Everything Is Connected (No, Seriously)

Quinn: [00:00:00] How did our planet come to life? Is it alive? And where are we as part of that? That's today's big question or questions. They're all interdependent and that's the point. And my guest is Ferris Jabr. His new book, Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life, is one of the most compelling, beautiful, timely, and important reads I've ever got to underline throughout.

Ferris is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and Scientific American. He has also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, National Geographic, Wired, Outside, Lapham's Quarterly, McSweeney's, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other wonderful publications. Ferris is the recipient of the Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant, as well as fellowships from UC Berkeley and the MIT Knight Science Journalism [00:01:00] program. His work has been anthologized in several editions of two of my favorite things that exist, the Best American Science and Nature Writing series.

I've been on a bit of a bender lately. I'm getting older. I've got kids that are getting older quickly. Work continues. Everything keeps changing and staying the same. I'm trying to contextualize for myself, for this work, for you all, and for my kids, time and place and presence and relationships.

How much time do we each have here? Do we as a species have here? Who do we spend it with? How do we spend it? How precious is it to each of us? Does it become more so, less so? How should we use our time and experience our place? How can we help?

As Ferris writes in his introduction to his new book, “In many cases, life does not simply receive rain. It summons it.” This [00:02:00] simple, breathtaking interdependence underpins preciousness, the precariousness of our time and place here, hurtling through space on top of and as part of this rock and air and water.

It underpins the strength and the fragility of the many systems we have and that we are part of, and at the very least, have forever depended on. It's time to help.

Welcome to Important Not Important. My name is Quinn Emmett and this is science for people who give a shit. In these weekly conversations with folks like Ferris, I take a deep dive with someone like him who's working on the front lines of the future to build a radically better today and tomorrow.

Our mission as always is to understand and then unfuck the future and our goal together here is to help you answer the question, what can I do?

Ferris welcome to the show. Thanks for coming. I really appreciate it.

Ferris Jabr: Thank you for having me. Great to be here.

Quinn: It's very kind [00:03:00] of you you are obviously very busy.

You've got this book of the moment. It's a funny thing to say. A book can be so timely, and necessary in this moment, but also just about as evergreen and also a history book as it could possibly be. You really managed to tie the whole room together there. So, it's much appreciated. Context is always helpful. Ferris, we usually start with one important, mildly ridiculous question. I've asked it almost 200 times. Otherwise, I would retire it. But it does set the tone, I guess, for this, which is not too important. But at the same time, There's a lot at stake here. So Ferris, why are you vital to the survival of the species?

And I encourage you to be bold and honest.

Ferris Jabr: That's interesting. I like this Japanese philosophy that's, it's sometimes translated as finding one's purpose in life and the idea is to find the intersection of your passions and your skill set basically. [00:04:00] And yeah, I try to do that.

And I think this book is a manifestation of that, because I've always had this hybrid interest in, I guess, the science and the humanities. I always loved nature and science on the one side, but also reading and writing and literature on the other. And I discovered in college that I wasn't that great at the sort of day to day work of research science.

I didn't really want to do that for the rest of my life, but I love learning about science and communicating science. And so this kind of work and writing seemed like the perfect fusion of those interests. And I just feel like this book for me is probably the best way that I can personally engage with the current planetary crisis, and contribute in some small way to its management and resolution.

And yeah, I guess that's how I think about it.

Quinn: That's amazing. It's wonderful. And I appreciate your candor on that. On probably more significant scale, I too was not in the flash card game, like it's not, it was never gonna go great in a thousand different ways. So I thought, oh, I'll do liberal arts, [00:05:00] and then this, and then a friend reminded me that I've essentially signed up to write a term paper every week for the rest of my life.

Ferris Jabr: Always have homework.

Quinn: Yeah. I was like, ooh, boy, did not think that one through. Well, thank you. That was incredibly eloquent and humble but important. We're all trying to find our way to participate in this thing, obviously, hopefully, especially folks who listen to the show. So, I'm wildly interested in all of your explorations of megafauna and microbial adventures under the earth, deep in the earth, under the water, in the air, all of these things, but I'm going to start with three important questions that came to mind immediately. One is, how is Jack and how is he going to deal with you leaving? How is Ryan and the edible part of the garden? And how is the garden in general?

We are in July and it's warm out.

Ferris Jabr: Yeah the garden's been doing really well this year. This has been a temperate spring for us compared to some previous years, and it's allowed the plants to really grow fast without getting scorched too early. Sometimes when they get hit by that heat [00:06:00] too soon, it really stunts them for the rest of the year.

So they've really enjoyed that. So the garden is tipping into its mid to late summer abundance and overflow at the moment, where it's getting a bit jungly out there. Air the corn is definitely knee high in our raised beds and we're trying some melons and beans with the corn this year.

And the tomatoes and peppers are appreciating the heat wave that we've been going through recently, and Jack's been great. He never is super fond of us leaving him. But he's gotten used to it over the years. I think we have a great pet sitter who actually comes and stays here.

