A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters

by Andrew H. Knoll

Why do so many people care so little in the face of planetary changes that will reshape the lives of our grandchildren? In 1968, Baba Dioum, a Senegalese forest ranger, provided a memorable answer. “In the end,” he said, “we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.”

A few tens of millions of years after Earth had mostly accreted, a Mars-size body rammed into our infant planet, flinging rock and gas into space. Much of the ejected material eventually coalesced to form a relatively small rocky sphere, locked into permanent orbit around the Earth. The full moon may inspire poetry, but it was born in violence, its secrets unlocked through careful studies of lunar rocks.

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Once formed, a quartz crystal will not evolve into a diamond, but over billions of years, Earth’s first simple organisms have given rise to a staggering diversity of species, including one with the audacity to ask how we got here.

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In 1988, when the Gulf dead zone was first recognized, it covered an area of 15 square miles (39 square kilometers); in 2017, the dead zone encompassed some 8,776 square miles (27,730 square kilometers), about the size of New Jersey. Several hundred other dead zones have been documented in coastal waters around the world, all toxic to sea life.