'A glorious paean to our living world, full of achingly beautiful passages, mind-bending conceptual twists, and wonderful characters. Ferris Jabr reveals how Earth not only gave rise to life, and now teems with it, but has also been profoundly, miraculously shaped by it.' – Ed Yong, author of An Immense World, winner of the Royal Society Science Book Prize
'I did not expect to experience joy when I opened Becoming Earth, but I did, and I do. The ambition, eloquence, and erudition in this dragonfly droneflight of a book are absolutely exhilarating.' – John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather, winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize
A radically thought-provoking account of a major shift in how we understand our Earth, not simply as an inanimate planet on which life evolved, but rather as a planet that came to life.
The notion of a living world is one of humanity's oldest beliefs. Though once scorned by many scientists, the concept of Earth as a vast interconnected living system has gained acceptance in recent decades. Life not only adapts to its surroundings – it also shapes them in dramatic and enduring ways. Over billions of years, life transformed a lump of orbiting rock into our cosmic oasis, breathing oxygen into the atmosphere, concocting the modern oceans, and turning rock into fertile soil. Life is intertwined with Earth's capacity to regulate its climate and maintain balance.
Through compelling narrative, evocative descriptions, and lucid explanations, Ferris Jabr shows us how Earth became the world we've known, how it is rapidly becoming a very different world, and how we will determine what kind of Earth our descendants inherit for millennia to come.
'Fascinating, thought-provoking, and, ultimately, inspiring' Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction Ferris Jabr is a contributing writer for The New York Times magazine and Scientific American. He has also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, Foreign Policy, National Geographic, Wired, Outside, McSweeney's, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. His work has been anthologized in several editions of The Best American Science and Nature Writing series and has received the support of fellowships from UC Berkeley and the MIT Knight Science Journalism Program, as well as a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant. He has an MA in journalism from New York University and a Bachelor of Science from Tufts University. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his husband, Ryan, their dog, Jack, and more plants than they can count. A revolutionary account of Earth as a living organism - a finely tuned planetary network made up of all living and non-living things - and one that provides an unusual degree of hope for its future.