And so he has somebody with him the whole time and sticks to his routines and all of that, which really, he really depends on those. Yeah, so the garden, this past winter, we experienced some extreme ice. And when ice lingers on plants, it can be really, really damaging and we have a small olive tree in our rock garden and it can handle cold, but it's not used to being covered in ice for so long.

So, I should have gone out there and shook off the ice like I've done in previous years. And I didn't this year. And it [00:07:00] lost all of its leaves. It basically completely defoliated itself. But now it's all flushed out again. It like, it miraculously recovered. Yeah. So it did lose some branches, that died from the ice, but it's all leafed out again and it totally recovered.

So it's proved its resilience to us.

Quinn: That's amazing. I mean, truly, look, the rest of the book is great, but the details on the garden and your adventures and kneeling in the dirt I don't know if you saw the last Mad Max where Furiosa is like on her knees in the sand.

I was like, that's what he's doing. He's like, why, why won't this work?

And now you have this jungle. It's incredible, but it takes a lot of work, but there is nothing like that. I was born and raised in Virginia, which is where we are now, but we were in Los Angeles for 15, 20 years, which is like cheating with gardening. In some ways, obviously it's gotten much, much drier and then wetter and now drier again. But coming back and dealing with seasons again and frost and ice and things like that yeah, requires some perseverance certainly from all parties.

Ferris Jabr: Yeah, I grew up in the Bay Area in California, and you're just spoiled there [00:08:00] for weather. If you grew up there and every time I go back they're always multiple seasons ahead of us, it seems, they have things blooming when things are just getting going here in the late winter and, yeah, California, Hawaii, Florida, these are the climates in the states in which you can grow almost anything.

Quinn: Let's talk a bit just for a moment about your youth. Cause it turns out the work we do best here. If we do anything that is helpful is to really help people answer the question of what can I do? And obviously you have really tried to do that here, like you said through some self awareness and just immense talents in time.

I know this took years and years for you. But we try to help people answer that. And a lot of times it's very directly. And with this show, it's sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly, and that includes really getting to the heart of why my guests do what they do.

And there's a question. Why do you have to do this work? And you can weight that both ways. Why do you have to do this work? And why do you have to do this work? And I thought about one of the passages you wrote early, I'll just read it real [00:09:00] quick, because this is the type of thing that my kids are young, but young enough to interact with the world and understand the implications of everything now. But they still have so much wonder, and you wrote, the idea of the Amazon rainforest as a garden that watered itself obsessed me. If that were true for an ecosystem as massive as the Amazon, I wondered, might it be true on an even larger scale? In what ways and to what extent has life changed the planet throughout its history? Now, if you're a kid. Right. If you're like seven, eight, nine, 10, and all my kids do in the back of the car, like reading me facts and fart jokes, but you find out something like this and it is the sort of thing that sticks with you. That makes you eventually all these years later, write you're incredible chapter on the Amazon, including climbing that insane tower. So, you have that specific, but you have so many other wonderful ones. I mean, the amount of knowledge here from Pleistocene Park to life as a metaphor to music and Kid Creek and beavers, right. And plankton, of course, is the source [00:10:00] of everything. How did you come to those? As you put together this book and you're compiling everything and trying to include it all to show we are one organism, what is your process for doing that? How did you get from being obsessed with this rainforest is a garden that waters itself to where we are.

Ferris Jabr: It's interesting because I feel like learning about the Amazon in the first place returned me to a particularly childlike sense of wonder and awe for nature, which I've continually felt awe and reverence for the natural world throughout my life. But learning that kind of heightened or intensified the magic of nature.

It felt like somebody had sprinkled pixie dust all over the typical water cycle that we all learn at elementary school and it was just suddenly even more wondrous because it wasn't just plants pulling water from the soil and releasing what they don't need to the atmosphere was actually the entirety of life in the forest participating in this water cycle.

The pollen grains, the fungal spores, the microbes, the bits and pieces of insect shells, probably, like scraps of [00:11:00] fur and scales and who knows what else gets up there. And just thinking about it that way was so new for me despite being somebody who had been really fascinated with nature for a long time and actively studying these things. And then I think it started me on this quest of explicitly searching for similar examples. I was like, if this is true here, where else is it true? And I started to see that there were these other examples, but they were coming from very disparate fields of science, oceanography, atmospheric science, ecology, geology, geochemistry, and no one scientist can be an expert in all of these things. So there weren't that many people talking about them cohesively in unison. And as far as I could tell, there weren't many people tying them together in a way that the general public could understand. And I think we're now seeing the beginnings of a movement where these interconnections between geology and biology and this idea of earth and life co-evolving and changing each other is really, those are really coming to the forefront and they're being [00:12:00] pushed to greater awareness in a way they weren't before, but it's really just getting going.

We're going to see more and more of it over the next decade or so. And so I started initially just amassing files on my computer of just examples. In the beginning, it was just a giant list of examples, it was like, Oh yeah whales released giant poonamis at the surface of the ocean and that nourishes plankton and also those plankton, they end up affecting the chemistry of the ocean and the scent of the sea.

