Earth Is More Than A Planet With Life On It. It's A "Living Planet"

This episode explores how Earth functions as a living entity, fundamentally interconnected with all life forms on it, transforming and being transformed by life.

1. Earth acts as a living system, constantly modified by the life it hosts.
2. Life on Earth—from bacteria to forests—plays a critical role in regulating natural processes like the water cycle and weather patterns.
3. The concept of Earth as a living entity is gaining traction in scientific circles, challenging traditional views of the planet's passive role in relation to life.
4. Life's interaction with Earth shows that it is not just surviving on this planet; it is an integral part of the planet's ongoing evolution and functionality.
5. Recognizing Earth as a living system could shift how humanity approaches environmental and planetary management, emphasizing a more integrated and responsible interaction with the natural world.

1. Introduction to the Living Planet Concept

This chapter introduces the idea of Earth as a living system where life forms, including humans, contribute to its regulation and maintenance. Ferris Jabr: "Life is Earth. Earth is life."

2. The Amazon's Role in Rain Production

Discusses how the Amazon rainforest contributes to its own rain production, highlighting the interconnectedness of life and atmospheric phenomena. Ferris Jabr: "The Amazon rainforest generates about half of its own rainfall annually."

3. Earth's Self-Regulating Mechanisms

Explores various examples of how life on Earth influences global environmental systems, such as bacterial impact on weather. Ferris Jabr: "Microbes can influence weather patterns by acting as nuclei for cloud formation."

4. Philosophical and Practical Implications

Considers the implications of viewing Earth as a living entity, stressing the need for a paradigm shift in how humans interact with the planet. Ferris Jabr: "To save the planet is to save ourselves."

1. Educate about Earth's systems: Increase awareness of the planet's life-supporting systems to foster greater environmental stewardship.
2. Support sustainable practices: Engage in and advocate for practices that maintain or improve the Earth's natural balance.
3. Participate in community environmental efforts: Local action can have global impacts on maintaining Earth's livability.
4. Promote and support scientific research: Understanding Earth's systems is crucial for effective management and conservation.
5. Reconsider personal and policy decisions: Make choices that consider long-term environmental impacts, emphasizing sustainability.

About ten years ago, science writer Ferris Jabr started contemplating Earth as a living planet rather than a planet with life on it. It began when he learned that the Amazon rainforest doesn't simply receive the rain that defines it; rather, it helps generate that rain. The Amazon does that by launching bits of biological confetti into the atmosphere that, in turn, seed clouds. After learning this, he began looking for other ways life changes its environment. That led to his new book Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life. He talks to host Regina G. Barber about examples of life transforming the planet — from changing the color of the sky to altering the weather.

People

Ferris Jabr, Regina Barbour

Companies

None

Books

Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life

Guest Name(s):

Ferris Jabr

Content Warnings:

None

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About ten years ago, science writer Ferris Jaber came across a fact he never heard before that blew his mind.

Ferris Jabr
The Amazon rainforest does not simply receive the rain for which it is so famous. It actually generates about half of the rain that falls on its canopy every year.

NPR Host
It may seem straightforward that trees and other plants pull water from their soil, then release what they dont need into the air. But Ferris says its not that simple, that the process actually involves the entirety of life within the forest.

Ferris Jabr
So the Amazon is continually spewing these invisible plumes of tiny biological particles, think.

NPR Host
Pollen grains, fungal spores, microbes, bits of leaves.

Ferris Jabr
They get swept up into the atmosphere, and they become the particles on which water vapor condenses in order to form clouds. So because they're continually lofting all of this water vapor and all these biological particles into the atmosphere, they're dramatically accelerating the water cycle.

So the more the rainforest is growing and thriving, the more rain it is stimulating. And then the more rain that is falling back to the forest, the more.

NPR Host
It can grow and the more it can influence ecosystems elsewhere.

When Ferris learned the Amazon forest actually changes the rain cycle not only above its canopy, but on other continents, it started to change the way he thought about life on Earth, because I'd always.

Ferris Jabr
Been taught that life is subject to its environment, not the other way around. And here we're living things, changing the weather on the scale of an entire continent.

NPR Host
So he started looking for other examples of how life changes its surroundings, which led him to write his new book, Becoming Earth, how our planet came to life. It explores the idea that life doesn't just live on earth. Life is Earth.

Ferris Jabr
The basic concept of the world being alive is truly ancient. We see that in religion, mythology, going.

NPR Host
Way, way back from the Aztecs to the ancient Polynesians and many other indigenous cultures.

