Ferris Jabr: "We're going through this shift"

A couple of weeks ago we were joined by July’s author of the month, Ferris Jabr, who dropped in to chat with us in our live Q&A—and it was a ton of fun. 

Over the course of an hour, we talked about his book Becoming Earth, about writing perspectives that shift from microscopic to planetary scale, and of the challenge of trying to show ideas that are simultaneously ancient and new.

He also talked to us about his travels, his garden, and even gave us some reading tips. Here are some highlights, lightly-edited for clarity.

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Becoming Earth was a long time in the making. Ferris said the spark for it was a piece of information he discovered around 2014.

“It really did begin with learning about the Amazon, and how the Amazon makes so much of its own rain… You know, the Amazon spans a continent, it's the largest forest on our planet—one of the largest ecosystems out there. It has the power to create the weather above its canopy, and to change weather around the world. And that got me really curious about how else life does similar things, not just now but throughout Earth history. So that's where it kind of started. I was literally just collecting examples, putting them in folders on my desktop, just taking notes, and it took several years of kind of intermittent research and writing and thinking … to realize that there was enough material here to constitute a book, and even more importantly, that there was an important shift happening within the world of science, that the thinking was changing amongst experts. As a science writer who writes for the general public, I'm always thinking about, you know, what do lay readers know and not know? What's familiar to them? What's not familiar to them? This was not the science I had learned in high school or even in college. I would never have been taught about forests making their own rain, or the fact that life is why we have a blue sky and a breathable atmosphere and fire. So to me, it seemed like all these insights needed to be brought to greater public awareness. They hadn't really had their moment in the spotlight yet.”

But the ideas behind the book have existed for much, much longer.

“There are ancient antecedents to the kind of thinking and science that I'm exploring in this book, The basic concept that the world is alive in some meaningful sense. Animism and related ideas, these are extremely ancient concepts—they're nearly human universals, we find them in cultures and religions around the world. And then within Western science, the Gaia hypothesis was the most famous Western scientific articulation of this idea of planet Earth being a single living thing. 

Scientific consensus can change quickly: What was once ridiculed can be rapidly adopted by mainstream science.

“The Gaia hypothesis itself, even though it was a scientific proposal, was harshly criticized and ridiculed and many mainstream scientists considered it to be basically rejected or untrue. And then quietly, the essence of Gaia—the basic things that James Lovelock and Lynn Margolis were saying—became the core of this new, mainstream field called Earth Systems Science, with completely no controversy surrounding it whatsoever. Just the basic fact that life profoundly alters the planet, that life and the planet together form a single, highly-interconnected system, and that life is involved in many of these processes through which the planet regulates its climate: these are now well accepted ideas and concepts. These ideas have been around for a long time in various forms, but have not been fully sanctioned by science, and we are now going through this shift in which they are gaining new appreciation, new recognition, new acceptance.”

As you find out near the end of the book, Ferris even managed to sit down with Gaia hypothesis co-creator James Lovelock himself. (Lovelock died in 2022 at the age of 103.)

“I knew from the very beginning that although I didn't want to write a Gaia hypothesis book or a Lovelock biography, this book was very much informed by it, in conversation with it. And so if I could have a chance to sit down with the person who conceived it that would be wonderful. I visited Lovelock in 2019 he had just turned 100 years old, and there were centennial celebrations going on in the UK, so I went to a big Gaia conference in Exeter, and then I hung around a little bit longer and was able to visit James Lovelock and his wife Sandy at their seaside cottage on the Jurassic Coast in southwest England. It’s a beautiful location, and very appropriate to the book because so much of that chalk over there is actually the remains of ancient plankton. He was so mentally there, like, just so sharp still. We sat down to tea and biscuits in their living room and just sort of had a long conversation about the origins of Gaia and his latest thinking on it, and his latest book that he had just published called Novacene. I think for him, I was just the latest in a very long line of journalists and writers that have come to visit him and see him, just some young American writer that he'd never heard of before, you know. But for me, it was a much more significant experience, because he was such a big figure in the book and for all this history, and somebody that I had read about for so long, and whose ideas I'd been immersed in for so long. So it was very significant for me personally.”

The UK was just one location in the book. Writing it involved a tremendous number of miles traveled, and not only internationally—but also up and down.