And then there's ancient plankton being swept over from Africa and fertilizing the Amazon. Just a giant list of all these fascinating connections. And slowly I was like, what is the framework here to understand all these examples together, what's the larger message?

What is the conceptual girding we can give all of this? And I continually returned to this ancient idea of earth itself being alive. If there are these incredible interconnections, does that mean the system as a whole is alive in some meaningful sense. And, I'd been aware of [00:13:00] Gaia, the Gaia hypothesis since I was a teenager.

I'd been taught that it was this woo woo notion that was a little bit closer to mysticism than true science. It wasn't considered totally bonkers, but it wasn't really embraced or accepted by mainstream science either. And then I started to question that. I started to question whether that was still as true now as it had been when I was a teenager and found over time that the scientific thinking had changed a bit in recent decades.

And now we're getting to the point where, you know, some of the fiercest critics are changing their minds and certain aspects of Gaia and that kind of thinking are becoming more accepted. So, it was this journey that began with just sheer wonder and awe, then intensive research, and then trying to tie everything together and give it a new framework.

Quinn: I love that. It sounds like such a methodical process. I imagine it definitely was not at times.

Ferris Jabr: Not in the moment, yeah.

Quinn: It's funny. I feel like this work started for me in a similar respect, which is I just kept sending people links to things. It was like, [00:14:00] Oh, holy shit, you should see this. Some people should be reading and I was like, maybe I should make it something that they opt into instead of that they have to tell me to stop texting them. I literally have an Apple note called cool shit to tell the kids about. And it's just the same thing. It's like I'm throwing links in there all the time and I tell them because they're still that age where they're just like, what?

Eating their breakfast in the morning. It's amazing. I appreciate it though. Like you said, you've all these examples and you pull them into. I can't remember the order. I apologize.

Ferris Jabr: Yeah, it's rock, water, air.

Quinn: rock, water, air. Great.

Which makes so much sense. And of course you delve into each of them within those and then tie them together. But that feels like such a strength in the book where you take either these huge things, right. Or the relationship between an elephant's footprint, right, and a pond and what else could possibly live in there that we've just ignored for so long.

Right. But, I also appreciated that you took these ideas, like Gaia and oh god I'm totally blanking on it. Is it the Radford or Ratcliffe?

Ferris Jabr: The Redfield Ratio.

Quinn: Yes, the [00:15:00] Redfield Ratio where you took time to really explain it and it truly sounds like one of those like Ancient Alien history type ideas where you're just like that can't be right.

That can't be right. You were like no, listen broadly it holds up. Obviously we've explored and understood and negated many specifics along the way, but you know, this wasn't totally off base and that takes some effort to do that. Why did you feel like that? It was important to both acknowledge these early ideas and then to explore them more honestly?

Ferris Jabr: That's a great question. I mean, science is continually updating itself, refining itself. And that's one of the great things about science is that it welcomes in a way being wrong, that, oh, we thought it was this way and now we're actually starting to learn that it's more like this.

And I think a lot of scientists, they speak openly about the fact that what we really have are models, you know, representations of the world theories, and we're continually updating those to get as close as possible to this ideal of objective [00:16:00] truth, this, idea that there is this external reality out there outside the world of our minds that we're trapped in.

And we are always trying to discern that, as closely as possible. And, so centuries ago things that most scientific thinkers thought were true are now considered laughable, but then sometimes it goes the other way around too, where these sort of ancient intuitive ideas that science initially rejected actually turned out to have a material truth behind them.

And I think one of the ones we are reckoning with now is this idea of interconnectedness. I mean, we've all heard this phrase, everything is connected over and over again. This is a central tenet of many world religions. It's become trite, a way to throw this in all the time.

Ecology in particular is revealing the sort of material, literal scientific truth behind that. I wrote a story about the Canadian forest ecologist, Suzanne Simard, who helped reveal these vast underground networks of roots and fungi that physically link trees and other plants and [00:17:00] permit them in some cases to exchange resources and information.

That's an incredible material manifestation of this idea that all things are connected. And then, the more you learn about biology and ecology, the more that becomes true. Just the fact that we are all complex life forms, these amazing chimeras, our cells have organelles that were once free living microbes, our genomes are riddled with information from bacteria and viruses that we've adopted over the years we are literally crawling with trillions of microbes and fungi and parasites and viruses.

We are all walking ecosystems. And then coming to understand for me that life is not just inhabiting or residing on the planet. It's literally a physical extension of the planet. Which is a very different way of thinking about it. And so we have this literal material continuity with Earth.

And that's how I've come to think of it now. And I make the analogy to a vast beach from which spontaneously emerge, intricate sandcastles [00:18:00] and sand sculptures. Just because these structures are more complex than the sand around them doesn't mean they're suddenly separated from the beach, right?

They're still literally the beach. They're still made of the grains of sand. And that's true for life and earth. Life literally emerged from earth. It's made of earth. It is still continuous with Earth. So understanding that continuity I think is really important and that is something that has been recognized by religion and mythology and folklore for a very long time.

