Re-rooting science in the aliveness of the Earth, ft. Ferris Jabr
How do we (re)connect the chemistry, physics, and other studies of life?
Did you know that the living beings and organisms of the Amazon rainforest play active roles in re-generating their regional water cycles?
“The Amazon rainforest is spewing these invisible plumes of biological particles—pollen grains, fungal spores, microbes, even fragments of insect shells, bits and pieces of leaves and bark.
All of these tiny particles go into the atmosphere with the water vapor coming off the forest — they give vapor something to condense onto. That is what’s essential for the formation of clouds. Then some of these bioaerosols, as they're known, will even seed ice crystals within clouds. When that happens, clouds become much larger and heavier, [and] they fall as rain much more quickly.
There's even a bacterium, Pseudomonas syringae [that] can freeze cloud water into ice, making the clouds much heavier. […]
Biology, life, microbes, and plants, have an important part of the water cycle. It's not just a passive recipient like a straw that sucks things up and then puts water back into the sky. It's playing a much more active role than that.
When I learned this ten years ago, it started to change how I thought about the relationship between life and the planet. Life on Earth has the power to shape the weather — the topography, structure, and chemistry of the planet as a whole.”
This was one of the most fascinating things I learned from my latest interview with Ferris Jabr, the author of Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life. It underscores the idea that we cannot separate chemistry, physics, biology, ecology, geology, and other earth studies from one another — if we want to really understand what it means to heal our planet.
It also reminds me of my curiosity to reframe the common saying “life on Earth” to “life as Earth” or “life as part of Earth” — because the latter better illustrates the entanglement of life and the planetary body.
How might we approach climate change differently if we went beyond fixating on the chemistry of the equation — returning to more holistic ways of knowing that are rooted in the aliveness of the Earth?
I welcome you to join me and Ferris in this thought-provoking conversation as we explore some larger-than-life questions about the Earth as a living body — one that gave rise to humanity, one whose living systems we continually co-shape, and one that will continue reiterating well beyond human timescales.
“Music, like life, is all about rhythm and relationship — it's an emergent phenomenon. You cannot explain a symphony purely through the instruments, through the musicians, or the sheet music. You need all those things interrelated in the right way to create what we experience as a symphony.
Similarly, you need all the complex components of the planet interrelated in the right way to produce a living planet.
Rhythms can fall out of disorder. They can be disrupted. And that is what we see through geologic time — that Earth and life co-evolve in certain incredible rhythms or harmonies. Then something happens that throws those into chaos, and it takes a long time to either re-establish those rhythms or evolve new ones.
I found that as a really helpful way to think about Earth through geologic time because it is so difficult to contemplate these immense periods that eclipse anything we have lived through. The music analogy helps make that a little more relatable.” – Ferris Jabr via Green Dreamer EP442
(You can listen to this conversation here or via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any podcast app, and view our transcript and episode resources here.)
About the guest
Ferris Jabr is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the author of Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life, which reviewers have described as an “electrifying” and “infectiously poetic” “masterwork of journalism” that “earns its place alongside the best of today’s essential popular science books, as well as acknowledged classics.” He has also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, National Geographic, and Scientific American, among other publications.
Invitations into reflection:
What does “harmony” look like and feel like to you — at personal, interpersonal, communal, ecosystem, and planetary levels?
What are some “fields of study” that you are curious to weave together in order to better understand your primary issues of interest?
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