Ferris Jabr: Re-rooting science in the aliveness of the Earth (Ep442)

Written By kamea chayne
“How can we make choices and shape our behaviors as a species that would be maximally beneficial for all of the many interweaving ecosystems that exist on the planet today?”
— Ferris Jabr

How do the biological life forms of the Amazon rainforest — from pollen grains, fungal spores, to microbes — play active roles in their regional water cycle? How might we connect chemistry, biology, physics, ecology, and other less quantifiable measures of aliveness to look at our planetary crises in much more holistic ways? And if the Earth's “systems” were ever-emergent and everchanging, then how do we know what to orient healing and restoring balance towards?

In this episode, kaméa is joined by Ferris Jabr, who shares his wealth of ecological knowledge while drawing upon his book, Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life.

Join us as we explore some big and larger-than-life questions pertaining to the Earth as a living body — one that gave rise to humanity, one whose living systems we contribute to shaping, and one that will continue reiterating well beyond human timescales.

We invite you to…

 

About our 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.

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episode transcript

Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity

Kamea Chayne: I know one of your early inspirations is learning about how the Amazon creates rain and isn't just a recipient of rain. So to get us started here, what are some common beliefs about rain in the Amazon that may feel a bit reductive? And what do we know about the ways that life in the Amazon influences the rain patterns, water cycles, and life in the atmosphere?

Ferris Jabr: When I think about the classic rain cycle, certainly the one that I learned in elementary school, I think many people continue to learn from a very young age, is that water evaporates from the surface of the planet, becomes clouds, and then it falls back down to the surface. Plants and life receive this rain and help it get back up into the atmosphere through transpiration, moving water from the ground to the sky. But the true picture is much more complex and wondrous.

The Amazon is the best-studied example of this. It is the largest forest on our planet and one of the densest and most biodiverse places in the world. It’s an incredible concentration of life. It's about much more than just trees and plants pulling water from the soil and then releasing water into the atmosphere.

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. And that is what’s essential for the formation of clouds. So, water vapor in the atmosphere needs some kind of particle to cling to so it can start forming a cloud. And 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; they fall as rain much more quickly.

There's even a bacterium, Pseudomonas syringae, with proteins on its cell surface that are the most effective substance in turning liquid water into a solid frozen crystal. These bacteria [Pseudomonas syringae] can freeze cloud water into ice, making the clouds much heavier.

Most rain that falls on land begins as ice crystals in clouds and melts on the way down. 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.

Kamea Chayne: This is super fascinating and also a critical invitation to consider what it means when large portions of the Amazon rainforest are facing deforestation and being converted into monocultures or grasslands for cattle farming.

In terms of the context of the Big Island of Hawaii, I've talked about how the history of the regions here are considered wet and mesic forests being deforested and converted into sugar cane plantations and grasslands for ranching have impacted the microclimate and water cycles locally. Even as people reforest native wet forest understory plants and trees, it becomes more challenging because the water cycles aren't as conducive to supporting the growth of these slower-growing plants that require more consistent moisture and rain.

Instead, the drier climate is now more habitable for these dry land grasses to spread more easily and continually change in the local water cycle. So at least it feels like, past a certain point, the directionality of these changes in the microclimate and water cycle can become self-reinforcing.

So with this in mind, in the context of the Amazon, and I'm sure this would apply elsewhere as well, I wonder whether there are thresholds of change where it’s more difficult for these ecosystems to recover on their own. Because I think there is some wisdom. I've heard that as long as you remove the barrier or whatever is causing strain, that ecosystem can and wants to self-regenerate and self-heal.

But since we're talking about ecosystems, with life changing environment and environment changing life and vice versa, I do wonder: At what point does an ecosystem become so transformed that it might lose its remembrance or capacity to “restore itself” to a relative balance that it once knew? I'm curious about what you might want to add or elaborate on here.

Ferris Jabr: Yes, these questions fascinate me. Something I found myself asking is, “How long can a particular ecosystem like the Amazon endure?” And “What are the longest surviving ecosystems on our planet?” So I looked into this and I was astonished to find that there are ecosystems existing today that are considered to have been around in a recognizable form for tens of millions of years. The Amazon is thought to have endured for about 50 million years, perhaps a bit longer. It is retaining its essential ecological structures, characteristics and relationships for that period.

