, Kate sits down with author Ferris Jabr, whose book Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life comes out on June 25th. Ferris’ love of other animals and plants started at an early age and that fascination has grown into an incredible career as a journalist, exploring the perspective of ecosystems, animals, and the earth itself. Beginning with his garden in Portland, Kate and Ferris span out into the garden of earth itself and the way life creates the conditions for its own existence. From the young ages of the earth and the reciprocal processes between bacteria and our atmosphere, they explore some of the salient cycles that bend chronological time and minds alike. Plankton, and their jaw-dropping role in earth, become a vehicle for talking about how Saharan Africa fertilizes the Amazon which causes rain in the midwest. They discuss how throughout earth’s timescale, complexity grows and with it, the complexity of the relationships between life and environment and earth. They also explore the human animal’s role on earth and its cycles and what it might mean to tell ourselves a new story. An excellent episode to explore complexity, cooperation, mutuality, and beauty. 

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Find Ferris:

Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life 

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Ferris’ Articles

The Story of Storytelling

How Beauty is Making Scientists Rethink Evolution

Resources Mentioned: 

An Immense World by Ed Yong

The Ends of the World by Peter Brannen

How to Be Animal by Melanie Challenger

Systems View of Life by Fritjof Capra

Connect with Kate:

Instagram: @kate_kavanaugh

email: kate@groundworkcollective.com

Howdy. I'm Kate Cavanaugh, and you're listening to the Mind Body and Soil podcast, where we're laying the groundwork for our

land, ourselves, and for generations to come by looking at the way every thread of life is connected to one another.

Communities above ground mirror the communities below the soil, which mirror the vast community of the cosmos.

As the saying goes, as above, so below.

Join me as we take a curious journey into agriculture, biology, history, spirituality, health, and so much more.

I can't wait to unearth all of these incredible topics alongside you.

Hello, and welcome to the Groundwork podcast, formerly the Mind Body and Soil podcast on its ever slow journey of rebranding.

I am your host, Kate Cavanaugh, and it is such a pleasure to be here with you today.

I know that oftentimes one of the things I am trying to describe on the podcast through the many incredible guests that we

have here is how deeply interconnected and intertwined we are with this earth.

In fact, I think of the tagline of this podcast as the threads of what it means to be humans woven into this earth.

The other morning, I went for a really long hike, and it was 7 AM, and there were still cobwebs spanning across the trail of this mountain.

And it was a really hot day.

I think it it got up to 96 degrees.

And so even at 7 am, it was 80, and about 100% humidity, and I was sweating, and I wasn't wearing very many clothes.

And I could feel these webs clinging to my skin.

And they were so fine, so gossamer thread like that I couldn't quite tease them off of me.

I couldn't find them, but I could feel them.

And as I was hiking, it really became clear to me that we truly are woven into this earth, that with every action, we are

affecting an interconnected community of our environment.

And so not only are are we the

out, plant tissues take up, the oxygen that we breathe in, part of plant tissues, not to mention all of the different bacteria

that we are breathing in and bringing into our our esophagus and then into our digestive tract through food, through breath,

through our hugs and interactions with others. Right?

And so that's just kind of the immediate way that it affects this thing that we perceive as our person.

But those effects just keep spanning outwards, spiraling outwards and getting bigger.

And one of the things I noticed as I went on this hike is that we are both the woven in and the weavers, we are the woven in the weavers.

And I'm always trying to find different ways of illustrating that complexity and interconnectedness on the podcast.

And I think we tugged at a lot of the microbiome bits with Alana Collin, whose book 10 Percent Human is fantastic.

We've pulled out it with Fred Provenza and Andreas Weber, who who really first alerted me to that oxygen carbon dioxide tissue exchange.

And I think that today's guest is going to really pull this together in a really big way of how Earth's interconnected cycles are constantly happening.

And we exploit some of this around the ocean with guest Helen Chersky. And today's guest is Ferris Jabr.

And Farris' incredible book, Becoming Earth, How Our Planet Came to Life is out today, June 25th. And it is amazing.

And I'm gonna pull just this little this little piece, from the book where Ferris says, historically, evolution has been depicted

as linear and branching, like a tree or cross linked like a web.

Although those metaphors certainly capture many evolutionary processes, others are much more sinuous, even circular.

Again and again, life and environment alter each other through feedback loops.

And I think that something that Ferris did absolutely, incredibly, jaw droppingly, is to explain a sort of multiplicity, interconnectedness,

cooperativeness, mutualism, this idea that life begets life and is interwoven in a complex way that we we can only begin to tease apart.

And something that I've come back to that Ferris talks about directly is the idea that dust from the Sahara soil from Saharan

Africa travels across the ocean where it actually feeds phytoplankton, and then fertilizes the Amazon, which the transpiration

that happens in the Amazon of trees, releasing water into the air and nucleating clouds with a certain bacteria then waters

our crops here in the Midwest of the United States.

And so we just really, I think, have just a cursory understanding of how interconnected this truly this web of life is.

And Ferris book is all about that.

And he does such an incredible job of building those connections even within the narrative and the actual structure of the writing inside of the book.

And it is just so well done.

Ferris work has spanned a lot of different articles in publications like the New York Times and Harper's Bazaar. And they are all excellent.

I just think that Ferris is someone who is really incredible.

And this book is a what an opening piece.

This is his first book, and it is it's a stunner.

So I cannot wait for you to read about this circularity and this cooperation and this complexity that we all get to be a part of.

That we are both the weavers and the woven.

And I think that this is something that I've been trying to define for myself, just even on a small scale.

And yesterday, I had a huge storm blow through the farm, and it took down 2 really precious trees.

And it was funny because immediately, the goats were thrilled to begin to eat the leaves.

And as I took a chainsaw and began to break down the tree today, I thought about all of the ways that that wood was going

to get used in my life, that it would go into a fireplace, that that ash would eventually go back to plants.

And so I think that we have the possibility of experiencing this on, on smaller scales, even just with turning turning vegetable

scraps into compost, and then adding that to our garden, of seeing some of that circularity and how interconnected some of these some matter is in general.

I also think that our sponsors before we get to the actual interview, I do wanna mention this.

I think that our sponsors illustrate this really beautifully.

For sponsoring this episode. I have some really cool stories about how these 2 awesome businesses are illustrating our interconnectedness

and nutrient cycling in the earth that are embedded in this episode.

And it's such a huge thing for me for you to support these awesome businesses that that are supporting this podcast.

So if you can check that out, I would be much appreciated.

And the other great way that you can support this podcast is by hitting subscribe, following along, and leaving a rating and review if that calls to you.

And I always offer that if you leave a review of the podcast on Apple Podcasts and just shoot me a DM with a a picture of

it, then I'll shoot you, some snail mail mail if you send me your address.

And it's always such a pleasure to to really get to connect offline.

And I've been having a lot of great conversations, both in letter format and in DMs about recent podcast episodes.

And I just want you to know, it's always such a delight to connect here.

And I just want to read one recent review.

I really wanna thank Jan Y for this incredibly generous review and for seeing me.

It feels really good to be seen.

It's always my goal that my guests on this show be seen, and to have those tables turned felt really special. So this is from Jan Y.

I've been listening to this podcast since its very first episode.

And while I often will tire of a podcast and move on after several months, Kate's collection of interviews has continued to draw me back.

I love the tireless exploration of connection through the varied lenses of the guests hosted.

I love the fact that Kate brings so many elements of her unique life experience into her conversations.

I love the attention given to the intimate reality

notebook, titles added to my reading list, and a brain abuzz with new insights into the living the life I have to the fullest.

Which is to say, I suppose that every episode brings a huge dose, not just of intriguing information, but also of hope.

And in an environment where information is so frequently used to distance each one of us from our own humanity, traversing

so many different topics while still maintaining a sense of steadfastly clear eyed hope is indeed a gift.

Fastly clear eyed hope is indeed a gift.

I just that that review brought me to tears, and I'm really grateful that you feel that way.

It is my my hope to bring hope to this space and the sense of connection and joy.

So so thank you, Jabr, so much.

And without further ado, and on that beautiful note, let us jump into this episode with Ferris Jaber, whose book, Becoming

Earth, How Our Planet Came to Life, is out today.

I actually, I thought we might start through the lens of your garden.

I so enjoyed you know, I was just telling you that I so enjoyed getting to read not just becoming Earth, but getting to read so much of your work.

And it's it's it's an extensive and wonderful body of work in terms of essays prior to this.

And I was really struck by your garden.

And I think a lot of us find a sense of care and connection through experience.