“I knew that because this book was taking an explicitly holistic and planetary approach, that I wanted it to be very diverse and to represent many different places around the world, many different ecologies, many different communities. It ended up being a very globe-trotting enterprise to make that happen. The first chapter is one of people's favorite journeys, which is where I go about a mile beneath the surface of the planet in this former gold mine in South Dakota that's been converted into a scientific laboratory. … the whole Jules Verne energy of descending into the Earth's crust was a really special experience, and a great was a kind of a great way to begin the whole thing, I think. And the inverse of that trip was getting to the heart of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil and climbing part of this research facility called the Amazon Tall Tower Observatory. This particular tower is more than 1,000 feet tall, and it's the tallest structure in South America and unlike the mine, where there is actually an elevator that takes you down to the bottom in about 10 minutes, there is no elevator at this tower, so you have to climb the whole thing yourself. There's no safety barrier… you're harnessed to a railing, but you can still slip through gaps. They're very worried about anybody being physically or psychologically incapable of completing the climb because sometimes people get stuck halfway up, they're just too scared to keep going. So they ask you over and over again, are you sure you're not you're okay with heights? Are you sure you can do this? Are you sure you're not afraid? And by the tenth time they've asked you, you're not really as confident as you were in the beginning.”

One other trip he loved was to a Siberian research outpost.

“For me, being on the west coast of North America, it was a three day journey just to arrive at the Research Station—and then, even that research station is several hours away from the actual experimental nature park they call Pleistocene Park. It is managed by this kind of maverick team of Russian scientists: everything is extemporaneous and kind of rough-and-tumble and very rugged when you're out there. One scene that did not make it into the book, was when we went to this area of exposed, crumbling permafrost along a riverbank. There's all kinds of ancient Pleistocene bones of bison and mammoths and such that are being exposed in this thawing permafrost—but the whole area is almost like quicksand. It's extremely muddy, and you can sink into it, and there was one point at which I was trying to get a closer look at the specimen, and I started to sort of sink just a little bit into this quicksand-like material, and had to quickly pull myself out and leap away.”

And he even gave us some great book recommendations of his own.

“There's a wonderful book by the Australian writer Tim Flannery called Here On Earth. Of any book I read, it’s probably the closest in sort of theme and approach to Becoming Earth. I think it came out more than a decade ago, so it’s kind of dealing with a different body of science, but I see him as a kindred spirit in terms of being very much a sort of holistic thinker and embracing this kind of science.”

“[Outside of science writing] I fell in love with reading and writing through fiction; I was an English literature major in college as well as a psychology major. Some of my favorite writers are the 20th century modernists that developed stream-of-consciousness: Virginia Woolf, Proust Faulkner, Joyce… I really, really fell in love with this whole idea of trying to capture the experience of the human mind at work on the page. But I think for me, Woolf did that better than anybody has ever been able to do. I frequently returned to her work [favorite novel: To The Lighthouse], and, in fact, even found some resonance in some of her autobiographical writings and diaries with this book and what I've been researching, because she talks about how, basically, life and the earth are connected by this hidden ring that comes into focus sometimes.”

“The best science fiction novel I've read recently is called The Mountain In The Sea by Ray Nayler, and it's about the discovery of a conscious, self-aware octopus species in the ocean. It parallels that with the advent of real AI, a true AI that is also self-aware and capable of language. In the novel there are several fictional texts that are quoted and excerpted, and those texts alone, I think are worth the price of admission, because they're just some really brilliant thinking.”

Like I said, this was a fun conversation and it covered a lot of ground. Subscribers can watch the entire video on YouTube, so if you sign up you’ll get access to the whole thing. Thanks to Ferris, and to the folks who turned up live.

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Next week is our next Q&A, with August’s author of the month, Carvell Wallace. We’ll be talking about his memoir Another Word For Love, and discussing some of the things that the book brings up: relationships and parenting, growing up as the weird kid, being a Black man in America… and anything else you might want to ask.

It’s happening at 6pm Eastern/3pm Pacific on Tuesday August 20 on Zoom, and you are invited!

Join us by clicking this Zoom link: I’ll also be sending out calendar invitations to full club members shortly so that you don’t forget when it’s happening. Even if you can’t make it, you can send over questions by email and I’m happy to ask them on your behalf.

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Lastly, thanks to everyone who responded to the survey I sent around last week, it’s given me some food for thought—but mainly sounds like folks are pretty happy with how things have been going so far. 

The main things I was worried about were all answered: Are you enjoying the picks? (mostly, yes.) Is there a more convenient time to hold our live Q&As? (Maybe, but no overwhelmingly better option.) And do people want a more traditional book club experience to discuss the book with each other? (Not so much.) 

The big piece of new feedback, though, has been that some folks are struggling to keep up with the pile of books that they’re collecting. I hear you.

First off, you don’t have to read the book inside a month! These are all meant to be picks that will age well, so if you find yourself looking at them later on I can guarantee they are still worthwhile investments. Second, I’m trying to work out how to offer some different options for those who want a slower option. Financially that probably gets a lot easier if the club is bigger… so if we can get more people into the club, I could offer a 6 books a year subscription as well as monthly. 

But I’m still listening, so feel free to fill out the anonymous survey if you haven’t already. That goes even if you’re not a paying member of the club—and if you have any smart ideas, please let me know!

Onwards

Bobbie