Certainly, things like the topography of the Amazon, and the particular species composition, are changing dramatically through geologic and evolutionary time. But those basic components are still there. For the past 50 million years, the Amazon has been a multi-layered rainforest with a closed canopy, dominated by angiosperms (flowering plants), as well as vines and epiphytes—plants that grow on trees. The vegetation is characterized by broad leaves with drip tips, which help water runoff during the region's heavy downpours.

Those essential characteristics have remained for that incredible period, which is truly astonishing longevity. But the Amazon is also one of the most discussed examples of a so-called tipping point. And some of the most famous Amazon scientists, such as Thomas Lovejoy and Carlos Nobre have discussed how we are very close to breaking the Amazon’s self-generated rain cycle.

If we continue to slash and burn the Amazon rainforest and convert more of it into ranch land or farmland or destroy it, we will eventually break the Amazon's capacity to provide the levels of rain that it has come to depend on.

This is not a new phenomenon because this is driven by what our species has done in just a few centuries—a few thousand years. We do not know how quickly or not Amazon could recover from something like that on its own. But I think all sensible people agree that we don't want to get anywhere near that point to find out.

I take solace and inspiration from the resilience and the tenacity of ecosystems through geologic time. I do think that they are capable of incredible recovery. We see this, for example, with coral reefs, which have existed for hundreds of millions of years. They have lived through some of the worst catastrophes in Earth history. They have always found a way to rebound, even when they have been brought to the brink of annihilation.

But that process is extremely slow. It eclipses anything like human civilization or recorded history. So that is not a process on which we can rely. I do think that ecosystems—when they get to a level of complexity and biodiversity— have an inbuilt resilience through geologic time. But unfortunately, we would not be able to survive long enough to see them recover on their own. We would go extinct before they were able to complete that kind of recovery.

So the task before us is to prevent the Amazon, or any other ecosystems, from reaching that kind of tipping point. The best way to do that is to conserve, protect and restore these incredible living systems before they reach any Rubicon—after which they can no longer revive themselves, or at least not any time span that is relevant to us.

Kamea Chayne: Thank you. I want to return to climate change and its implications towards the end of this conversation.

I want to move into aliveness. I've had the honor of interviewing various Indigenous philosophers, scientists and community leaders. And some of those conversations focused on looking at the limitations of the lenses of Western science, and its institutional biases in terms of funding and so forth. They discussed how it would benefit from being in conversation with other ways of knowing, like Indigenous sciences that tend to be more holistic in their perspective and more relational as well. I think your work is interesting because you're using Western science’s tools and learnings to push back against the more mainstream world of science to conceptualize our planet. As you say, it circles back, in many ways, to what Indigenous sciences already were philosophizing with. 

But I think even for me, I forget that in the mainstream scientific world, the idea that the Earth is alive is controversial. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts on where the resistance against this kind of worldview comes from. And what have you felt frustrated by in terms of the concept of life that you've been keen to challenge and unravel?

Ferris Jabr: It's so important to recognize that the ideas I'm exploring in the book that we're discussing right now have these ancient antecedents. We see them in religions, mythologies, Indigenous beliefs and traditional knowledge stretching back past any surviving records. You find it in so many diverse belief systems around the world. This basic concept that the world is alive is universal.

If you look at the history of early Western science, many thinkers such as the ancient Greeks and even Renaissance thinkers, were fairly comfortable characterizing the planet as a living body or entity of some kind. But then as decades went on and Western science became increasingly reductionist and empirical—that idea started to fall way out of favor.

When you get to the time of Charles Darwin, it was not considered credible, rigorous, or scientific to say that Earth is alive or that the planet is a living entity. Instead, it was much more in vogue to segregate the animate from the inanimate as much as possible — to think of living things as a “special class” of matter and not physically or continuously with the planet, or Earth, or with the rest of the matter of the universe.

I also think that capitalism and colonialism played into this as well because these are worldviews that favor the language of mechanization, profit, and seeing the land and the planet around us as an inanimate body of resources that is ready for the plucking, and waiting to be utilized in whatever way is most convenient for us — not as this living entity that is worthy of veneration and has its inherent value beyond just what is human, or that there is inherent value to the non-human as well.