And I think I'm curious where your interest in the interconnected and interwoven fabric of life on earth came from and to

kind of tease that out through the lens of the garden.

And I think that's also great because you talk about earth like a garden, which hopefully I'm gonna pull in here in a second.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I fell for gardening from a really young age, just this, you know, idea and process of nurturing other living things.

I mean, I was obsessed with animals and plants and life in general, you know, from a from such a young age that I honestly

when people ask me why, I I can't really explain it.

It's almost more like an instinct, you know, than anything else.

And and, and so I, you know, I attempted my first garden when I was about 11 or 12 in California, suburban California, and

I was mostly growing edible things, you know, carrots and radishes and herbs and such.

But the process of seeding and nurturing and watching and seeing such enormous development in a relatively short span of time, just, I really fell for that.

And then it well, then it was something like, gosh, 2 decades, more than 2 decades since I had the chance to actually garden properly again.

Because after leaving home for college, I didn't live anywhere where I had my own garden.

I didn't really have access to many gardens.

I tried to do community gardening, and I never got a space, you know.

And then it wasn't until 3 years ago that my partner Ryan and I bought this house that we live in now in Portland, Oregon,

and I finally had, you know, a bit of land to work for the first time.

When we moved in, it was just derelict lawn.

This was this house is a fairly new construction.

And what I learned over time is that they had basically tried to kind of fleece over this, construction site with just a thin

frock of, you know, the type of, sod, you just kind of roll out and into place.

And, the soil beneath it was not not in a in a great shape.

And so, you know, we knew we wanted to get rid of the grass and, you know, establish a much more diverse, kind of community.

And so that was our first task was to get rid of all of the grass.

And that's when I kind of really discovered that the soil underneath there was it was dry, was full of gravel and rubble.

It was not that sort of rich cocoa color you want in really fertile soil. Yeah.

And that's and, you know, as you were saying, so one of the chapters in the book is all about the history and future of soils

through the lens of my garden, and that's when I got really obsessed with what is soil actually.

And, what do I do when I when you don't have great soil, like, how do you how do you bring soil back to life?

How do you nurture the soil ecosystem? What does that really mean?

So sorry, that's kind of a long rambling answer.

But yeah, that's my sort of my gardening journey.

And, you know, we now have a garden with we have a little wildlife pond, we have a rockery, we have a bunch of drought tolerant

perennials, we have some raised beds for herbs and veggies, a wildflower meadow, a couple of shade gardens.

I really I can't help but buy way too many different kinds of plants and just see what works and try out different things.

So we have a crazy number of different, species and cultivars, And we're slowly learning over time what works really well for this particular microclimate.

And your soil has changed?

Yes, it has. Yeah. So I did, I did a few, you know, amateur home tests to kinda get a better idea of what the soil was like.

We dug some ditches here and there to test drainage.

I did a few of those lab tests where you actually pack up some soil and ship it off to a lab, and they send you back just

some basic results like nitrogen, phosphorus, levers, potassium.

I did a little bit of microscopy where I tried to get a sense of the microorganism community in the soil, which was more challenging, I was hoping.

But I did find you know, I I found, like, some tardigrades and other micro creatures, in the soil and and and foliage and stuff around here.

And, I can just tell from the texture and color and feel of the soil, which is, you know, one of the main ways that actually

soil scientists initially test soil, that it has it is starting to change.

And I think from what I learned, the most important thing was establishing this kind of mantle, this living cloak of vegetation on top of the soil.

Because I used to think of soil as just sort of a substance or medium that you kind of plunge things into and stuff grows out of it.

Mhmm.

But now I see it as its own living entity, its own living system, and what it really requires, what it's coevolved to need is protection and partnership with plants.

So if you can give, you know, malnourished soil a bunch of healthy plants, their roots become these incredible havens for microbes and fungi.

They start weaving these new networks underground.

And then on top, you have this protective clank cloak or mantle of vegetation, and that really helps protect the soil from the elements.

Because even as raindrop from a soil particles perspective is devastating. It's the dinosaurs. Right?

Like, it's gonna smash it to pieces. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

So, I think that was the single biggest

good change that we made was getting in a whole bunch of different types of perennials and other, you know, long lived plants

that have their root systems and their foliage there with the soil.

Hello, everyone. I hope you're enjoying this interview with Ferris Jaber for his new book, Becoming Earth.

I admit I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about how nutrients cycle through deep time as part of the earth and water,

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I love you starting with this because I think that what you just said is so salient that there's this relationship, first

of all, that you developed with the garden and with the soil, but also this relationship between soil and plants, and that's mutually beneficial.

And the relationship of all of those microorganisms that are in the soil is something like a 1000000000 microorganisms per teaspoon, something absolutely one wild.

And also sort of our preconceived notions of what soil or dirt might be.

And I think that one of the things that I loved in becoming Earth was that you formed these layers of relationships and interconnections

and interpenetrations of life flowing in and out of one another in such a beautiful way.

And I think that it it really it really speaks to something and to just to stick with the garden, I'm going to pull this quote,

and then maybe we can talk a little bit about that interconnectivity and this idea of Earth as a system,

But

I have this quote from you that I loved.

And you were talking a little bit about sort of the idea of the fall and the mythology of of coming out of Eden and then things like that.

But you go on to say, but for the great majority of its history, Earth was nothing like the relative paradise our species and so many others have enjoyed.

And far from being passive, Earth and its constituent creatures are agents in their own evolution.

Earth is a garden that sewed itself, nurtured itself, and through sentient life forms eventually became aware of itself.

A communal garden and whose creation and maintenance every member participates consciously or not.

Like many gardens, Earth has endured catastrophes over which it had no control.

Like many gardeners, Earth's creatures have inadvertently undermined the very system on which they depend, sometimes pushing it to the brink of collapse.

On the whole life and environment garden and gardeners have co evolved relationships that favor mutual persistence.

These reciprocal bonds have made Earth amazingly resilient over spans of time so vast, we cannot properly comprehend them.

And so I wondered if we might go into some of those relationships and interconnectivity as Earth as a system and in the foreground

very much in, in the picture, not as Marcia Bjorn around would say, a sort of backdrop for our endeavors, but a part of them.

Yeah. I think that is such an important point that you've brought up is that we tend to think of the environment, including

the planet as a whole, as the backdrop. Right?

And we are the main actors on the stage.

We are where the action is happening.

And even living things like plants are kind of this, you know, foliar backdrop behind us, even though they, of course, have their own incredibly dynamic, lives.

And so a huge part of the book is to kind of flip that thinking and, recognize firstly that the supposed boundaries between

life and environment are much more porous and much blurrier than they are typically thought to be, that the boundaries between

individual and community are likewise extremely porous, and that the planet as a whole can be thought of as a single integrated

physical system in which all the living and nonliving components, you know, fit together and must be considered as a whole, not just as individual pieces.

And in that sense, you know, there is a story to be told that the the earth itself has its own story, right, as an integrated whole.

And, you know, I've touched on this, I guess, in various things that I've written, but traditionally there's been a lot of

focus on individuality and competition in the life sciences because that is so essential to Darwinian theory.

You know, and to suggest this other thinking, it's not at all to say, Oh, you know, Darwin was wrong and everything he got everything wrong and blah, blah, blah.

No, like, it's it's more about expanding, you know, going beyond the, you know, traditional strict Darwinian ideas because,

yes, individuality, competition, reproduction, natural selection, that is those are the fundamentals of evolution by natural

selection and how we understand Darwinian evolution.

But there's a lot more than that happening, in biology.

And I think for quite a while now, many scientists have been arguing for this expansion of our modern, you know, understanding of evolution.

And things like symbiosis are so crucial to that, you know, because there there is, in addition to conflict, there is so much

partnership and alliance and reciprocity, in nature.

And we need to account for all of those things simultaneously, not just focus on one or the other.

We love to just focus on 1 or the other.

You know, we love these sort of cartoonish depictions of nature as perfectly harmonious are also these, like, hard nosed,

cold eye depictions of, you know, nature, red in tooth and claw.

And clearly, you know, it's it's the multiplicity of it all. Right?

Like all of this is happening at the same time.

And that's kind of confusing and thrilling, I think.

It's like, it's, it's kind of, it's challenging to take all that on at the same time.

But that is really the truth of it, not just one or the other.

So, you know, a lot of the book is concerned with this field called earth system science, which I don't think it's had its moment in the public spotlight yet.

You know, like, there's certain scientific ideas that break through the public consciousness in a huge way.

Like, I think a lot of people know what a black hole is, you know, probably in large part of because of Stephen Hawking's work.

I think a lot of people have heard of Richard Dawkins and The Selfish Gene because that was such a cultural touchstone.