Ferris Jabr
But within western science, this idea that we can think of Earth as a living entity has been very controversial for.

NPR Host
A long time, since the 1960s, when James Lovelock and then later Lynn Margulis developed their versions of the idea.

Ferris Jabr
That was severely criticized and ridiculed by many mainstream western scientists, especially with an evolutionary biology, because they did not like this idea of Earth being alive and being conflated with an organism.

NPR Host
But now that's starting to change with new research that's come out in the last few decades.

Ferris Jabr
It suggests that wherever life emerges, it inevitably transforms its home planet, and that together, life and the greater planetary environment do form a single, highly interconnected system.

NPR Host
Today on the show, what it means to consider Earth a living planet. From bacteria caused rainfall to the delicate balance of wildfires and oxygen, we look at how the environment shapes life and how life shapes the environment.

Im Regina Barbour, and youre listening to shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.

Okay, first, let's dig into this idea of a living earth. Like, what does it mean? And how is it different from a planet with life on it?

Ferris Jabr
Right? So one of the biggest revelations for me when writing this book is to stop thinking of life as something that simply inhabits the planet or resides on the planet's surface, and to think of life as a literal physical extension of the planet.

A tree is a beautiful metaphor for our living planet because by mass or volume, the majority of a tree is actually dead tissue. It's dead wood that is structural but contains no living cells. And there's just thin strips of living tissue here and there, ringed and laced throughout that dead wood. Well, Earth is similar in that, you know, the majority of it is inanimate rock and water and air, but it has this beautiful flowering skin of life that in some ways sustains this larger living system.

All life forms are, by definition, systems. They are networks of smaller components, some of which are animate and some of which are inanimate. And so in that regard, the Earth is no different. It's just that it is the largest of all of those systems. It's all the other ecosystems combined into the largest known living system.

So what we call life emerged from Earth. It is made of Earth. And then life loops back to profoundly transform the larger planetary environment. Then we can recognize that system itself as the largest known living entity because it demonstrates what seems to be the most fundamental characteristic of life at all scales, which is a capacity to regulate itself, to preserve itself, to endure. Somehow, we have to account for Earth's incredible resiliency through time. The fact that Earth has remained alive for more than 4 billion years is truly astonishing.

NPR Host
Right. And to illustrate kind of like, how this feedback is happening, you go through a bunch of examples in your book. One that really stuck out to me is how bacteria can cause rain. Like, how does this work?

Ferris Jabr
Yeah, I'm fascinated by this capacity of microbes to change the weather and to stimulate rain and snow and hail, in fact. So there's microbes all over the surface of the planet, both on land and in the ocean, and they're continually swept into the atmosphere by powerful winds, by storm currents. And in addition to the living microbes themselves, there's also all kinds of bits and pieces of life. Just biological confetti gets up in the atmosphere, and they become seeds for both clouds and then for ice crystals within the clouds. And there's one microbe that's particularly special, pseudomonas syringi. It has on its surface, on its cell surface, proteins that act as a template to organize water molecules into a solid ice crystal. And it's the most effective so called ice nucleator that we've ever discovered. It's so effective that it's actually used worldwide on ski slopes to create artificial snow.

NPR Host
What?

Ferris Jabr
Yeah, we spray water into the air with the proteins from these microbes, and they freeze the water. They help freeze the water and turn it into snow.

NPR Host
That's so cool. Another cool example is how life quote dyed the sky blue. I love that imagery. What did the sky look like before it was blue?

Ferris Jabr
Right. So if we go back into Earth's ancient history, more than 3 billion years ago, Earth probably had a hazy, orange sky. You know, it was probably full of carbon dioxide and methane, and it had essentially no free oxygen in it.

And so Saturn's largest moon, Titan, has a sort of. Yes, it has a smoggy, orange atmosphere that maybe resembles what Earth's ancient atmosphere used to look like for similar reasons.

NPR Host
Cool. Okay, but tell us why it's blue then.

Ferris Jabr
Right, so when life started to oxygenate the atmosphere, and this began maybe two and a half billion years ago with cyanobacteria, inventing photosynthesis using sunlight and water and then releasing oxygen as a byproduct, and then later continued with algae and land plants. So this long process of oxygenating the atmosphere completely revolutionized the chemistry of the entire planet, and in doing so, shifted the color of the sky towards the blue end of the spectrum.

So, you know, most times today, when somebody asks, why is the sky blue? The most common answer you hear is, well, it's because the atmosphere most effectively scatters the shortest wavelengths of light.