James Lovelock, the British scientist who proposed the Gaia Hypothesis, the most famous and popular version of the idea that Earth is alive, faced a massive outpouring of derision and opposition from mainstream Western science — especially from evolutionary biology, which at that point was fixated on genes, reproduction, and evolution by natural selection as the hallmarks of life. They did not like the idea that we could think of Earth as a living entity.

Lovelock’s theory did not jive with their strict definitions of organisms being things that are shaped by competition, reproduction, and natural selection because they did not see how that applies to something as large as a planet. And so it took a long time to circle back to what James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis were discussing in the 70s and 80s, and even longer to come back to these even more ancient ideas of interrelation — and this concept that everything is truly interconnected.

But I do think we are starting to see those ideas gain new scientific credibility and Western science is becoming more accepting of them. That is a large part of why I wanted to write this book and to show how far science itself has come. And how, as you said, we can use 21st-century science to push back against the prevailing thinking, and to advocate for this necessary shift in how we understand the planet and our relationship to the planet.

I no longer think of life as simply a surface phenomenon — something that resides on or inhabits the planet. I now think of life as a literal physical extension of the planet. Life is made of Earth. It emerged from Earth. It returns to Earth. It is literally, materially, physically continuous with the planet.

I think it is absolutely meaningful and scientific to think of Earth as a whole and alive. As you said, that is still a provocative, controversial statement within Western science, but I do think more scientists are becoming more open-minded to that way of thinking and distinguishing between planets that have come to life and remained alive.

A lot of people in astrobiology and cosmology are interested in this way of thinking because it is an argument for broadening our concepts of life and evolution more generally. We need to stop being not only human-centric but Earth-centric and start to recognize life as this broader cosmic, physical phenomenon. We could ask ourselves what life might look like elsewhere in the universe and understand that it could be very different from life on Earth. So I do think there's this exciting shift happening within Western science that is very different from what happened several decades ago when Lovelock and Margulis were ridiculed. That is no longer the case. 

Kamea Chayne: I resonate with all of this and I'm reminded by my conversation with Farmer Rishi, which was very impactful for me in terms of seeing that life is the constant, and the opposite of death isn't life, but birth. What are these forms that life is continually expressing themselves as?

I also very much resonate with this idea that it's not really “life on Earth,” which is so deeply embedded in our language and therefore our presumed worldview. But I've started reframing that to “life as Earth” or “life as a part of Earth” because that for me at least feels more resonant and aligned.

I know one iteration of thinking about life is looking at them as systems. And I've been sitting with that too because even in our language of ecosystems, or life in a broader sense, we share a commonality and maintain systems. I'm still thinking through this because, at least in my understanding, it feels static and organized with certain rules and processes. And if we were to hold a deeper time perspective, all systems are still constantly ever-emergent and transforming.

So I think it can be both/and. I think of Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, whose work made me question whether our systemic crisis is partly from our inclination to systematize what can't necessarily be controlled. There are several running threads here, but I welcome you to take this in whatever direction you would like, and even bring in your comparison of the emergence of the earth as akin to music if that resonates here as well. 

Ferris Jabr: This is something that came up a lot when writing this book. What do we mean by a living system? How was that defined? How do systems change over time? It also came up when examining this concept of the balance of nature,  which I think is something that has been misunderstood in both academic and popular contexts.

A lot of scientists don't like the idea of nature having a balance or living systems being in balance because, for many scientists, balance means a strict, static equilibrium with nothing changing at all. But that's not what most people mean when they talk about balance.

Rachel Carson said that the balance of nature is shorthand for a complex, precise, and highly integrated system of relationships between living things that are fluid and ever-shifting in a constant state of adjustment.

And I think that's a great way to think about Earth as a living system. There are certain conditions and properties they have to maintain to continue being alive, but they are not at a strict scientific equilibrium.

A perfect equilibrium is essentially the opposite of what we think of as life. It is the opposite of change. Because when you have a perfect chemical or physical equilibrium, no more change is possible. And supposedly, that's what the universe is inescapably moving towards. That is what the end of the universe could look like when everything falls apart and dissolves into this homogenous mush. All energy and matter are as evenly distributed as possible. And so anything life-like, or resembling life, would be impossible in that state. That is kind of a perfect equilibrium.