And I think it's taken science longer to come to that, to terms of that, especially with regard to the sort of historical segregation of geology from biology and thinking of the planet as a big rock with life on it, as opposed to something that came to life or is alive itself.

And sorry, now I'm forgetting the initial question.

Quinn:No, you answered it. It's beautiful. And, I am a like pagan atheist religious studies major. Like I said, liberal arts. I have learned about them all. I've experienced so many of them. I don't personally subscribe, but I feel like I have a slightly more objective viewpoint of all of them [00:19:00] that way.

But you're right. If there was a subtitle to your book, it's dust to dust, right? When you're talking about how we've been burying people for so long, when you're talking about soil, right? And all the microbes involved in that, when you just happened to slip in, you're like, Oh, and by the way White Cliffs of Dover and our early tools made out of plankton.

And it turns out it's all like, it's the gif, right? Of time is a flat circle, right? From True Detective when he's smashing the thing.

Ferris Jabr: Yeah. Yeah.

Quinn: And you're right. It's funny, there's a huge variety of religions and faiths and things like that, however you want to title them and there's a lot that they're objectively wrong about, there's a lot that they've been trying to lead us to, there's a lot of important community elements but those, and especially these indigenous perspectives that we have ignored would be an understatement for so long.

It turns out, this is really probably the way it does work. Organized religion used to pay for science in Europe, all those years ago. And we worked as hard as we could to separate them. And it is fascinating to come back to this point, to realize that Hey, listen, maybe folks were onto something [00:20:00] and it might feel foo foo to you.

But I love you use the example like if this than what else, which I try to apply, especially having children it's like, why not, obviously we are each part of this larger ecosystem, why wouldn't all of these things be connected? And you can look at that in a tragic perspective today in the sense of we're just understanding this or coming to terms with it just when we might not be able to save important parts of it. But you can also look at it in a solutions perspective. And I really appreciated how at the end of each section went into the Churchill framing of and here we are, it's not ideal.

Really want to move to Pleistocene Park. That feels like a really great place to spend your time. But at one point they were like, yeah, listen, this, theoretically at appropriate scale could stop the permafrost from melting and maybe really slow the potentially very bad of the climate crisis we haven't really hit yet, or maybe not, but it is worth doing and we [00:21:00] here spend a lot of time and effort trying to break down the ridiculous artificial barriers between personal actions, which the Pleistocene Park is in some way, right?

They did that by hand versus these systemic things. And again, you wrote about this a little bit. You said scrambling for solutions, we find that we know enough to recognize and even quantify the importance of the astoundingly complex ecosystems we inhabit, but not always enough to confidently intervene when they begin to collapse. Were solutions always part of what you wanted to write about in here, because it's easy for everyone to read the Guardian about deforestation in Brazil and good thing we elected this guy and it slowed down. But you paint the stakes like I've never really seen before by making it so miraculous and then telling us like it is.

Ferris Jabr: I mean, I think I definitely wanted to talk about responses, how best to respond to and manage the current planetary [00:22:00] crisis. And I feel like, if science writing, if science journalism is going to present us, confront us with all the problems it has to go that extra step, and talk about what to do about those problems.

And, not every short news article can do that on its own, but in a book, you do have the space to address both of those things. And I'm glad you brought up Pleistocene Park because this is a particularly audacious experiment in the Arctic, this experimental nature park in Siberia.

It's run by the Zimovs, Sergey Zimov and Nikita Zimov, a father and son scientific team and their families. And scientists from all over the world visit their research station to conduct all kinds of Arctic ecological research. In addition, the Zimovs are conducting this audacious experiment where they are bringing in large grazing animals to resurrect some version of the ancient Pleistocene grasslands that existed in that part of the world, tens of thousands of years ago partly to keep the permafrost as frozen as possible and then [00:23:00] hopefully counteract it's thawing which would release huge amounts of carbon and methane to the atmosphere.

And I like that you highlighted what, I think it was Nikita had to say, where he was basically like, yeah, we recognize that a lot of our peers think this is bonkers, to try to do this at the necessary scale, but what is the alternative? Like we're running out of time.

Like we have to try something. This is what they have chosen to attempt. This is what their circumstances and sort of philosophies and situation in life led them to. It's a very unique place because they've been given by the government a huge number of acres of true wilderness where there are essentially no human inhabitants or very few, very sparse.

So it's in some ways an ideal place to try out an experiment of this scale, but actually doing it is so challenging, which is a lot about what that chapter is about. They're really doing this on their own and, just trying to get even a few bison to the park, cause they're from so far away, it's so, so arduous.

[00:24:00] And yeah, I think that like we were talking about before, so that philosophy I mentioned, I was trying to remember the name, it's Ikigai is the name of it.

Quinn: Mm hmm. Yeah. Sure.

Ferris Jabr: So, that's what anybody can apply, I think, on a personal level, is figure out where your passions intersect with your skill sets, and then what is needed in the world, like, where those three things come together, and then what can you do.