The microbiome has exploded in, you know, in popularity and knowledge in the past decade.

But earth system science, I don't know if that's quite as well known yet.

I don't know if this kind of holistic thinking and interconnectivity as a, you know, genuine, legitimate, mainstream, modern

science is understood by the general public yet. And part of

the And there are so many amazing feedbacks and processes and systems within this, you know, greater earth system that I think

should be should be taught in elementary school as fundamental as the water cycle.

Like, when we are learning about the water cycle, we can't we can't remember those simple charts and block arrows and everything.

We should be learning about the planetary thermostat, you know, or the deep time carbon cycle.

Like, we should be learning about these incredibly important, processes and feedbacks and systems that are so crucial to understand

right now when we have messed them up so badly, you know, when our species has done so much to throw them for a loop and then

we're trying to figure out how to rapidly, you know, fix that, how to how to make amends for what we've done.

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You know, I'm always interested in I think in order to sort of understand where we are at this point in time, there's something

to be said for understanding, number 1, how we got here and some of those mechanisms in

throughout all of your work. And I think a lot of it speaks to little pieces of that as you navigate the idea of cooperation

and the sort of a very different, you know, I think I've thought a lot about, and we've talked a little bit about on the podcast,

how a lot of Darwinian natural selection, sexual selection is couched in the terms of competition.

And also, and and you speak to this in your article on beauty, in in sort of these economic terms that that were popular at

the time, and and so much was going on in that sort of later 19th century, that that sort of, there was a lot of crossover

in how we were thinking about Earth and ourselves and economics and industrialization, and all of these different pieces and

to bring that back into focus, certainly through the book and also through, I think, just thematically in your work, an idea

of cooperation, an idea of letting go of anthropocentrism, and really focusing on the wonders and the marvels of all the life

around us and and how it's sort of interconnected.

And I pulled this from your article on forests where you were you were speaking with Suzanne Simard, and and talking about her work.

And you said by searching for hints of interdependence in the forest floor, she had inadvertently provoked one of the oldest

and most intense debates in biology is cooperation is central to evolution as competition.

And I think that what you said that Earth is it's it's not it's not black or white. It's it's complexity.

We can't reduce it to a single metric.

We can't say it's rid of tooth and claw.

We can't say that it's it's this sort of haven and and paradise.

It is just everything wrapped in complexity and one

of

one of my favorite things that really stood out to me Ferris some reason, as I was reading was plankton.

And I think they illustrate some of the circularity and complexity and interconnectedness throughout,

geological cycles. So beautifully. And I and I was struck that when you piece together plankton throughout the book, they

have this incredible journey through through deep time where they go from ocean to rock to fertilizer for a forest and back again.

And and maybe you and I could talk through some of that or if you wanted to walk us through that just kind of as an example

of how jaw droppingly interconnected all of this is.

Yes. I think that's the perfect phrase for it.

It really is jaw dropping interconnection and, like, that that chapter on plankton is kinda my ode to them because they are just so endlessly fascinating and amazing.

I mean, I I it is it is truly mind blowing.

I mean, so first of all, you know, if we take the broadest definition of plankton, which is basically like if we include all

the little, you know, microscopic floating beings out there,

drifting and floating beings out there, then they really are the first organisms, that ever came into existence on the planet.

You know, that we think the first organisms were these ocean dwelling microbes, most likely.

And so, you know, today, plankton now encompass a much larger variety of species, you know, going through these fascinating

little known, often single celled creatures like coccolithophores and diatoms and radiolarians, and they they create these

amazing microskeletons and shells for themselves that architecturally and sculpturally are, like, just as astounding, if not

more so than any, you know, conch or incredible large structure seashell you've ever seen.

These are the these are the kinds of forms that Ernst Haeckel was obsessed with and, you know, meticulously illustrated in, in his beloved, illustrations.

And then there's even things like, you know, tiny crustaceans, the larva of fish and crabs, and all the way up to certain

types of jellyfish, you know, giant jellyfish.

They're technically considered plankton because they mostly drift.

They're mostly moved around by the currents even though they didn't move on their own as well.

And, plankton, as you say, they are intimately entwined with many of the planet's geological processes, in truly astonishing ways.

So, you know, first of all, I just I love to think of, you know, the ocean, there's like this invisible, microscopic forest

just enmeshed throughout the entire ocean surface, which is photosynthetic plankton that are constantly channeling energy

from the sun, using it to perform photosynthesis, you know, using it to live and survive, but creating this kind of planetary productivity. Right?

You know, scientists like to think of all of the collective photosynthetic activity on the planet, at the same time.

And all of these ocean plants, these ocean plankton are just as powerful as all of the land plants even though the land plants

vastly outweigh them in terms of mass and weight.

You know, plants with woody tissues actually constitute the the by far the largest amount of biomass on the planet. Nothing comes close to matching them.

But all of the photosynthetic plankton in the oceans, are just as productive because they turn over, like, they they live

much shorter lives and and they reproduce much more quickly.

So they are producing about equal amounts of oxygen and they're performing about equal amounts of photosynthesis, you know, photosynthesis to the land plants.

And then, the climate, the planet's climate has a lot to do with how carbon moves in and out of different reservoirs.

You know, so there's a reservoir in the atmosphere, in the soils and crust, in living matter, in the oceans, and plankton

are a huge part of how that carbon cycles through the planet because they, are continuously using carbon that's dissolved

into the ocean surface to perform photosynthesis.

And when they die in sync, they accumulate in layers of muck and sediment on the ocean floor and these layers petrify over time.

They get compressed and hardened into stone.

Eventually, they get subducted into the planet's interior and, you know, they're lifted to the surface again through tectonic activity or through volcanoes.

So the entirety of the White Cliffs of Dover, which are made of limestone, along with the majority of limestone formations

across the planet, including major chunks of the Alps, it's not just stone.

It's actually it's actually a massive trove of fossils, of microfossils.

The the entirety of the cliffs are made of the compacted remains of these plankton called coccolithophores that encase themselves

in, little bits of limestone, of chalk.

You know, they make these little scales for themselves to protect themselves. And if so

Our original chalk was this is the original the original chalk, something that you illustrate, and so does so does Helen Chairski in The Blue Machine.

She has a beautiful chapter on cocklethelford.

Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. And, I'm forgetting who it is, but there's a there's a famous, science fiction writer who I think draws on this as well.

There's there's a certain book in which it's set on partially set on, you know, the the ancient limestone, and then they draw

magic from the life that was, you know, embedded in this limestone.

And, so if you scrape a bit of the white Cliffs of Dover off and you look at it under an electron microscope, like an extremely

powerful microscope, you can see the remains of these cockleth of 4 fossils.

And sometimes you can even find in the cliffs or in, like, really deep ocean sediments an intact fossil coccolithophore with

all of its little scales still on there, and they look like, you know, petrified doilies.

You know, they they're as delicate as lace, but they're made of metal. Yeah.

And then so as you were saying and then also, you know, there there's dust that blows across continents and fertilizes the Amazon rainforest.

It comes, mostly from Africa, and where it's coming from is basically an ancient lake.

It is, you know, it's it's now desert, but it was once a vast lake.

And at the bottom of this lake are still tons of these fossilized plankton, and their skeletons get swept up into the atmosphere. They become dust. They travel across the ocean.

They fertilize the Amazon bringing it nitrogen, phosphorus, and such that it depends on. So plankton are they're everywhere.

They're moving around all the time through water and air and soil, and, you know, they've been wrapped up with the planet's

geological processes for at least 3,500,000,000, probably 4000000000 years, something like that.

Wow. I just thought I I thought that this was was stunning and and just their role in kind of everything that they they seemed

to be everywhere that they were part of fertilization part of a massive amount of the photosynthesis that happens here on

earth, that they were part of the creation of an atmosphere richer than oxygen, perhaps to begin with, that they were chalk,

that they, that they show up in in materials that we ended up flintknapping, that they keep nutrient ratios in the ocean and pH levels balanced. You know?

And then once they reach the Amazon, because you also you you travel to the Amazon, that it is their fertilization of the

Amazon rainforest that allows that incredible organism and ecosystem to transpire and nucleate clouds with bacteria, which

you also illustrate beautifully in the book, that eventually, in conjunction with ocean systems, become weather systems that rain on fields in the Midwest. Yeah. And

yeah. Yeah. The con Oh, yeah. The connection Go ahead. I know. I know.

We get just it's just astounding when you think of all those connections.

And and like you were saying, that's right.

So plankton were involved in probably the single most profound change in the planet's history, which, you know, is the oxygenation of Earth.