So I think there's been this confusion between balance and equilibrium. I think living systems maintain a dynamic balance that in scientific terms is a disequilibrium, but that becomes confusing in everyday language and conversation.

One of Lovelock's initial insights was that you could recognize a living planet from afar by studying its chemical disequilibrium. For example, if it were not for life, we would not have an oxygen-rich atmosphere. If Earth were just dictated by pure physics, with no biology or life, we would have a carbon-dominated atmosphere, very much like Mars or Venus with essentially no oxygen. It is the evolution and presence of photosynthetic life combined with certain geological processes that fill the atmosphere with oxygen and keep it that way. That is technically a type of chemical disequilibrium. But from life's perspective, an important dynamic balance is being maintained. One that is essential for the continued existence of complex life. 

I continually searched for a metaphor to guide this whole book or to help convey this concept of Earth as a vast interconnected living system. And it's so challenging because how do you come up with a metaphor for Earth, which contains essentially all other metaphors on our planet? What smaller piece do you choose to represent the whole?

I did like using music as an analogy, because, like life, it’s a real physical phenomenon. But it also retains a certain kind of mystery. We don't fully understand its power over us, which is similar to life. Both things are very difficult to define precisely in a consensus way.

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 is 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. But the music analogy helps make that a little more relatable. And we [humans] are the latest example of throwing the planet into chaos. But it is still possible and we still have the time, resources, and tools to preserve some version of Earth that is familiar enough to us that we can continue inhabiting it.

Kamea Chayne: Thank you for this perspective. I resonate with this analogy and I know this will stay with me beyond this conversation. I know you've also talked about Zoogeochemistry as a relatively new field of study, looking at how the agency of animals transforms the chemistry of their environments.

We started talking about this, but recognizing that Western science in many ways is circling back to the knowledge that maybe it also had roots in itself, but also that Indigenous sciences had already been philosophizing with. It's interesting to me because I think about a lot of these new fields and the trends that I'm seeing, with things becoming more multidisciplinary, or the combination of fields, or looking at the spillovers of one field of study into another. And it feels to me like there is this undoing of the logic of reductionism that was at the roots of a lot of these things. Because maybe at first it was dissecting, separating, individualizing, categorizing, and reducing to know.

And now it's about coming back into remembrance to connect the dots, to take a step back, to better understand and look at relationalities, networks, agency, systems, emergence, and so forth. Of course, it's not as neat of a binary as this, but it’s just a general overarching observation. I'd be curious to hear what else you've thought through on this front and what you'd like to share with us.

Ferris Jabr: I completely agree. I do think that holistic ways of thinking are having a very strong re-emergence and re-emphasis right now. I deliberately try to weave Indigenous mythology and Traditional Ecological Knowledge throughout the book as a way of acknowledging and honoring the ancient antecedents and wisdom of all of this more contemporary science. Western science is continually re-evaluating itself and circling back to some of these ancient ideas that at various points have either been overlooked or outright dismissed or oppressed. 

I think a large part of the reason for this is that the current planetary crisis, which encompasses more than just anthropogenic climate change—but is also about biodiversity loss, pollution, socioeconomic inequality, and more—is forcing us to reckon with all of this at a systemic level. It is forcing us to think about things holistically and the relationships between already vast systems because it is the only way to properly reckon with it all and to understand it all.

We cannot be too atomized, too siloed, or reductionist in the planetary crisis if we want to understand what is happening and figure out how best to respond.

I see my book as just one part of this larger wave of reconsideration, re-evaluation, and new emergence of the kind of thinking that we're talking about. For example, there's a new biography of James Lovelock that just came out by the British journalist Jonathan Watts. And he takes what he calls a Gaian approach to this biography. So every chapter is centered around a particular person who was important in Lovelock's life—including many of the women who were important collaborators, thinkers, and contributors to the Gaia hypothesis, but whom have not received adequate or proper recognition in the past.

