Becoming Earth: A Journey Through the Hidden Wonders that Bring Our Planet to Life

by Ferris Jabr

Living systems use free energy to maintain an improbably high level of organization in a universe hurtling inescapably toward maximum entropy—toward complete dissolution.

Moreover, organisms and their environments are inextricably bonded in reciprocal evolution, often converging upon self-stabilizing processes that favor mutual persistence.

Yet our living planet has consistently demonstrated an astonishing resilience—an ability to revive itself in the wake of devastating calamities and find new forms of ecological consonance.

Instead, we must simultaneously acknowledge our disproportionate influence on the planet and accept the limitations of our abilities.

Time and again in the Anthropocene, we find that we have blundered into the same tragic predicament: through increasingly sophisticated science, we are finally deciphering some of the planetary rhythms that life and environment have coevolved over great spans of time, just as our widespread destruction of Earth’s ecosystems and reckless consumption of fossil fuels threaten to distort or extinguish those very rhythms.

Yet the sheer complexity and staggering diversity of our living planet are also reasons for hope, courage, and perseverance, because it is precisely this intricacy that makes Earth so resilient.

If fire is itself a kind of music that results from the interplay of life and environment, then a fire regime is a tune or theme that recurring wildfires and their particular habitat compose together.

Fire is arguably the single most important catalyst of human evolution—the furnace behind our intelligence, technology, and culture.

In general, though, if given enough time and opportunity, life and environment seem to coevolve relationships and rhythms that ensure their mutual persistence. There is nothing teleological about this. Such persistence is not designed or planned. It is the outcome of ineluctable physical processes that are distinct from, but related to, the processes that govern the evolution of species.

whereas those that undermine the system to the point of collapse will ultimately eliminate themselves, even if they profit in the short term. The most resilient ecosystems—those best able to adapt to challenges and crises—will survive the longest.

When our ancestors harnessed fire, they transcended the energetic constraints imposed on all other animals.

Earth’s coal deposits primarily formed in hot, humid swamps and wetlands more than 300 million years ago, during the geologic period to which they lend their name, the Carboniferous (from

A living planet, it seems—especially one that has evolved a high level of ecological complexity—has the potential for extraordinary resilience over geological timescales. But the self-stabilizing processes underlying this resilience operate much too slowly, and involve far too much upheaval, to spare such transient entities as human societies.

There is no optimal state for the planet. Yet it is true that over great spans of time, Earth and its creatures have tended to coevolve relationships that promote their mutual persistence and imbue the planet with remarkable tenacity.

In his last book, Lovelock argued that the “staggeringly improbable chain of events required to produce intelligent life” has occurred once and only once in the known cosmos—that humanity’s existence is “a freakish one-off.”