And if we travel back to the beginning of Earth's earliest chapters, there was essentially no oxygen in the atmosphere whatsoever,

and the sky was probably this hazy orange.

And it wasn't until cyanobacteria invented essentially invented photosynthesis and started to output oxygen that the atmosphere started to change.

It started to shift towards the blue end of the spectrum.

It started to become a much more, you know, high oxygen environment.

And that radically changed not just the atmosphere, but the entire planet because, for example, more than half of the mineral

species that we have on earth today could not exist without a high oxygen environment.

And Earth has more than 5,000 minuteeral species, which is vastly more than any other planetary Right?

So before we had an oxygen rich environment and before, right?

So before we had an oxygen rich environment, and before plants were on land, there were no wildfires.

And if there was no possibility of fire, human history basically would not have happened or it would have looked extremely different.

We would never have hard been able to hard fire.

We would never have broken the, you know, the energetic limitations, that are on non cooking animals, and we just we never

would have, gotten to the cultural or technological sophistication that we eventually achieved.

And, yeah, so it's just like and then the so like you're saying, plankton were even part of the tools that our ancestors used because it's not just limestone.

That was new to me. I know. It's crazy. So, like, so, you

know, it's not just limestone, but other types of rock and stone are primarily made from the fossilized remains of plankton

and other microscopic life, including the types of stone that we napped into some of the earliest, stone hammers and arrows and such.

And so although our ancestors didn't know it, they were they were crafting and working with the ghosts and skeletons of long

dead plankton, that made this particularly type of sharp, hard, knappable material.

So they are absolutely woven into our evolutionary history as well.

And and we're still using them today.

And I I I first wanna touch on I mean, I think that you covered this sort of the growing up of earth really beautifully.

And you touched on, you know, Marcia Birona Rend, who I who I mentioned, in talking about foregrounding earth, has a beautiful

thought that we often kind of put everything precambrian as just like something that we we just kind of ignored.

It wasn't as interesting, but it composes a massive amount of earth itself and and that history.

And and it really is amazing because it created the the really delicate conditions for for these ingredients of life.

And and just like you said of fire, that there's a very narrow range in which this works as beautifully as it does too much

oxygen and a single spark is going to light everything on fire and too little and it's too easy to smother.

And so we're right in in this zone in so many different spaces, not just fire for this, this perfect ingredient where you have.

And and you talked really well about this, I actually pulled this quote from, are you familiar with free Jove Capra, he wrote

one of my favorite books, which is actually it's actually a textbook called the systems view of life that is about systems

and sort of the rise of systems thinking and earth systems.

And it was the first time that I was introduced to the Gaia hypothesis and to James Lovelock, amongst other things, but he

has this great quote, where life creates the conditions for its own existence, that it's through these relationships between

environment and organisms and all of this complexity that that that arises. Plankton being fascinating.

Sorry, my microphone just fell.

I'll kind of I'll kind of go back and I'll just say plankton being these this fascinating vehicle for telling that story,

because they appear in all of these different places, in which I think I would be remiss if I don't mention and I loved I

loved that you included this too, because they come back in some other ways as as plastic that that plankton are a part of,

the oil beneath our, you know, and how biomass has turned into over 1000000 of years, petroleum underneath the earth's surface.

And you had this, you have this great sentence that I love of this sort of what I would call a sort of Tim Morton esque weird

circularity, which is microplastics then are a kind of necromancy long dead plankton resurrected, exploited and eventually

discarded in their former home where they are fated to become ecological impostors, tormenting their living descendants and disrupting the planet's vital rhythms.

And so they make an appearance too in these synthetic polymers that we call plastic, that are are very much changing the planet as well.

Yeah. That really astounded and perturbed me deeply when I realized that's really what was happening.

Because I think I think a lot of people hear the term fossil fuels and we just we think it's like, oh, because they're so

old or something, you know, and we don't we don't fully realize that that fossil fuels are the remains of ancient life, you know, that this is Yeah. Yeah.

Like this is that's why they're called fossil fuels. It's ancient life.

Like you were saying, a lot of it is this photosynthetic planktonic matter that has, you know, been fossilized and turned

into oil over vast spans of time.

And we are drawing, we are bringing back this life to the surface and then combusting it and putting it back in the atmosphere

when it's supposed to be sequestered underground for, you know, eons from our perspective.

Yeah. And turning it into polymers as well.

And I I would be remiss, Vaslav, Smil, have you ever

Yes.

Read any of yeah, has a statistic where he says it's about it's about 40 acres of biomass, that is represented in a single gallon of gasoline.

And so this is I just I just want to put a sort of large s on how much form formally living matter this represents.

Exactly. It's like just to take our car around the block where we have to, like, stuff it with rainforest and whales and the

equivalent of rainforest and whales and elephants in terms of biomass, you know, just to keep it going. Yeah.

Which really makes you see gas in a different way.

Totally different.

And then and then, yeah, like you're saying, then plastic is basically another form of fossil fuels.

Like, that's another way that we use fossil fuels because of, like, the essential ingredient of plastic is is petroleum. That's like it's raw material.

And and then so then this crazy necromancy that happens when we create all these microplastics and plastic pollution, and

the plastic breaks down and breaks down and breaks down, and that's something scientists seem to be learning is that it it

seems to almost never fully go away.

It just becomes smaller and smaller and smaller.

So you end up with these microscopic plastic entities, you know, just polluting the ocean, and they're kind of behaving in

ways that are eerily, resembling to actual living plankton, right?

Like, they're kind of moving through the same cycles, they're clogging up some of these processes, other organisms are trying

to eat them either deliberately or inadvertently as they would plankton, and they're becoming sort of a massive perturbation

of the of the ocean carbon cycle.

You know, these microplastics are accumulating in sediments as well.

And we don't really fully understand what that's gonna do. No.

Yeah, so the, the mystery and the, you know, the potential consequences there is is really chilling, to think about that think

about those, yeah, the the cyclic nature of it all.

And, like, once you've once you've released something, you know, to the your system, it's gonna get wrapped up in everything else. You can't just call it back.

Like and that's been the immense problem with plastic pollution is that, you know, short of stopping all plastic production,

like, how do you actually solve this problem?

How do you actually recover all this plastic and prevent it from getting into know, the Earth system in the 1st place.

And I think that's it's our failure to recognize ourselves as part of the Earth system to this delusion that we can somehow

be separate from it, that we can use all this technology and make all these materials and just kind of dump them here, you

know, bury them there, and it then there won't be any consequence for that one.

Obviously, there is, you know, these massive ecological repercussions.

Yes. And I think that when you begin to put these systems, when you begin to put the systems thinking and earth as a system

and people become more aware of that, I think you start to feel as though you are a part of that interconnected system and

to better understand that there is this this reciprocal effect that is happening, this constant conversation.

And and I wanna get into how we're a part of it.

But first, I really do wanna kind of dive into the idea that life creates the conditions for its own existence, because I

think that sort of sets us up for this double sided coin of awe and horror at

at the, oh, at what we've done, and also at what is possible and what has happened throughout time.

And I I did. I kept coming back to this idea that life creates the conditions Ferris its own existence

returns to earth, that there is this reciprocity.

Another little quote that you had was, historically, evolution has been

evolutionary processes, others are much more sinuous, even circular.

Again and again, life and environment alter each other through feedback loops.

Yes.

Of which we are very much a part.

Yeah. This this idea is so integral, to the book, to Gaia and to my own kind of entry into all of these, concepts because,

I mean, I really, fell in love with all these ideas through the Amazon rainforest.

And the fact that the Amazon generates about half of the rain that falls on its canopy, the fact that scientists speak of

it as a biogeochemical reactor that has persisted in a coherent form for more than 50000000 years, you know, as a predominant feature of the Cenozoic biosphere.

The idea of the Amazon is a garden that is essentially watering itself to some extent, all of that just completely enraptured me.

And I just became obsessed with this question of how else is life changing, influencing, improving in some cases its environment

on a massive scale, not just locally, you know, here and there, but on the scale of a continent or indeed the entire planet.

And so, you know, it be it began with me understanding that it's not just a simple matter of trees and plants pulling water

from the soil and releasing water to the atmosphere, it's a lot more than is is going on.

So, essentially, the forest is breathing out this complex of organic detritus and biological particles in addition to the water.

So there are these, complex gaseous compounds that plants are releasing all the time, that salts they're releasing, you know,

pollen, fungal spores, bits and pieces of insect shells, bits and pieces of fur and scales, they all get swept up into the atmosphere.

And it's the combination of all of that water vapor plus all of the minute particles on which the vapor can condense that creates the ideal conditions for rain.