He's trying to say that there are big ideas and new ways of thinking that can never really be traced to a single person. They emerge from collaboration, cooperation and from groups of people. And then next year, we're gonna get an interesting book that I'm excited for called, Is a River Alive by Robert McFarlane, which looks at the history of animism and the idea of legal personhood rights for things like rivers, mountains, entire ecosystems and all these incredible more-than-human complex systems around us. 

These kinds of books speak to a much larger movement that is happening because even 10 or 15 years ago, those kinds of books would not have been taken as seriously as they are today. And I think that just shows how quickly things can change. 

There's still a lot of work to be done, but I do think we are in the midst of a shift and I think that it's going to become more apparent over the next few years.

Kamea Chayne: I think that's very exciting and it’s so crucial during these times to bring these ideas into the mainstream. I’m just very grateful for your work in contributing to this collective remembrance. 

Something that I've also been sitting with and questioning is this concept of anthropocentrism versus eco-centrism. And in my working thoughts, I don't think this binary exists. Because in terms of anthropocentrism, different cultures of people have different perspectives and worldviews of what is best for their community. So there's a wide range of diversity there in terms of what is considered anthropocentric.

And even with that aside, I think people are by definition anthropocentric because that's just our vantage point in the world in this current life form. And that's not necessarily good or bad, it's just the bodies that we're operating from in this life. The same way that beavers, when they change their habitats and expand watersheds by building dams, that's beaver-centric. Or buffalo, when their migratory behavior expands grasslands, that's buffalo-centric.  

And then maybe the young forest surrounding those grasslands that the grasslands are taking over and expanding into may not be so happy because the grasslands are growing into their arbored landscapes—but those are the transformations taking place from the buffalo being buffalo.

So this also leads me to the conclusion that there's no one eco-centric interest because otherwise, is it the interest of the forest being overtaken by the grasslands or is it the interest of those grasslands expanding? And then to take this to the level of the planet, it also makes me wonder like, what does health even mean at the planetary level? And what do resilience and recovery mean? What is it recovering towards if the Earth throughout deep time has been ever emergent? So yeah, these are some of my ongoing curiosities that I don't have answers to, but I'd be keen to hear your thoughts on this as well.

Ferris Jabr: Those are great points. If we want to talk about this at a planetary scale, it's sometimes helpful to take a cosmic or alien perspective. So if we imagine some alien observers looking at Earth as some cold-eyed, disinterested, objective, AI, alien observers they're asking: “What does planetary health mean? What is in the best interest of Earth as a massive living entity?” I think what they would conclude is that as long as the Earth itself remains alive and enduring, that's all that matters. 

For example, if there is some mass extinction and all of life is reduced to microbial, then those microbes continue for another few billion years. From a cold-eyed perspective, that's fine because it's still a living planet. It's still enduring as a massive living entity. For the majority of Earth's history, it was a purely microbial planet. For over two and a half billion years there was nothing but single-celled microbial life on this planet. Complex multicellular life is a much more recent emergence, only going back maybe half a billion years or so. Our species is just a tiny part of that.

But as you're saying, that doesn't make sense to us because if you’re a part of this larger system you're forced to take a more specific value-based perspective, right? So what we're asking ourselves, what is important to us as humans, is what allows us, our species and civilization, to continue to survive. And that involves a lot of other species because we are dependent on the ecosystems in which we are embedded. We're dependent on all of the domesticated plants that we grow as crops. We certainly cannot survive on our own. There are essential entanglements there. 

As you're saying, that is not the same consideration that a forest might have, or a grassland might have, or a microbial mat might have, or a coral reef.

Each of these unique ecosystems and communities has its value system and inherent perspective of what is important, and what is most essential. Can we speak of value, meaning, and purpose in biology, regardless of whether the organisms involved have what we recognize as consciousness or self-awareness?

And to this day, many Western scientists, especially within biology, are uncomfortable ascribing any kind of desire, attention, or purpose, or meaning to anything non-human. But there is starting to be increasing pushback against that. And some scientists are even arguing that to be alive is to have value or to create value or meaning. To be alive requires you to have certain things that you value more than others, and you essentially imbue the world with meaning by being alive.

