Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life

A radically thought-provoking account of a major shift in how we understand our Earth, not simply as an inanimate planet on which life evolved, but rather as a planet that came to life.



The notion of a living world is one of humanity’s oldest beliefs. Though once scorned by many scientists, the concept of Earth as a vast interconnected living system has gained acceptance in recent decades. Life not only adapts to its surroundings – it also shapes them in dramatic and enduring ways.

Over billions of years, life transformed a lump of orbiting rock into our cosmic oasis, breathing oxygen into the atmosphere, concocting the modern oceans, and turning rock into fertile soil. Life is intertwined with Earth’s capacity to regulate its climate and maintain balance.

Through compelling narrative, evocative descriptions and lucid explanations, Becoming Earth shows us how Earth became the world we’ve known, how it is rapidly becoming a very different world, and how we will determine what kind of Earth our descendants inherit for millennia to come.

Review

Lyrical, smart . . . will make you appreciate our home planet in countless new ways -- NPR

This is the book I'd been waiting for. It tells my favorite kind of science story: one that seems at first counter-intuitive, but then quickly becomes obviously true – a story so important and compelling that I am going to be recommending it for years. -- Hank Green, co-host of Vlogbrothers

Becoming Earth is a glorious paean to our living world, full of achingly beautiful passages, mind-bending conceptual twists, and wonderful characters. Ferris Jabr reveals how Earth not only gave rise to life, and now teems with it, but has also been profoundly, miraculously shaped by it. -- Ed Yong, Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist and author of An Immense World, winner of the Royal Society Science Book Prize

I did not expect to experience joy when I opened Becoming Earth, but I did, and I do. The ambition, eloquence, and erudition in this dragonfly droneflight of a book are absolutely exhilarating. -- John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather and winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize 2023

An astonishing book, weaving together science, history, and the author's unfailingly precise observations with the grace of a poet. -- Steve Silberman, author of NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize

This wondrous book reveals our living planet for the miracle that it is. By the end, you may even feel that 'miracle' is an understatement. The story of Earth is the story of a planet reworked, remade – and, to an astonishing degree, created – by life itself. Wow. -- Carl Safina, author of Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel

Fascinating, thought-provoking, and, ultimately, inspiring. -- Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction

Gorgeously written and brimming with fascinating science and provocative ideas -- Dan Fagin, author of Toms River, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction

We tend to take our rare jewel of a home planet for granted. In his startlingly beautiful and insightful book, Becoming Earth, Ferris Jabr shows us exactly why we shouldn't. The Earth lives, breathes, and rewrites our history even as we read, reminding us once again that there is in fact no place like home. -- Deborah Blum, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of The Poisoners' Handbook and The Poison Squad

A remarkable achievement: a loving homage to our glorious planet that's at once as thematically vast as the ocean, and as precise on the page as a fungal filament. Ferris Jabr, a science writer with a poet’s soul, is among the few scribes worthy of serving as biographer for the life-encrusted rock we call home. -- Ben Goldfarb, author of Eager and winner of the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award

About the Author

Ferris Jabr is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and Scientific American. He has also written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, National Geographic, Foreign Policy, Wired, Outside, Lapham’s Quarterly, McSweeney’s, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. He is a recipient of a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant and fellowships from UC Berkeley and the MIT Knight Science Journalism Program. His work has been anthologized in the 2014, 2020, and 2023 editions of Best American Science and Nature Writing. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his husband, Ryan, their dog, Jack, and more plants than they can count.