And that could be anything from making a garden like my partner and I did here, transforming grass into true garden. It could be political activity. It could be changing the way you commute. It could be I don't know, volunteering with some climate resiliency programs or becoming electrician or working renewable energy or any number of thousands of things, and yeah, in the book, part of what I grapple with is that we are learning about these incredible ecological rhythms that the planet has co evolved over long periods of time, and we are learning how we need to back off, and at the very least disrupt those rhythms as little as possible.[00:25:00]

But then when it comes to actively intervening, trying to work with these rhythms to amplify what these ecosystems already do, that's where it gets extra complicated. And even with the best intentions and with a lot of research, it's difficult to do that carefully and intelligently, but also quickly enough to make a difference for the current planetary crisis.

And it really, it all comes down to scale and speed because, we're so far behind where we should be in terms of responding to this crisis, and every moment that goes by where we don't intervene at the necessary scale, it just gets worse because you have to act as quickly as possible.

And a lot of these ecosystems, they tend to adapt on a very slow timescale that is not particularly relevant to us, our human lifespans and the lifespan of our civilization. So it's difficult to reconcile those things, but there are intriguing options. And I think that we're probably going to see some form of desperate geoengineering within the next couple of decades, just because certain types of extreme weather will get so [00:26:00] bad that people will feel compelled to try something out of desperation. But at the same time, there are a lot of scientists looking into some really interesting and potentially, safer options. And honestly, one of the biggest things we can do that has no, essentially no risks is preserving and restoring the ecosystems we already have.

I mean, simply by preserving the Amazon that still exists and preventing its further destruction, that is an immense benefit, not just to South America, but to global ecology, because the Amazon is contributing to rainfall around the world. It should be a huge carbon sink when it is a thriving rainforest.

And it contains a huge portion of the entire world's biodiversity, which is so critical to the planet's long term resilience and complexity. So that is honestly see like the biggest things we have to do as a species. It's changing our energy infrastructure, right.

Getting away from fossil fuels, changing our agriculture, because that's another [00:27:00] huge contributor of greenhouse gas emissions and it's contributing to land degradation, soil erosion, and then it's habitat restoration and protection. Those are the three big buckets that I always come back to in terms of what we actually need to do.

Quinn: And that's an important point to make, which is we, and this process of this musical piece that is life on earth and just under earth and in the water is we are not too far gone yet. There are a lot of things we can do. We, really, again, try hard here to, like you said, What are you into? What are you good at? I will give you 7, 000 really reputable places that are already going where you can go help, especially on frontline places. And a lot of these scientists you've worked with, or I realized I said, Pliostein 40 times, Pleistocene parks, like operators, like they said, this is where that led them.

And, whether you are a kelp farmer or a kelp scientist and people sniff at you and go, Oh, well you would have to grow so much kelp. It's guess what? Like here we are. And of course [00:28:00] there will be trade offs like you again, pointed out in the book. We don't know, is it going to get wrapped around something if we try to sink it deep?

And I think since I think Running Tide, it might've run into some trouble even recently.

But also that's going to happen. That's going to happen as we chase solid state batteries and all of these different things. There's no perfect version of it, but doing these things with the context, as you, I imagine one of the words you probably use the most was interdependencies. It really does matter. There's, no way to get away from that. We are inextricably linked to this. Like you said, we're not just masters of these things. Coming back to religion, what is having domain over it? That's unfortunately not the way it works. We've acted that way. And we're paying the price of that.

Ferris Jabr: That's a great point. I like what you have to say about this complement of approaches, because there really are, there's so many different ways to respond to the current planetary crisis. And we need a diverse complement of approaches, not just focusing on one or another to the exclusion of others.

And as you say, some of them are unfortunately not going to work, [00:29:00] but that's just part of the process, and discovering what works best. So certain things will fail over time and other things will succeed.

Quinn: Yeah. I was at a conference and someone said, where do you fall on whether we should be doing mitigation or adaptation? And it's like boat has sailed, you know, it's like we gotta do both of those. Like you said, for someone in the Pacific Northwest to be like, it's 90s, but it's not as bad as it was.

It's not a great place to be. And clearly we need to do all of those things so that your garden and your pond doesn't become too overheated like these things are important. And, I think one of the things I really took away as much as like this, it was like, David Attenborough had written to me and reading his descriptions of things.

It was so wonderful, but it really came back to me. And I thought about I think it was an elephant footprint, how there is so much locally within your yard, within your community, within your town and your state, wherever you are, that you don't realize you are dependent on and is very much dependent on you if it's still around, And that you can [00:30:00] affect like yes Pleistocene Park is incredible and the Amazon is amazing and part of me definitely wants to climb the tower and the other parts like no thank you, like not happening, the part where you had to switch over your thing to the other railing I was like, nope, that was it. I'm not not in no, thank you. But these things, again, it's the act locally thing, of course, these huge strategic international things and protecting 30 percent of our waters, it's important, but you can have such an impact. If you look in your elephant footprint, if you look at your local water supply, right, you can see where that matters and then hopefully expand it from there. I mean, that's the point is this stuff is everywhere.