Even a single-celled organism can be looked at as creating meaning in the sense that there are certain aspects of the world that to it are more meaningful or valuable than others. And different types of life forms have very different ways of sensing and engaging with the world. So we're not even all talking about the same kinds of sensory information in the first place. We are each living in our slice or bubble of the world and experiencing it differently. And that is itself its inherent value system. 

Being alive forces you to adopt a species-specific, organism-specific, or ecosystem-specific way of looking at the world and value system. And we are unfortunately forced to look at the Earth that way. Humans are incredibly privileged in that the degree of self-awareness and consciousness we have allows us to challenge ourselves arguably more than any other species can because we can attempt the ultimate empathy. We can attempt to put ourselves in the perspectives of other species of the non-human, even of the inanimate, and to try and consider what would be best — not just for our species and for the specific organisms and ecosystems on which we depend, but what would be maximally beneficial for all of life on our planet as it exists today?

How can we make choices and shape our behaviors as a species that would be maximally beneficial for all of the many interweaving ecosystems that exist on the planet today?

Unfortunately, that way of thinking is so removed from capitalism and from the dominant socioeconomic structures that govern much of human civilization. But it is possible, as humans with the kind of cognition we have, to think that way. And certainly, many thinkers push us to think more like that. 

Kamea Chayne: This is amazing and very thought-provoking. I think for me, I'm just left with this idea that anthropocentric means very different things if we were to maintain or remember worldviews of interdependence and entanglement and understand that our interests go much farther beyond our bodily selves because we are dependent on our broader communities and webs of life. That would mean a very different thing compared to if somebody were anthropocentric and held worldviews of individualism, extractivism, and a narrow definition of what it means to be human that is exclusive to other communities of people and other communities of life.

I think there's a lot here. And maybe one of the key differences is that when most species inevitably create changes to their environments, it’s mostly to make it more comfortable, and habitable, to create a bit more abundance in terms of what they need to survive. Maybe what is unique about humans is that some groups of humans have created changes to our planet that are making it less habitable to us and to our species.

As you said, from the big-picture time perspective, the planet will continue to evolve in its shapes and forms and communities of life. But at least the changes that we've been causing in a short amount of time are making the Earth less hospitable to ourselves.

Ferris Jabr: Absolutely, and I do think that if we look through deep time we see that when the Earth, the greater planetary environment and its lifeforms are given enough time and opportunity without some sort of severe disruption, they tend to converge upon relationships and rhythms that ensure their mutual persistence. And there is this trend of organisms increasing the habitability of their environments and the planet.

It makes sense when you understand that life and its environment are bound together in reciprocal evolution and co-evolution. And so any changes that lifeforms make to their environment that improve the chances of both those lifeforms and the systems they're embedded in persistently enduring, are going to be favored through time.

Evolution, or a life form, disrupts the entire system—we are the latest example. For this first time, we are a species aware of this impact and capable of choosing a different path.

Whereas in the past, species have been restricted to much slower, unconscious evolutionary change that takes much longer to unfold, and they're not participating in a conscious, self-aware way that we know we can choose to do.

Kamea Chayne: As we start to wind down our conversation, I'm interested in moving us back towards the implications that these perspective shifts have on how we look at and understand climate change and the climate crisis. And I think, at least in the mainstream climate science and climate solutions world, it feels heavily centered on the chemistry of the equation—such as carbon emissions and carbon sequestration.

And that is a huge part of the equation. But to me, it feels reductive to the point where it allows for the problem to be co-opted for ulterior interests that aren't even about healing our planetary ecosystems.

So as you return to this remembrance of Earth being alive through science, through undoing reductionism, connecting biology with chemistry, physics, and other less definable measures of aliveness, how would you invite people to look at climate change, and consequently our climate solutions, in more holistic ways?

Ferris Jabr: I agree that the standard language of climate change and the carbon cycle can often feel quite clinical and alienating and removed. And I think part of what's so amazing about this new holistic way of thinking and a so-called Earth system science, which takes a holistic perspective, is that it shows us the interchangeability of carbon and life, geology and biology. And it shows us how life is really at the center of it all. What are we doing when we unearth fossil fuels and combust them?

[Oil extraction] means going into the bowels of our living planet and unearthing stores of ancient life that have been cooked and compressed deep within the earth and turned into what we call fossil fuels, gas, and oil.

