The Teeming Earth

Bathsheba Demuth reviews Ferris Jabr’s “Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life.”

By Bathsheba DemuthMay 5, 2025

• Science & Technology

• Environment

I TEACH A COURSE each year on the history of energy in the United States. Coal, the foodstuff of the early Industrial Revolution, plays—no surprise—an outsize role. I begin by mentioning its origins as dead plant tissue in the Carboniferous Period—tissue that, with enough heat, time, and pressure, has condensed into veins of black near-stone dense with carbon. We move on to mill towns and accelerated transportation in the 1800s, then to turn-of-the-century miners’ unions and postwar carbon emissions. The course amounts to a semester-long argument that the world as we now live it was made from burning fossils.

But what if, long before industrial ambitions, those photosynthetic organisms 300 million years ago made the Earth while alive? This is the provocation of Ferris Jabr’s book Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life (first published last spring, now out in paperback). In the Carboniferous Period, trees, ferns, and plankton replicated at such speed and scale that exhalations of oxygen outpaced decomposition, which is why the atmosphere contained 10 to 15 percent more oxygen than it does today. The splitting force of plant roots and the chemistry of fungal and microbial metabolisms turned rock into soil. In the deep history of the planet, plants made fire possible and may have contributed to the onset of ice ages. And that’s just photosynthetic life. Long before the Industrial Revolution, organisms were not just subject to their environments but also remade them, from the forms of rivers to the carbon cycle. Or, as Jabr writes, “the history of life on Earth is the history of life remaking Earth.”

Becoming Earth is at its core an ode to life’s ability to adapt, transform, and create the conditions for its own flourishing. Elegantly told in three sections—corresponding to land, oceans, and atmosphere—the book profiles a bouquet of microbes that live a million years or take nourishment from uranium radiation, bacteria that seed ice crystals and hailstones, entire ecosystems that inhabit decomposing bones and the footprints of elephants, underwater forests of kelp and trees that create rivers of rain, bison that make gardens of the steppe, and whales that fertilize the oceans. We meet many of these life-forms through the people who know them best: the Zimovs, a Russian father and son trying to bring megafauna back to Siberia; Susanne Menden-Deuer, a plankton ecologist who loves the shapes of diatoms; Frank Lake, an Indigenous fire-tender who, through his orchard and research, is trying to change how California burns.

General-audience nonfiction often features vignettes about researchers intermixed with an approachable synthesis of scientific findings. But Jabr’s deft descriptive voice expands the possibilities of the genre. “Earth’s skin is full of pores, and every pore is a portal to an inner world,” he writes of caves. Or: “A cloud is Earth seeing its own breath.” Such poetic precision is not just in the service of making specialized knowledge broadly understandable; it also evokes the creative exuberance of life remaking the world in service of making more life. The word that kept coming to mind as I read the book was teeming. Jabr wants us to appreciate specific species or organisms, but not in isolation: at the core of this book is the argument that the Earth, at the scale of the entire globe, is itself fundamentally alive.

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This idea of the planet as a living thing is not new. More novel is the fact that this idea is at all controversial. As Jabr notes, societies from Polynesia to the Arctic understand the world as animate, with Earth at the center of life. Only in 19th-century Europe did the planet fragment into inanimate component parts. It was no accident that this splintering and deanimation happened alongside coal-fired factories. Fossil fuel power, and fossil fuel politics, assumes a static, dead Earth. Twentieth-century science—much of it closely tied with manufacturing and the economies of the World Wars—preserved this mechanistic perspective. When James Lovelock proposed in the 1970s that Earth was a balanced, living whole, his Gaia hypothesis found eager advocates in parts of the environmental movement but was roundly mocked by scientific colleagues.

Over the past 50 years, the emergent field of “Earth system science” has returned to the idea of a living planet, “a single, self-regulating system comprised of physical, chemical, biological and human components,” according to the 2001 Amsterdam Declaration on Earth System Science. Gaia has returned under a new name, in other words. Becoming Earth is a welcome primer to this research, an introduction Jabr tells through the metaphor of music. “When the right sequence of notes is played, when it is combined with other sequences in just the right way, we no longer hear mere sounds—we experience music,” he writes. “Likewise, the living entity we call Earth emerges from a highly complex set of interactions: the mutual transformation of organisms and their environments.”

Music is a smart analogy, both because it’s intuitive and because it allows for a gently normative argument. Music is usually identified through its harmony, the “sequences in just the right way” that resolve noise from stochastic discordance into a tune. As a living thing, Jabr argues, Earth tends toward such harmonies. The deep past is full of changes, some of them millions of years in the making and profoundly calamitous. But in the wake of new atmospheres or rearranged continents, life shapes pandemonium into a new, relatively stable rhythm.

