“Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life” with Ferris Jabr

Historically, Western science has largely segregated geology and biology, characterizing Earth as an inanimate rock with some life on its surface and minimizing the role of life in shaping the planet as a whole. Now, something is shifting. Science now recognizes that Earth and life continually coevolve, and experts from diverse fields are increasingly open to the idea that life and the planet form a single, highly interconnected, living system. Over the past several billion years, microbes, plants, fungi, and animals have radically altered the continents, oceans, and atmosphere, transforming what was once a lump of orbiting rock into our cosmic oasis. Life breathed oxygen into the atmosphere, dyed the sky blue, made fire possible, calibrated ocean chemistry, converted barren crust into fertile soil, and perhaps even played a role in the formation of the continents. 

In this talk, moderated by LEAP Postgraduate Fellow Laurie Sellars, science writer Ferris Jabr, author of Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life, chronicles the many ways that diverse forms of life, from microbes to mammoths, made the world as we know it today and explores how our species fits into this paradigm.

Ferris Jabr is the author of Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life and a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and Scientific American. He has also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, National Geographic, Wired, Outside, Lapham’s Quarterly, 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 a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant, as well as fellowships from UC Berkeley and MIT. 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 partner, Ryan, their dog, Jack, and more plants than they can count.