Then we are setting this ancient life on fire, and the emissions, which are essentially the ghosts of ancient life, are then being suffused into the atmosphere and thickening its heat-trapping blanket. That is the core source of anthropogenic global warming. 

For me, it’s understanding that a single gallon of gasoline is hundreds of tons of ancient life. When we fill up our cars and vehicles with gas, we're putting multiple blue whales and stuffing that quantity of life into the engine just to keep a car running. That's a much more compelling way of thinking about all of this. And it's a more truthful and startling way of thinking about all of this. 

I think we need that kind of language to better understand what we have done to our planet, and what we are doing right now. Earth system science and thinking about systems and planetary scales is an excellent way to think about these incredible connections between Earth and life. And to understand that it isn't just clinical, boring chemistry, but that it is all about how life has changed the planet continually over billions of years and continues to do so. And how so much of the planet is made of, or has been influenced, by life in some way. We are constantly walking over, breathing in and swimming through the remains of Earth's ancient life forms. We're continually immersed in life and its influences.

Kamea Chayne: I love this invitation that instead of viewing fossil fuels with disgust, what if we viewed them as sacred, ancient and ancestral? Maybe they lead us to similar conclusions, but I think that perspective shift can be very profound. Thank you for that offering.

When we start to think at the cosmic level, I think one possible rabbit hole is, if the Earth is going to live on no matter how this planetary body is transformed and if the entity of Earth is one day possibly going to die when the sun that we rely on burns out, then what is the meaning and purpose of it all? And what is the significance of what we do in this lifeform—which is just a super tiny blip in the grand scheme of things?

These big life questions start to come up and I'm curious to know what you learned through writing this book. What inspired you to think through these bigger questions of life, purpose, and our role and place as a part of this Earth at this moment?

Ferris Jabr: It is so humbling when you grapple with geologic and cosmological time to understand what a tiny fraction of the whole picture we are, and what an even smaller part of any individual's lifetime is. But at the same time, I feel this incredible material continuity, not only with our planet but with the cosmos as a whole. And I think this kind of science and thinking brings that to light. It brings into glowing focus that it is not just as Western science has tried to portray.

A literal, material and scientific truth is that we are intrinsically connected to the very first stars and galaxies in our universe—to the air, water, soil, and the rocks that make up our planet.

Even when our lifetimes end, it isn't truly an end, a cessation, a true finality. It's more like the next transformation. We dissolve and become part again of this universe, and our components will turn into something else again. And then this process happens over and over and over again. There is this real-world reincarnation that is built into the way the physical universe works. I've just been in awe by the power complexity and mystery of nature from a very young age.

And the more that I challenge myself to learn the science behind it all, the more I feel an increase in gratitude to be a part of this universe, even for a very short time as a conscious entity. Because the alternative is for nothing to exist at all. We can also ask, why does anything exist in the first place versus nothing? I'm so grateful to be part of not only something that exists but something so miraculous.

Kamea Chayne: And as we come to a close here, I know that throughout writing this book, you had the opportunity to work on a small garden at your own home. I'm curious, what were some of the key inspirations and learning lessons you harvested from gardening as they relate to our conversation today? And are there any other calls to action, or invitations to deeper inquiry for our listeners?

Ferris Jabr: My garden here in Portland, Oregon, has become one of the most personal and direct ways in which I've engaged with this kind of scientific thinking. When my partner and I bought our home here about four years ago, there was just a derelict grass lawn and we knew we wanted to create a garden from scratch. So we ripped it all out and quickly discovered that our soil was in bad shape. It was nutrient-deprived, it was full of rubble. This area had been a construction site and a parking lot in the past.

So I had to very rapidly learn about soil science and what to do about this situation. And I came to realize that I'd been thinking about soil all wrong. It wasn't just this repository of nutrients that I could replenish. It was a living entity that I needed to learn how to nourish, to cultivate, to bring back to life. And learning how to do that on my property has been incredibly inspiring.

Gardening has allowed me to stop and observe closely—to notice every leaf, insect or arthropod that I've never noticed before or bothered to learn the name of.