Ferris Jabr: Yeah. And that's what I really discovered through the garden. Now the garden became the way in which I was most personally and directly engaging with this material. And I loved gardening from a young age, but didn't really have much opportunity to do it seriously until a few years ago when my partner and I bought this house and had this canvas to work with.

And I didn't know anything [00:31:00] about soil at the time, really not in a scientific way. It was always something I just bought a few bags of from the nursery if I needed better soil or whatever. And now I had to like because our soil was in such bad shape. I had to learn everything about the science of soil.

And then how does one actually cultivate it and bring it back to life. And I was surprised and heartened to see so many scientific organizations, explicitly talking about soil as a living entity, even major textbooks, the Soil Science Society of America and the USDA have all described soil as alive in one way or another.

And I've come to see soil as this incredible microcosm of the planet because soil is this intricate network of rock, air, water, and life. And that's what the planet is too. And it's only when all of those things come together and continually interact that they form this dynamic, continually evolving, adaptive, system that is alive itself.

And so now, I think of, how do we keep our soil alive and healthy, not just how do we replenish its [00:32:00] nutrients, as though it was just some inert or inanimate reservoir that we could just take things out of and put things back in. I see it very differently that way.

And when I garden now, when I'm in the garden, I do genuinely feel more connected to the plants and the earth quite literally than I did before, because I now see that I recognize that continuity that was hidden to me, previously. And actually, so one of my favorite writers is Virginia Woolf, and I often returned to her writing for inspiration, and I was shocked going back to some of her autobiographical writings, she wrote about these moments she called moments of being where she felt like the kind of cotton wool of everyday life, the kind of stuff that prevents us from seeing the truth is suddenly pulled away and she can perceive a deeper reality. And she experienced one of these moments as a child when she was at her summer kind of vacation home in St. Ives, Cornwall, and she was looking at some flowers by the front door, and she suddenly saw this illuminated ring connecting the flowers to the earth, and it suddenly occurred to her that the real [00:33:00] flower was part earth, part flower, that they'd been connected the whole time, and she'd never really realized that.

And so she wrote that down as a useful thought that she may come back to later. And I was just so shocked at how resonant that was with everything I'd been learning. And I think that really is the gist of it, right? Is there is this invisible ring connecting us to the planet, connecting all life to the planet.

And sometimes it comes into glowing focus for us. And that was what the book was for me, was trying to make that ring visible and phosphorescent for everybody, hopefully.

Quinn: Well, I think it was. And again, I loved when you were like, and I made a pond. I was like, Oh, now he's messing with water. Good luck. I was a lifeguard for enough years to know that it's complicated, like best wishes. And then the raccoons were like, fantastic. A pool.

Ferris Jabr: Yeah.

Quinn: Pulling up your fucking plants.

But, but again, that makes you go well, all right, now I got to figure out how a pond works. Right? Most people do not do that. And of course, we extract and we harvest these resources that are finite. We do not recognize their [00:34:00] dependency and we definitely deprive enormous historically marginalized people access to any sort of nature, much less to make their own garden or pond or whatever it might be, or to make their pliostein bark, right?

And that is essential. But it is also important, and I feel like you did such a good job of really painting the scope and the implications of this, which is, we are the blink of an eye in certainly in Earth's history, much less larger. But, it's funny, we were down in North Carolina last week down the Outer Banks, which is something that has not existed forever and won't exist for very long.

And, the waves were a little rough, the yellow flags were out, not the red flags. And my 11 year old was getting pretty cocky about playing in the waves. I said, just remember, the ocean doesn't care about you. Have fun and I'm glad you're getting more confident and more skilled, but it doesn't care about you.

And we have leaned on these incredible processes again, like you spent so much of the book talking about [00:35:00] plankton. It is the thing right without anything else. And it is both fragile, but at the same time, the Earth went a very long time without us, and it'll go through different versions without us, but it is also not afraid or not lacking the capability or need to completely turn itself over when some of these systems start to go awry. And I think that's one of the things I really appreciated is you didn't just start off with, the Amazon is the lungs of the earth or urchins have eaten all the kelp and cause the water is so warm and we need more seals. It's painting it as this magnificent, beautiful, interdependent thing of which we're just a part of. And then saying, these are the ways it can break or it's breaking , and how we can affect those. And I feel like that is what makes you hopefully have more of a relationship with these things, whether it makes you want to travel or again, look in your backyard or your front yard.

Ferris Jabr: Yeah. Thank you for saying so. I mean, I really, I did wanna convey, the [00:36:00] scope of this book is so broad, both physically and temporally because it's going through so much of earth history, which has been around for more than four and a half billion years. And then it's also looking at the planet from an explicitly holistic perspective. So it's, every ecosystem, every continent trying to see these connections between all these large scale systems. And it's so true that I've come to realize there is no such thing as just earth.