And that's why this happens in incredibly densely vegetated areas like the Amazon.

Receiving rain. It is not just taking advantage of the conditions that preexisted. It is amplifying those conditions.

It is it is literally amplifying the conditions to which it is already suited.

So it's it's like the chicken and egg, you know, rain and rainforest, like, which came first. Like, they they're so interconnected.

It's it's almost impossible to pull them apart at this point.

And so, you know, learning that completely changed the way I think about the relationship between life and Earth.

And over time, I think one of the biggest revelations for me is that we need to stop thinking of life as residing on Earth

or inhabiting Earth and rather think of life as a literal extension of Earth.

It is literally a physical outgrowth of the planet.

And I like to make the analogy of, you know, imagine a vast beach and these sand castles and other incredibly complex structures

and sculptures spontaneously emerge from the sand.

Now, just because they've attained a higher level of complexity Earth.

Life is literally coming out of and remains made of and returns to Earth.

I've come to think of all of the stuff we call life as Earth animated.

It's literally the matter of the planet that has come to life. It has become animated.

And for me, that was a huge change in and speaking to what you were talking about is, you know, thinking of the environment

as the backdrop, so, you know, getting away from that, realizing that, no, it is it is literally the stuff of the earth that has come to life.

What we call life is the planet, you know?

And and and, and so once you kind of properly accept that all of those bound like, for me, those boundaries are just kind of dissolved.

Like, I just I think of all of us now as animate Earth. That's just what we are.

I think too, and I wanna pull this in too because one of the things that that you did very well throughout the book is that

as as life gets more complex, as we move from single celled organisms to something that's multicellular.

And and and these outgrowths of earth, this earth animate becomes more and more complex.

It also offers the opportunity for more and more relationships, and reciprocity and cooperation to form which I think only serves to increase its complexity.

And so I loved that, that there was not just and I love this, I'm going to be thinking about this for a while this earth made

animate this outgrowth of Earth, but also the complexity and possibility of all the interrelationships and co evolution and complexity between those outgrowths.

Yes, absolutely. There's this idea within Earth Sciences and Life Sciences and the juncture of the 2 that we really do see

the planet becoming more complex and more habitable over time.

You know, it's not that it's not that life, universally and always improves its environment and planet.

You know, sometimes life makes changes that are severely detrimental.

Like, it's thought that the oxidation of Earth involved a massive extinction potentially because so many organisms were not adapted to high oxygen environment.

And then, of course, there's us and everything that we've done.

But but, you know, there if you look at the big picture, like, the really big trends, you do see this increasing complexity

and habitability of the planet, when complex multicellular life comes into the picture and forms these relationships with microbial partners.

When the complex life is involving in the mesh of these much older, smaller organisms, you then get these emergent effects

and changes that allow for even more diversity to pile on top of that.

And so it is this, like, concatenated, compacted effect of increasing diversity and complexity, which becomes resilience.

Because when you have high diversity, you cannot wipe it all out with just one type of onslaught.

You know, it's gonna take something really big or it's gonna take a lot of really small things to truly, annihilate everything.

And I think we see that resilience throughout our history is because at least 5 times something has happened that has winnowed

the biodiversity at the time to just a fraction of what existed.

And yet each time earth has resprouted and arguably become even more diverse and complex and resilient than it was before.

And so, you know, this this idea also you know, life creating the conditions for his existence or improving them or changing

them, this was part of what was so, you know, initially controversial about the way Lovelock articulated Guy in the very beginning

because he himself admitted he did make some sort of mistakes with his initial articulation, and he he later recanted those and refined his ideas over time.

But basically, in the very beginning, he the way he stated it was that life is deliberately altering the planet in order to benefit itself.

And for many scientists, this was too tautological.

This was too goal oriented and purpose driven, which is not really the way that life and evolution works.

What he later he later clarified that what he meant is that together life and environment, when they are co evolving over

great spans of time, they sort of discover or converge upon these processes, relationships, rhythms that tend to favor their mutual persistence.

So it's not like, you know, life is holding some counsel and all of the living beings, like, we're gonna, you know, make these

changes to ensure that we have a habitable planet, But there are these inevitable processes that are related to evolution

by natural selection that influence it, that are happening in tandem with it, that result in these emergent effects we only

see at the level of ecosystems or planets.

And so it is it is really it is truly astonishing, what can happen when you have the high level of complexity and diversity that you're referring to.

You know, we get these emergent level effects and and, and properties and processes and relationships that you simply cannot have with a much simpler system. Yeah.

The complexity is so, essential to it.

Yeah. And then to weave weave that into the complexity throughout geological time too, that this is which you illustrated really well with the plankton.

But, I I mean, it is just

I just think it's it's so beautiful.

I that's always what I come back to.

I mean, it's just so almost so unimaginable.

It's again, it's that jaw dropping ness.

And I loved that at toward the end at in the epilogue, you were able to visit with Lovelock before before his his death.

And to get into just it, I mean, it it had a sort of conviviality, but you were just there sort of having tea with him and

and and sharing a little bit about where where his mind was towards the end there.

And because I think that something that I noticed throughout all of your work is it's speaking to the way that science shifts

and grows and that that it itself is not fixed, and that our understanding becomes deeper and hopefully becomes more complex

in the way that we tease this out.

And I think that you have profiled many people that are are grappling with and and really illuminating complexity, both both

grappling and illuminating in such a beautiful way.

Yeah. I I do think I am drawn to scientists, who are challenging the status quo in some ways.

You know, their ideas are provocative at the very least because they're not yet textbook science, but they there's a lot of

evidence mounting to support them, but there's still a lot of debate going on at the same time.

And I find that intellectual space particularly thrilling.

I mean, there there is there's a huge service and value to synthesizing what is already textbook science, what is already known and very well accepted.

But I'm really interested in where are we kind of coming up against and pushing the limits of our current knowledge, Who are the people working in this space?

What is kind of the history of, you know, the larger community's reaction to these ideas?

And, you know, Lovelock was certainly a very, maverick, independent, controversial thinker and figure.

And, you know, he he's so interesting because, you know, he was a medical doctor, an engineer, an inventor, and an author. He wasn't a biologist. He wasn't an ecologist.

He took a a much more physicist's view of life and what what does it mean to be alive, you know, the kind of thinking that

that Schrodinger would take, you know, like and so for him yeah.

So for him, it's like, life is not restricted to biological organisms.

It can be a more broad phenomenon, you know, than that we need to expand our concept of what life is.

And in the book, I kind of I talk a bit about, systems thinking like you were you're talking about, but, you know, thinking

of life as a kind of system that sustains itself, right?

So life is some it's really a process more than a property or a noun, it's more of a verb.

It's something that matter or systems are doing.

And so, you know, what we call life, they tend to be these systems that sustain themselves.

They we know that our universe is hurtling inescapably towards maximum entropy. Everything's gonna fall apart eventually.

But in the meantime, we have these amazing things called life, and they are systems that use free energy to maintain what

would otherwise be an improbably high level of complexity in organization.

And they do that, you know, temporarily.

But at the scale of ecosystems and planets, we see this incredible, longevity and resilience and endurance.

You know, I've I've actually one question that fascinates me is what not just what are the oldest organisms on the planet,

but what are the oldest ecosystems on the planet? What are the oldest living communities?

There are corals, coral reefs that are thought to be continuously growing for something like 40 to 5000 years.

There are seagrass meadows that that may be, like, 200000 years old.

And then as we were talking about, the Amazon has existed, you know, for for tens of 1000000 of years, potentially.

So so what does longevity and lifespan and endurance and persistence mean at the scale of an ecosystem or a continent or a

planet as opposed to just individual organisms?

Because we're always so focused on the individual, right, and then the organismic.

But if we if we go to the much larger scale, we see, potential and, you know, a kind of resilience that you simply cannot

achieve on on the level of the individual.

Mhmm. I've never considered that. I'm sorry.

I was just pausing and thinking about that.

You know, you you love the rainforest. I love the prairie.

I grew up I grew up in the prairie.

And that is my ecosystem of choice, my favorite ecosystem.

And and it has such a long and varied and incredibly impactful history in terms of carbon cycles and and everything that it

contains and the coevolution of some of those grasses and and the ruminants that that it supports and that in turn support

them. Right.

And and I just love that to consider that, like, life on the the timeline of an ecosystem And when what is the oldest ecosystem?

I think that's, that's really beautiful, because I love anything that that breaks up our idea of time.

I think that in in being humans, we're very attached to a human timescale.

Think you even had an article about how different animals might perceive might perceive time, which was fantastic, because

I think it's important to remember that our concept of time is incredibly limited.