That has immensely deepened my connection, not just with this particular garden, but with my whole community around me here, and really with the planet as a whole. Gardening, farming, or anything related to that is an incredible way to strengthen one's connection with our living planet, learn about ecology, and at the same time provide oneself with sustenance and beauty. With our wild neighbours and communities around us, we can, through gardening, benefit them as well and create spaces and resources for them. So I’ve tried to focus on that.

How can we improve habitat and resources for wildlife? We’ve put in a pond, and a wildflower meadow, we try to make the garden as biodiverse as possible. We've seen the results in the increasing waves of life of insects, arthropods, birds, and even mammals that have come to the garden because of these resources. So that has been gratifying as well.

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Kamea Chayne: What has been one of the most impactful books you've read or publications you follow?

Ferris Jabr: I love this book called An Elemental Thing by Eliot Weinberger. It's a bit difficult to classify in terms of genre. He's mostly thought of as a nonfiction writer, but the way he writes is incredibly poetic. He pulls together this pastiche of facts, but he weaves them into a tapestry that reads as a reverie. It has almost a fable-like quality to it.

And I admire that because I think so much of nonfiction writing or science writing is the task of being very artful about how you put facts together. Because in nonfiction you can't make things up. That's kind of the cardinal rule compared to fiction. It all has to be true. But the artfulness comes in the way that you put those facts together. And I think he's a wonderful example of that. It’s very inspiring the way he creatively challenges mainstream or typical ways of nonfiction.

Kamea Chayne: What mottos, mantras, or practices do you engage with to stay grounded?

Ferris Jabr: I have to go back to the garden for this one because it is a form of literal grounding. But also metaphorically, gardening forces you to take the time to stop and be in a place and to look directly around you in this very small space and pay attention.

Attention is a form of appreciating and loving the world around you.

I’ve just started learning to identify insects and wildlife in my own backyard, and I cannot believe the sheer number of species around me that I had no idea existed and that I now have at least a passing familiarity. And that comes from stopping and observing closely. When I really challenge myself to do that, I continue to find more and more life that I was not aware of before. So I really do rely on gardening as a grounding practice.

Kamea Chayne: And I know that is certainly one of your key inspirations, but what is something else that is one of your greatest sources of inspiration at the moment?

Ferris Jabr: I've been reading a lot of science fiction lately. I enjoyed this novel called The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. It looks at the discovery of a self-aware language-capable octopus species in the ocean. And it parallels that with the advent of the first real AI, the first real Android that is self-aware. It challenges our concepts of intelligence and consciousness by asking what would happen if humans encountered another species or another entity that is as intelligent and self-aware as we are. It grapples with those complex questions. 

And I also have enjoyed this animated series on HBO called “Scavengers Reign”. It is a really interesting Gaian exploration of what would happen if humans crash-landed on an alien planet that is itself alive. The ecology of the entire planet is responding to these human invaders in concert. And you see humans that learn to follow the innate rhythms of the planet find ways to survive, whereas those that are resisting are facing this immense immune response of the planet and are being driven out. It's also so gorgeously animated and visually beautiful.

Kamea Chayne: As we conclude here, what final words of wisdom do you have for us as Green Dreamers?

Ferris Jabr: It's my pleasure and thank you so much for having me. I like this Japanese philosophy known as Ikigai, which is sometimes translated as, finding reason or purpose or meaning.

Find the intersection of one's talents, skills, passions and loves with what the larger world demands from us.

I love thinking that way to guide one's life. I often get questions like, “What can I do as an individual to address climate change?” Or, “How can I best respond?” The answer is that there are so many forms that could take. It could be becoming somebody who works with prescribed burns to combat the wildfire crisis or creating a wildlife garden. It could be learning about food sovereignty, or writing a book. It could be so many different things. I find these more generalized principles very helpful as a guide.

For me, this book sits right at that intersection; I’m learning about science whilst writing is my skill, passion and love. Writing about our relationship with the planet, all the things that are happening to our planet and what we can do about it is part of what the world demands right now—it’s the way that I can personally best answer that call. So I just wanted to share that perspective as an opportunity to think about each of our own lives, how best to conduct them, and what we can each do with the time that we have.

 
kamea chayne

Kamea Chayne is a creative, writer, and the host of Green Dreamer Podcast.

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