NPR Host
It's called Rayleigh scattering. It's something I taught many, many, many times.

Ferris Jabr
Well, there you go. You probably know much more about it than I do. And so, you know, my understanding is like, that is why when we look up the sky, we see blue, because it's those shortest wavelengths that are getting scattered. Yes, but that depends entirely on the chemistry of the atmosphere. If you have a different proportion, different concentrations of different molecules in there, they're going to scatter different wavelengths of light. And that was the case back in Earth's ancient atmosphere until life changed the picture.

NPR Host
Let's give the planetary scientists something, too. It was also a lot to do with volcanoes, but, you know, yes, that's true.

Ferris Jabr
My book is kind of really focused on life. But, of course, geology is the second half of that picture, and it's always there as well.

NPR Host
Right, right. Okay. The next one that we're gonna talk about is this relation between fire and life. So, like this co evolution of wildfire and plant life, I can kind of see how these two are connected. But can you break it down for me?

Ferris Jabr
Absolutely. So, for a long time in earth's history, the level of oxygen in the atmosphere fluctuated really wildly. For example, if we go back roughly 300 million years, the level of atmospheric oxygen was somewhere between 30% to 35%, compared to about 21% today. And back then, we had massive raging wildfires unlike anything we've seen. And so something seems to have shifted about 200 million years ago, and especially in the past 50 million years, where the level of atmospheric oxygen is a lot more stable than it used to be, it's hovering around that 21%. And so scientists have long struggled to explain that stability. And what they're converging on now, as a possible answer, is the co evolution of fire and terrestrial plant life.

So the basic idea is that if oxygen levels get too high and you have these raging wildfires, they're going to burn down huge tracks of terrestrial vegetation. So when that happens, oxygen levels start to dip back down again. Right. So it's the stabilizing feedback built into the system.

NPR Host
So with all of these examples, like, happening all at the same time, like, what makes Earth living? Like, how do we put all of these things in a conversation? Like, what's the sum of all of these?

Ferris Jabr
Right. So the way I think about it is life is looping back to change the planet really profoundly. So, together, Earth and life are forming this single system, this tightly interconnected, tightly coupled system.

And this system as a whole demonstrates a capacity to regulate itself, to regulate the planet's climate to endure, to have resilience. These are the characteristics that we associate with living things. So we can think of this system as a whole, as the largest known living entity.

NPR Host
Yeah, I'm really intrigued by this idea that Earth will balance its system out. But, like how the fire example took millions of years. Humans may not be around for that balancing act. Like, to see what happens?

Ferris Jabr
Absolutely, yeah. So the planet seems to have this innate capacity to regulate its climate. To some extent, it can pull itself back from these extreme hothouse states or these deep freezes, but the process by which that happens is so slow that it is simply not relevant to human societies, or even to any particular species most of the time. And we definitely cannot rely on that planetary balancing act. We have to intervene and correct the severe imbalance that we've introduced. But it is astonishing that the planet, that the earth system as a whole, has this innate, albeit very slow and limited, capacity to keep itself in a more temperate climate, in a more habitable zone.

NPR Host
What do you think the implications of changing this mindset will be like if we do start thinking about Earth as a living thing?

Ferris Jabr
I think there are some really important implications of this kind of conceptual shift. You know, I think the first thing to recognize is that in some ways, we're like all other life. Life changes its environment all the time. So we're the most recent chapter in this really long co evolutionary saga. But in other ways, we're highly unique compared to other life forms, because we're really the only creatures on the planet that can consciously understand and deliberately change the entire Earth system as a whole. And so all life is participating in this system, but we're actually aware of our actions and their consequences. That gives us a unique privilege and responsibility, and I would even argue, a moral obligation, not just to each other, as people, as humans, but to the larger living entity, the larger system that we are a part of. I think there's an immense difference between thinking of ourselves as inhabitants of the planet or, quote, passengers on spaceship Earth versus being literally continuous with the planet. So to save the planet is literally to save ourselves.

We are all extensions of Earth, and everything we do is looping back to change the planet in some way. So we are empowered in that sense.

NPR Host
Ferris, thank you so much for talking to us today. I've started to think about Earth differently just in this conversation, so thank you so much for sharing your book with us.

Ferris Jabr
Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here.

NPR Host
Ferris book, Becoming how our Planet came to life is out tomorrow, June 25. See our episode notes for a link to the book. This episode was produced and fact checked by Burleigh McCoy, edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez, and the audio engineer was Kwesi Lee. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thanks for listening to short Wave from NPR.

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