And it is a short thing here to be a human, which is wondrous and and amazing.

And yet it I think we get caught in only the in short term thinking, when when really there's there's something to be said

to think like an ecosystem or to think, as Marcia Bironoran says in in sort of geological time.

Yeah. It's it's fascinating to think of our cognition, our brains are these incredibly complex systems, yet they're only subsystems within this much larger earth system.

And so we evolve, you know, our brains literally evolved to perceive reality, to receive time and space in a particular way

that is most advantageous to us in terms of sort of an organism surviving day to day, moment to moment.

And but it's like but now we have this incredible self awareness and this desire and capacity to understand or to try to understand

the Earth system and, you know, the Earth's story, which is many billions of years long.

But it's so but there's this gap, you know, that we're constantly trying to, to paper over because it's like, how do we how

do we go from being individual organisms that live a century or so at most each to understanding a living entity that has spanned 4,000,000,000 years of history. You know?

I mean, we don't we don't even, like, like, there you know, we're not even, like, the dinosaur like, the dinosaurs.

The reign of the dinosaurs was eclipses, the entirety of human history even going back to our earliest human ancestors.

Like, we're just we're so we are so brief compared to so much else so far.

And, yeah, I wish I I constantly long for a greater cognitive ability to truly understand, these timescales, you know, which

are which are so essential to understanding, Earth history and all these ideas that we are talking about.

But I constantly bumping up against my own cognitive limitations, but I guess that's, just part of being a human on this planet.

So fortunately, we have we had we do have a lot of tools and systems, you know, workarounds.

Like, we're I don't know if we're ever really gonna there, but we have a lot of workarounds that are helpful.

Yeah. And I think I think to speak to, you know, your your work and what you had said to be sort of on that edge that that

we haven't that hasn't been fully codified, some of the science that hasn't been fully codified into textbooks that and and

you do a really good job of sort of balancing perspectives within it and and sort of that tension within communities.

But I think in that same way of pushing an edge, pushing a boundary, I think pushing our ability to at least try to wrap our

minds around deep time and and different time scales and its implications for earth.

I actually think that what you've done in the book is one of the best ways to do that, because you form this idea of instead

of trying to understand time as a strictly linear process of the a sort of linear evolution of geological time throughout

Earth, time becomes interwoven in all of the relationships and cycles that are bringing some circularity to time that we can

we can touch deep time when we hold a piece of true chalk.

And most chalk is not true chalk anymore. But we are

human minds, maybe, and I I mean, this is just I'm just thinking about this now.

It's easier to understand that at the level of a relationship to chalk or to see, dust blow across the Atlantic and fertilize

the rainforest from ancient bodies of plankton that that that suddenly makes it real.

Yeah. I'm so glad you picked up on this notion of cycles and rhythms because I you know, one of the biggest challenges for

any author and I think particularly for nonfiction writers whose books do not have a single narrative character or narrative

through line, is structure, like, how do you give this, you know, how do you give this book, this this work, a framework, and a structure and a skeleton.

And so, you know, the most straightforward way to tell Earth's story is linear chronology, like, just start at the beginning

and go to where we are now, and that's been done many, many times.

And I knew that for this book, I did not wanna do that for for a number of reasons.

You know, first of all, it's not just a straight geological history nor is it simply the history of life.

It's trying to merge those two things. Right?

It's it's trying to show the coevolution of life and the planet, and it's trying to show the 2 have changed each other, and

it's trying to show where you know, the intersection of biology and geology.

And then secondly, I wanted because cycles and rhythms are so fundamental to Earth and to the Earth system, I wanted to give

the book some sort of a sense of rhythm of waves as you're moving through.

And so the structure I settled on, you know, so I I used the 3 main spheres of the planet, you know, the lithosphere, the

atmosphere, the hydrosphere, or rock, air, and water as I call them, to divide the book into 3 sections.

And then when within each of those, we kind of follow the same evolutionary arc where we're starting with the simplest, oldest,

earliest organisms, the microbes, then we move to the more complex stuff like animals, plants, and fungi.

And then we look at the most recent changes by our species in the last few centuries, last few millennia.

And we kind of repeat that evolutionary wave within each section.

And I was hoping it would give the text in the book, you know, kind of this feeling of of rhythm and cycle and that which

not just like you're saying, it's not just a straight linear, timeline that we're looking at.

There's so many, loops and feedbacks happening.

And and, like, what happens, now is directly related to what happened before and will, you know, affect what happens later,

and you just can't get away from that kind of looping circular relationship.

So I'm glad that, you know, that that the importance of rhythm and cycle is is coming through to some extent.

It came through beautifully, and I've actually thought a lot.

I I read mostly nonfiction, and I've thought a lot about, for my own sake, perhaps someday, a lot of the different ways that

you can tell a story, and what it means to not have that anchor of a more central figure, you actually you do a really good

job of anchoring all of your articles within sort of a sort of central character or figure.

But I also felt that there was a bit of an anchor of this foregrounded earth throughout it as the character, but it does speak really beautifully to cycles.

And the book absolutely has a rhythm that feels tangible.

And it and it does sort of bend your your mind to time.

I'm thinking about Ted Ching's work too, suddenly. I have you

I love Ted Ching's

genius. So I had to think about I had to throw that up there too, because that that also has that where you're trying to bend

things in a way that they are very much it is a cycle.

I I want to put us back in that cycle.

I want to put humans back in it for a moment.

And I think that that something I loved about your work and a lot of the work that I've been looking at lately is looking

at not having the anthropocentrism that is so rampant within all of our thinking.

But at the same time, like you said, you know, towards the end of each section was kind of bringing humans and how we've changed

it into it, because we are a part of this living fabric and the cycles, and we

are perpetuating cycles that

we can fossil fuels has been relatively short in the scheme of things.

Fossil fuels has been relatively short in the scheme of things.

You know, we really only transitioned from photosynthetic energy of wood in the 1600 on the coal and then and then into fossil fuels.

And the creation of plastic is is relatively new.

Most materials were were more of Earth, even though plastic is of Earth, it's a very different thing.

And and and I know I sent you this ahead of time, but I kept coming back to, Melanie Challengers work when I when I was reading

the book, and she has this wonderful quote at the beginning of how to be animal, where she said, the world is now dominated

by an animal that doesn't think it's an animal.

And the future is being imagined by an animal that doesn't want to be an animal. This matters.

And I just I just kept coming back to that because we are a part of this Jabr.

And we are, we are earth made solid.

We are a part of this outgrowth.

Yeah. That is a really a really profound notion because I feel that resistance to being animal is so stubborn.

You know, it is it has been so entrenched, in human history and human thought for so long.

I my parents didn't raise my siblings and I as any particular religion, but we had quite a bit of Christian influence when we were younger.

We had a lot of friends who were Christians, and I went to a private Christian school for a couple of years and I, in the

summers as a kid, would sometimes attend these, like, Christian youth summer camps.

And, you know, I was, like, the the nerdy animal obsessed kid at these camps.

And I remember being like, I would love to just spout facts.

And I was like, oh, you know, like, our closest relatives are the chimpanzees and the gorillas and blah blah blah.

And one of the counselors was, like, really upset with me for saying that because she was adamant that we were not animals the way that other animals were. And I was like, no. We definitely are.

Like, we're very closely related to all these, great apes, and, like, we are, you know, we're part of the tree of life and

we are we're mammals and but, like, it was, this was this was a functioning adult who did not accept that we are biologically animals. Yeah.

And I feel like, you know and there's a long, long history to that.

And so one of the central messages of the book is that life inevitably changes its environment and and all kinds of life are included in that.

Like, whether you're a microbe or a mammoth or a human or a bird, you will change your environment.

And so there is something simultaneously humbling and empowering about that I find, you know, it's humbling in that, it's not unique to us.

You know, there's this mistaken notion that even intellectual luminaries have perpetuated that humans are unique in being

able to change the planet or the environment at a large scale, which is simply not true.

I mean, if you just if you look at Earth history, that's just simply not true.

Like, it's, you know, bacteria and microbes and plants and fungi have made the most profound changes in the planet's history, not, you know.

And so but it's also empowering in that, you know, some people refuse to believe that we have that power, that let that an

organism could be so consequential and so influential.

So if you if you have the power to make, you know, to harm the planet, you also have the power to help it.

Like, in other words, once you have that planetary power, you have it, and it you know, it's how you wanna use it.

And so as you're saying, at the end of each section, I look at what has our species in particular done trying to put us in

the context of this much larger coevolutionary saga of life continually changing the planet over time.