There's been so many different versions of earth throughout its history. That's partly where the title comes from is that the planet is in a perpetual state of becoming. It's always changing and we have to understand how it became the world it is today, which is a very long story. And a large part of that, the part I focus on is how life has continually transformed the planet to make it the world it is today.

But we also have to understand the world it is rapidly becoming right now, largely because of what our species has done to the planet. And there is like a solace and inspiration and courage to be found [00:37:00] in looking at the planet through geological time specifically because you do see this incredible longevity and resilience and tenacity.

The fact that the planet has gone through 5 mass extinctions where the majority of species alive at the time went extinct and yet each time managed not just to recover, but arguably to become more complex, more biodiverse over time, getting to where we are today, where we have not just microbes and not just microbes and plants, but this incredible diversity of life probably the peak of biodiversity in the planet's history.

And like you said, for more than 2 billion years, the planet was exclusively microbial. There not only was there no humans, there was no multicellular complex life of any kind. That is a version of Earth that can exist, the microbes are perfectly happy with that version of Earth, but now what we have, what we have evolved and what we depend on is so much more than that.

And that is what we are trying to preserve because, regardless of what we do, what happens to us Earth as a [00:38:00] whole will go on, and it could revert to that microbial state and have this glorious microbial diversity that involves no complex life whatsoever. But obviously, we are trying to preserve this very particular version, iteration of Earth that is necessary for our way of life, and that requires keeping the planet within these very strict thresholds, and it's not just the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, it's everything. It's the pH and chemistry of the oceans. It's how much pollution is out there.

It's how much soil do you have left to actually grow things to do agriculture, it's just all of these thresholds that cannot be crossed and must be maintained in these narrow bands. And yeah, that's basically the challenge before us right now, is how do we preserve a version of Earth that is familiar enough to us that we can continue our way of life because it won't be the same. We've already changed the planet enough that it's not going to be exactly the same as it was. The nineties are gone, unfortunately, never returned to that much [00:39:00] more idyllic time. But we can still preserve a version of the planet that is familiar enough.

It's a variation on a theme that we can continue having a thriving human civilization. And hopefully eventually, even a better world that is powered by renewable energy and clean energy, and not dependent on fossil fuels and the current technological and economic infrastructures that are simply not compatible with a livable, habitable planet.

That's this fundamental incompatibility that we have to finally accept and deal with.

Quinn: I really appreciated how much I mean, it wasn't extensive, but it was meaningful how much you talked about and included Donut Economics and those ideas in this which are just very important.

It's funny you talked about how broad this is, the scope of Earth's history and all these things and so minute down to your garden and your pond and your raccoons or pulling apart the whole vast part of the kelp and understanding of fuck, there's another whole world in there, but that is vitally important and it makes me think about, and I've been thinking a lot about time. One,[00:40:00] I'm ancient. Apparently, that happened fast. I've got kids. It goes so quickly. The cliche is obnoxiously true. You've got a dog, you understand that like, it's the world's greatest crime that dogs don't outlive us, right? They should be the sharks that are 400 years old swimming around. But you also think about if you nerd out about enough, like you said, geological time, universal time, galactic time, whatever it might be. And it all, if you really put it together, what it does is it hopefully makes you feel like each of our but also our time here and the circumstances that let us be here are incredibly precious.

And I'm sure you're familiar with the Drake equation and the Great Filter idea, right? Was it did we already pass it going from single cell to multicell or is it not in front of us and of other civilizations? And there was an article recently going actually, I think we need to update that equation because we forgot to include plate tectonics.

And when you do the math, it goes from Oh, it turns out there's probably billions, or at least there were millions and millions to come and probably a bunch out there. We'll never see them or never [00:41:00] reach them, whatever. And then they were like, actually, if you do the plate tectonics thing, there might not be that many out there.

Ferris Jabr: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Quinn: Because it’s incredibly rare.

And yet again, you can, understandably, feel a little down about that, or you can read your book and learn about how microbes influence plate tectonics, right?

And go, again, like, how do you not see how lucky we are and how precious this is? And you had a great quote, and I just dug it up here where you said, A defining feature of our planet today, and again, today being the key because it's been so many different versions, is not simply the presence of water, but the simultaneous existence of water in all its possible states.

Vapor, liquid, ice, and its continuous movement between air, sea, and land. We're constantly, we're like, Oh, we found another exoplanet! Nevermind, it rains diamonds. We couldn't survive there. These things that we have in this time that we each have, whether you're writing a book like this, or running Pleistocene, or whatever it might be. I guess this is all [00:42:00] one way of just saying thank you, I think it really hits home, I had like a year ago, I spent like maybe an hour, consulting on the phone with Sesame Street about how to talk to kids about climate change, and I was like, if that is all I ever do, it's like that 52 minutes,

I'm good, and because the thing I came back to was, it's just about relationships, that's what this the whole thing isn't, that seems to be, again, interdependencies the theme of this book, if you have to come back to.