A careful student of Lovelock and his legacy, Jabr understands how balance reestablishes itself after massive, roiling transitions, and he also understands that this understanding is not neutral: it has bearing on the kinds of changes made by humans. Even as the Gaia hypothesis was embraced by environmentalists, for instance, it also found advocates in the fossil fuel industry. After all, if change is normal and resolves inevitably back into harmony, then human-caused change will—surely—also resolve itself. Any industry causing that change is, then, simply part of a “natural” process. The climate has warmed before. Seas rise. Changing the atmosphere by burning coal is thus beyond politics.

But tempo matters. In Becoming Earth, the Industrial Age—from the burning of coal to the Haber-Bosch process that fixes nitrogen to fossil-fueled climate change—ramps up the beat of change. Jabr devotes a nuanced chapter to plastic, comprised of a group of now-ubiquitous substances. From microparticles on the ocean floor and in our bloodstreams to the drifting mats of fishnets and flotsam in the Pacific, new polymers are detrimental to fish, birds, plankton, and many other kinds of life. For Jabr, the issue with plastic is not that it is unnatural. Plastic is no more or less novel than other species’ past by-products—like lignin, a plant polymer initially unfamiliar to the Earth system, or like oxygen, which was toxic. What is different about plastics is how rapidly they are spreading—not over millennia but decades. (It is a sign of Jabr’s care that he does not repeat the overcited idea that plastics are a product of the Second World War and instead begins with tree latex and Bakelite.) The music is moving too quickly to harmonize in any time frame relevant for the adaptation of life on earth and certainly for human societies. As Jabr puts it, “We have flooded the planet with plastic in a geological instant.”

Thinking about industrial activity not in terms of its novelty but in terms of its temporality is an elegant way out of Lovelock’s bind. Gaia might continue as Gaia always has, this time saturated in Styrofoam and bottle lids ground to dust, but people will not. The stakes are human, as are the causes. Plastics might not be unnatural, but they do exist in the realm of politics—of choices made in the near term and in the service of what is understood as valuable. Life, or disposability and profit?

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Where Becoming Earth touches on politics, Jabr’s prose is somewhat undermined by the pronoun we. “Before we make a shoe,” he writes, “we must account for every step it will take—not just in the next few years but in its entire indefinite journey through the streams and strata of the planet and all the future ages of the creature we call Earth.” This is an excellent articulation of the need to slow plastic production, but who is we? Elsewhere he calls the degraded soil on land he recently purchased in Oregon “a microcosm of what our species has been doing to the plant’s land surfaces for millennia.” The whole species? Are all human relationships with the Earth the same?

The issue with using the collective pronoun is familiar to many an environmental writer. We is a useful shorthand; prose becomes bulky if the more precise phrase “high-net-worth citizens in 20th-century developed countries” is invoked too often. But in the case of plastics, such a description is more accurate. I cannot teach the history of coal without also teaching the history with which it is entangled—of burgeoning inequality, and of who gets to burn and who lives with the aftermath.

More fundamentally, invoking the whole species makes the politics of something like plastic hard to parse. If we—the forebears of all nine billion of us—have always been degrading the soil, then is it simply human nature to erode and slough nitrogen into rivers? Jabr’s answer is implicit. What we—truly at a species level—can do is learn. We can shift our perspectives to see what microbes and whales are capable of and let them do it. This sensibility is exemplified in many of the people Jabr profiles, like Marty Odlin. A seaweed farmer of deep curiosity and noble, if sometimes niche, ambitions, Odlin is driven to sequester excess carbon with his underwater pastures. He serves as a beacon of sorts for interspecies hope.

Becoming Earth is not a work of blatant politics in the contemporary partisan sense. Even though it offers an admirable tour through carbon reduction technologies, soil revitalization efforts, and plastic mitigation, it has no desire to be a policy tome. But perhaps another reason formal politics has little role in Becoming Earth is that the book’s overwhelming theme is interdependence. Because human beings need certain temperatures and atmospheric conditions, which are conditions created by other living things, speeding up the tempo of change is dangerous. Jabr wants us to see the planet as alive and ourselves as part of its tune, not as individuals or even a species distinct from the rest.

And where, at least in the United States, is there a major party that endorses a vision so affirmative of life writ large? It is certainly not the remit of the ghoulish right, defenders of human life only before birth, and then only if a fetus has no need for clean air or water or basic healthcare. Once grown, people are of value only when paying taxes, according to the current secretary of health and human services. Other living things are legible in death, as when trees become lumber.

Mainstream liberal politicians and pundits, thankfully, have far less investment in eugenics, and are more committed to basic facts about atmospheric carbon. But a deep strand of techno-optimism—compatible with the capitalist status quo—runs through this branch of policy, which imagines we can outwit dependence. Nowhere is this more blatant than in Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein’s new book Abundance, a liberal manifesto for a well-provisioned future that barely acknowledges the existence of living things other than human beings. At the level of speeches and policy, mainstream politics is so anthropocentrically narrow as to offer up a world denuded of Earth.

Becoming Earth is quietly radical in its suggestion that any history, indeed any story, that includes people must also include the Earth in all its vitality. Next time I teach energy history, my course will include coal and all its revolutions—as fossil fuel and as a living, breathing part of a remarkable whole.