And while we are not categorically unique from other life and changing the planet or the environment, I do think we are unique

in the combined scale and speed and diversity of our changes.

Because as far as I can tell, no previous life form has ever changed so many layers, so many aspects of the planet so quickly, you know, and so thoroughly.

Like, every layer of the planet we've been able to access, whether it's, you know, the highest part of the atmosphere, or

the deepest recesses of the crust, we have altered it in some way, you know, whether whether it's microplastics in the clouds

or the mines that we have dug miles down, you know, we've just completely transformed the planet and we've done it in just

a couple of centuries, whereas most previous life forms have required at least 1,000,000 of years, sometimes longer, to make these types of changes.

And, yeah, it's just it is astonishing also that that is a single species doing this because in the past, so many of these

changes were, if not strictly collaborative, at least communal enterprises. Right?

It was like microbes and fungi and plants making a lot of different changes simultaneously.

And so that that is, you know, that's encompassing a massive range of different species, whereas we are a single species that

has made all of these changes very, very rapidly.

And so that is unprecedented in the history of our planet.

And I believe even the even just looking at the volume of carbon we've put in the atmosphere, it's possible.

You know, some earth scientists think it's possible that going back more than 4000000000 years, nothing in the planet's history

has ever injected that volume of carbon into the atmosphere that quickly.

Like, there's never been a geological event that has done the equivalent of that, which is just astonishing because some of

the like, if you've ever read Peter Brannan's, amazing book The Ends of the World, which is all about the mass extinctions

in Earth's history and, like, really gives you a very vivid understanding. He's incredible at explaining Earth science.

You know, like, the kind of volcanic activity, and tectonic asteroid spikes and all these other cataclysms that have happened

that are so colossal, we can't even probably fathom them and have never experienced anything like them, even those have not

injected the same amount of carbon this quickly. You know what I mean?

So it's like it's that it's that combination of volume and speed.

And that is what is so terrifying about what we're doing right now is that because it is unprecedented in that way, we cannot 100% predict exactly what's gonna happen. You know, we know Oh. Yeah.

I mean, we know kind of, like, the basic patterns and properties, but there's a lot of potential consequences that we are

not able to predict and, you know, with any, like, high reliability.

And that's kind of a big, tension and discussion point right now is, are we currently witnessing the entire climate sort of

rapidly shift into a new state that's gonna have all kinds of unpredictable consequences, or are the kind of measurements

we've been seeing recently in extreme weather events just kind of more short term blips in a longer term trend that is more predictable?

And we honestly don't 100% scientists don't 100% know what the answer to that is, yet.

But there's there's genuine reason for concern in that way.

And we can't we should not expect to, you know, to be able to foresee everything that is gonna happen, from you know, as a

consequence of our our, carbon emissions and and other forms of ecological disruption.

I think I I hadn't heard that that that we have injected more carbon into the atmosphere more quickly than any geological

event in the history of of Earth.

And and that's really I mean, that's it's it's incredibly sobering.

And I think it's sobering, because what the book speaks to is these cycles are so interconnected in a way that I honestly

think we're just beginning to understand, that I don't think we could have the predictive capabilities because these are affecting

Earth systems on so many levels from the micro to the macro.

It would be I I think it would take a lot of hubris to say that we could definitively model that in throughout time. And that's, that's certainly my opinion.

And I think that a lot of this hubris comes from a sort of human exceptionalism. And, and

an idea that we are not a part of this, but we are not an animal in this, that we are somehow above that there is a hierarchy

or or even just even just a separateness.

And I think that nature is a thing that exists out there.

And and I spent a lot of last year exploring the sort of porous boundary between self and other that when you when you really

start to look at it, it really dissolves.

And I think you said something at the beginning of this interview that struck me you said that your affinity for plants and

animals as a child felt almost like an impulse.

And I don't know if you know the work of Andreas Weber, he wrote a book called The Biology of Wonder and matter and desire and erotic ecology.

But Andreas said something that really struck me in one of his works, and it's that as as thorough as we are about cataloguing

developmental stages and children, the the rolls over holds their head up, you know, whatever that is, we don't catalog the

developmental stage where a child reaches out and is thrilled to and excited to touch a dog, a cat, a plant, and yet it is universal.

And it is this sudden reaching out of oneself and recognizing self contained in and shaped by the interconnections and relationships

of all the living beings plant and animal that we are, we are a part of.

Yeah, I wanna kick that to you because I do think that that this book puts us firmly firmly in that.

Yeah, I mean, everything you just said has spurred so many thoughts.

I mean, you know, firstly, I think so much of the history of science can be seen as a humbling of ourselves.

You know, like, there are these these pairs of related ideas, like this idea that mind is somehow special or distinct from matter. Right?

Like, this this hit this idea of dualism Mhmm. Descartes' way of thinking.

Descartes.

Right. Exactly. And that for me, like, that is so connected, so paralleled to the history of, vitalism, you know, this idea

that life is similarly, like, this special force or essence, you know, and that living things are imbued with, like, this

special force and that's what makes them alive.

And both of those ideas have been dismantled, you know, by by modern empiricism over time.

And then, like, we don't we don't need to reach for these, like, special mystical explanations that we that it is all arising

from matter and energy even if we don't understand entirely understand, you know, how exactly it's happening.

Like, we still cannot explain precisely how consciousness emerges from £3 of electric jelly in our skulls.

We still don't have a fundamental explanation

for what Even if we put it in a blender.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, which I learned from you.

Even if we make brain sleep, we still can't, yeah, explain it.

And, yeah, we still have a fundamental explanation for life.

What what precisely distinguishes life from nonlife?

Like, what is the, you know, fundamental explanation, not just a list of qualities that textbooks give us, but a proper Ferris

definition and explanation for the phenomenon of life.

And then, of course, related to, you know, humans as animals, as part of the earth, as just as much a product of evolution

as any other living organism, as just as much, you know, constrained by and You

know, getting you know, getting rid of that false sense, of exceptionalism.

And then what what you were just saying about reaching out, it immediately reminded me, first of all, of, Ed Yong's latest

book, An Immense World, which is all about thinking of other species, other creatures' sentience and their perceptions and

experiences, and then in particular Ferris sensory abilities.

But I'm fascinated by thinking about how other living beings experience reality, experience the world.

You know, what are other ways not just of behaving and being in the world, but actually experiencing it, like the psychological experience, of other creatures.

And I do think like, thinking about it now retrospectively, I do think that was probably a big part of what drew me in particular

to other animals was wanting to understand Ferris

that other people have their own perspectives and stop seeing everything just from your own perspective.

And and there's all these amazing videos and of psychologists testing this on kids.

There is a point at which a kid understands that, oh, other people around me have their own perspectives on the same shared

environment and they may not know what I know or I may not know what they know.

And that's like a very fundamental development.

And we know that only certain animals, well, as far as we know, have that ability as well.

Like like, you know, our great ape cousins can do this.

They can understand that different individuals have different experiences. They can manipulate that. They can lie and deceive.

So I think wanting to bridge again yet yet again bridging a gap. Right?

How do you bridge that gap of subjective experience?

Like, I'm fascinated by getting our getting putting ourselves in the minds of other creatures and even extending that, you

know, to thinking about different types of living entities.

Like, what is is it valid to speak of an experience, a forest's experience of the world? And what would that even mean? How would that work?

And, yeah, just, this kind of, like, you know, this this exercise in extreme empathy of, like, pushing ourselves out beyond

our supposed barriers into other living beings and entities and experiencing the world from their point of view is endlessly fascinating to me.

And and I now that I think about it, that probably is was like a major seed for me for all of these kind of related interests. So thank you for helping me.

I love this, Tammy. It's my pleasure. It's my pleasure.

I mean, I think that comes through so clearly in your work, whether you're you're looking at minds through the lens of brain

soup, or you're looking at whales and prairie dogs and other cetaceans and octopuses and all of these different, you know, corvids also lie.

There's there's really cool experiments that have been done in corvids, and ravens and magpies where they they also lie.

And so I think that it really comes through in your work.

And then to look to look at a forest,

Ferris different forests, and to explore that.

And I think that, yeah, it is really clear that there is a desire to understand a different perspective.

And I think that, you know, to actually to come back to Melanie Challenger, one of the things that she says that I love is

that one of our superpowers as human beings, because it's easy to talk about our hubris, I think, within the context of this

conversation or our destruction, but one of our superpowers is that affiliative love that we can have for other beings, for

other entities, for other ecosystems that we, you know, she says that we we repurpose the oxytocin from the mother child bond

into this affiliative love that is promiscuous and generous in in a way that we are really capable of.

And I think to add to that what you just said that, that empathy is a part of that, too, that our ability to put ourselves

in another hoof or a fin or a mycelial network. That is a superpower.

Yeah. It's it's in some ways the most thrilling form of travel, you know, is to push oneself not into just new spaces, but radically new perspectives.

And maybe in some ways, this, you know, holistic this explicitly holistic interest in very thinking of the planet is is the

most, like, radical form of that because beyond earth so far, we have not found life anywhere else. So we you know? Alright. Yeah.

And I maybe in some ways, you know, this explicitly holistic interdisciplinary thinking of the planet is the most radical

form of this empathy, you know, pushing this empathy outwards, to experience new perspectives because we haven't found life

anywhere else, but we know that life permeates, you know, basically every part of the planet we've been able to reach.

And so to think of it all as an integrated whole and the connections between it all requires, you know, a certain kind of empathy, I love that. I

I love that. I love that. And to to traverse up that scale into thinking of the earth system and to put ourselves in in that perspective, as well.

I know we're we're getting close on time.

And and I want to begin to wrap up and I have a place that I kind of want to wrap up with you.

But before I go there, is there anything big that we've missed or anything that's really percolating for you that you want to touch on?

Let's see. We've covered a lot.

Yeah, I think we I think we've been really thorough.

I mean, I think we really talked about a lot of the big stuff for sure. Yeah.

And I hope what we're doing too is I want to draw people into reading the book, I don't want to recount it in all of its beautiful detail.

And, and I think I'll say here to you, you're, you're wordsmithing your creation of story, your your technical skills are how

well you craft things and and how you're going to how well you craft things and and how lucid everything is how visual your

writing is, I think in a way that offers that perspective, even just through the sort of hallucinatory act that is is to to

read a good wordsmith on the page. And so I thank you.

Thank you.

Yeah, yeah, I really mean it. And I with that, because you've crafted such a good story, both here, but also from the sort of bigger career perspective.

I actually went back to you wrote a whole story in Harper's about stories.

And one of the questions that I it was my friend James Connolly kind of brought this up for me was asking ourselves, like,

what would it mean to tell a new story?

And I know that I sent you this morning that David Graeber quote, goes something along the lines of, you know, we we view

ourselves as we can reimagine the story that we've been telling ourselves about Earth, and about our place in it.

And I think that you, you do a good job of illustrating that through looking at the way that science evolves and shifts and

change and the stories that we tell ourselves within that shift.

And so I pulled this, this quote, because I think it just really hit me.

You say like trees in a forest, we too are rooted in the living mesh of another organism.

In a web of story, we give life to the stories we tell, imagining entire worlds and preserving them on rock paper and silicon.

Stories sustain us, they open paths of clarity and the chaos of existence, maintain a record of human thought and grant us

the power to shape our perceptions of reality.

The coevolution of humans and stories may not be one of the oldest partnerships in the history of life on earth, but it is certainly one of the most robust.

As a psychic creature simultaneously parasitizing and nourishing the human mind, narrative was so thoroughly successful that

it is now all but inextricable from language and thought.

Stories live through us, and we live through stories.

And I think what you've done with this story with becoming Earth is to help us live through a different perspective as we've

we've kind of now established, and to maybe see that we're on the precipice of a point where we could reimagine a new story

for what happens next within the context of these cycles.

Yeah. I mean, I think there's a really interesting relationship between stories and life and, you know, the questions of what

both are at the most fundamental level.

And like nature and and living creatures, stories, you know, enraptured me, obsessed me from a very, very young age.

And then, of course, eventually became central to my profession, my career. So,

And I feel like there's, the word story and the word narrative get, misconstrued a lot in sort of our modern media landscape

and and political environment where I feel like a lot of people for a lot of people, narrative has become this dirty word

almost that they are making it synonymous with agenda or bias or prejudice, you know, or hidden motive.

But I've, you know, I'm interested in thinking about narrative and story, and I and I feel like that perspective really obscures

this, which is that we really need to think of narrative and story at a much more fundamental level as something that is essential to our cognition.

You know, it is essentially a way of thinking that we all depend on.

It is not it is not, it's not something that people just deliberately choose to do when they're trying to manipulate or deceive each other.

It is literally embedded and meshed in our everyday language and thinking, and cognition.

I feel like that's the truer way to recognize narrative and story.

And I, you know, I mentioned I mentioned in that piece of thinking of what are the evolutionary origins of story because that

is so connected to so much else that we've been talking about because you need certain abilities, you need to be able to have

a certain level of memory to hold events in your mind, but even more importantly, stories, much like life and ecology, are about connection, right?

It's about making the connection between different events, different things that happen. That's really what a story is.

And so it's when we then learned to materialize stories, to give them physical form, so they were no longer attached only

to our vocal cords and our memories and our oral traditions, but were now embedded, literally embedded in carved into rock,

inked on paper, whatever the physical form might be, you know, scratched onto a disk that we send into the solar system.

Yeah. Undo a little bit of sand made silicon chip on a computer.

Exactly. Perhaps I'm flanked it in there somewhere, probably.

You know, now we've now we've given the stories a physical form and an ability to endure and a longevity that they didn't

even have before that I think can even outlast us. Right?

Like, these these, stories we've broadcast into space or sent hurtling into space on physical objects will could potentially

outlast us and certainly outlast us as as individuals.

And so I'm fascinated by this, you know, this idea of the parallels between stories and life, you know, living organisms,

but also other kinds of life, the longevity of stories, the evolution of stories, how all of it is, you know, tied up with our own evolutionary history.

And then as you beautifully put it, you know, thinking of the book as attempting to tell a new story of the planet, not as

a planet on which life happened, but as a planet that came to life itself.

You know, so thinking of thinking of the planet through that narrative lens in particular, giving it more agency in its own narrative history and evolution.

You know, the agency that it that it deserves that has been there the whole time that has been masked by our obsessive you

know, our self obsession and our own you know, our obsession with our own stories and us being the main actors and all that,

which, yeah, kind of beautifully brings everything we've been talking about together because it's, you know, it's like, yeah, we are we are animals.

We are part of the earth system.

We are just one of the players, you know, one of the many potential stewards within this vast communal garden, and we are

a living part of an entity that is itself alive and that has a capacity to change itself.

So Earth is a self changing story in some respects, I suppose. It is a Mhmm.

It's a story that writes and changes itself Yeah.

You know, as it is happening, which is just really remarkable to think about.

And and what a what a privilege to be a part of that, right, to be a small part of that story.

Yes. An honor to be an outgrowth of Earth here for this this just short, short amount of time. I I cannot thank you enough.

This was this has been so delightful.

It has been It has been really becoming earth was delightful.

And so was just the arc of of your career and getting to explore your writing.

And I would encourage all listeners, you know, you you have all of these resources in your website, and I'll link them in the show notes as well.

But you really do perspective shifting paradigm shifting work.

And I just so appreciated getting this peek inside of your brain.

And I can't wait for people to experience Becoming Earth, How Our Planet Came to Life, which is out on June 25.

And I don't know if this will air that day or before.

But either way, I just would urge everyone to pick up this incredible book.

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

It's been joy to speak with you, and I really appreciate you, giving all the thought, not only to my work, but to these ideas,

you know, which, I am just I I am likewise very excited for larger discussions about these ideas.

And I really think, that we are in the midst of kind of a resurgence of interest in these concepts.

And I think we're gonna see a wave of books, of articles, of essays, of talks about a lot of these ideas, and I'm really particularly excited for that.

And I have no doubt there will be, many, many guests that you can have on that, you know, that can talk about, these ideas as they're further developed.

Well, you're you're starting us off on a great foot, and I I really appreciate it.

Anywhere else you want people to find you, We'll have links to the book to your website to some of these articles.

But if they wanna connect with you on social media, all of our favorite place, where can they find you?

Yeah. I'm the same username on basically all social media.

It's just my name, Ferris Jabr, and I'm on Twitter, Blue Sky, Mastodon, Threads, Instagram.

I've kind of, yeah, just, flung myself all up Ferris Yep.

I love it. Well, Farris, thank you so much, and can't wait for the book's release.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Mind Body and Soil podcast.

If what you found resonated with you, may I ask that you share it with your friends or leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts?

This act of reciprocity helps others find mind, body, and soil.

If you're looking for more, you can find us at groundworkcollective.com and at kate _kavanagh, that's kate_kavanagh

on Instagram. I would like to give a very special thank you to China and Seth Kent of the band Alright Alright for the clips

from their beautiful song Over the Edge from their album The Crucible.

You can find them at Alright Alright on Instagram and wherever you listen to music.