Ferris Jabr: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. No, what you just said is such a fantastic and beautiful way of thinking about all of this. So thank you so much for that. And I think you're absolutely right that it is truly miraculous how much life is intertwined with the basic structure and physics and chemistry of our planet and how important it has become to the way the planet works today and the systems we depend on.

And it's fascinating to think about potential other living planets out there that are much more limited than ours might be, so like my understanding, for example, is that for most of Earth's [00:43:00] history, we have not had frozen poles or potentially even ice anywhere, maybe like tiny pockets here and there, but for most of Earth's history, the planet has been too warm for the abundance of ice to exist, which is so bizarre for us to think about because it's such a huge part of our earth, and even with the horrifying thawing and melting that's going on right now, imagine a world in which there's literally no ice.

I've often wanted to write something about, the museum of ice in the future where the only place you can see snow and snowflakes and ice is in a museum where they've recreated or preserved these things because it doesn't exist in the natural world anymore but it's fascinating also to think about more cosmically are there other worlds where, something like microbial life has emerged, but it hasn't really become intertwined with the planet to the same degree it has here.

So water doesn't exist in all three states simultaneously. Or you don't have substantial land masses. Or you have plate tectonics, [00:44:00] but they're like, they're stultified and halting. And they're not really as nearly dynamic as we have here. Because all of that has to work in concert for this like incredibly beautiful complex planet that we have, which makes it all the more precious and miraculous as you were saying. And another favorite writer of mine, E.M. Forster, he has this mysterious epigraph in all his novels, Only Connect. The meaning has been debated for many, many decades.

I like to interpret it as underscoring the importance of relationship, relationship is a fundamental feature of our universe. It's hard to think of anything that truly exists in isolation from anything else, right? Everything feels tied together, hitched together when you really look at it.

And so it's like relationship is almost like the most important property of anything in our world because it's all about how things interact with each other, not just how they are on their own. And I just feel like the sheer complexity of the interconnections of our world and [00:45:00] how much they make possible is what we are coming to appreciate, more and more deeply and to recognize more and more explicitly through science.

And it's wonderful to give that kind of instinctual or intuitive wonder a kind of scientific compliment, which for me just enhances it all the more.

Quinn: Well, I think you did a fantastic job of that. It really is a love letter. It's an exploration. It is so filled with wonder. These things feel so foreign to us, but they shouldn't. If we treated them, with the reverence and with the respect for the dependents we actually do have for them, these things are part of who we are. And again, we prevent a lot of folks from accessing the nature of which we are a part of, or we don't prioritize it in some way. But it really does, it matters. I don't want to keep you forever. I could do this all day, but I've got a last few questions.

I usually ask everyone and then I'll get you out of here. I know you gotta get back to your garden here. So, Ferris when was the first time in your life where you realized that you had the power of change or the power to actually do something meaningful and [00:46:00] folks talk about running for class office, in fourth grade and promising more snack machines or protest or writing a book.

Ferris Jabr: For me, the intoxicating power of language came into my life very early. I definitely just glommed onto reading and words and language from a very young age and then, writing as a form of affecting change also became something I was aware of very young, because I remember growing up in California, we take a lot of field trips to these amazing outdoor spaces, of which are so abundant in California.

And one of them was one of the resting stops from migrating monarch butterflies. It's called Natural Bridges in the Santa Cruz area. And so monarchs will stop there and they'll gather on the eucalyptus trees and they hang in these amazing bunches just dripping from the leaves and they just rest there for a little bit before they continue their journey.

And when there's huge numbers of them, because when they fold their wings, they hide their colorful orange parts and they look like brown leaves. [00:47:00] They just look like giant clusters of dead leaves for camouflage. So I wrote about that in second grade, I think, after one of these field trips.

And I must've described it like, I used words like cluster or I use some vocabulary that impressed my second grade teacher, and then her being impressed, impressed upon me, that that was something I could do with language, that the things I wrote could make a big impression on people and get a reaction out of them.

And so I was just very drawn to describing the world through language, trying to capture the world in language in a way that elicited the greatest response possible from my peers, from my teachers, from my family. And so, for me, just, writing as a way to engage with the world, to understand the world was very important from very early on.

So that moment has stuck with me, going out into nature, observing, writing it down and getting a response from people.

Quinn: Thank you for sharing that. And something you said is so compelling to me. We're obviously in many ways at this crossroads with [00:48:00] journalism. Again, in a number of ways we don't need to get into, one of them is how emphatic, if at all, should and can journalists be, again, depending on whether you've got a substack or a book or you're working at a traditional paper, if it still exists, about solutions and do you tread into the political or whatever it might be, or the corporate and things like that.

And one of my favorite writers who I believe blurbed your book, Ed Yong has spent a lot of time wrestling with that and very publicly as well. It's fascinating to me because you said a version of how can I make an impression?

How can I have people take away from this? Cause it's really easy to, I got to write a book cause I got to get this out of me. Right.Or I want people to read this, but for it to, you want to have it have an effect, have the maximum effect. That is a very important lever to be acting upon, right? I imagine that influences your writing quite a bit besides just directly writing solutions.

Ferris Jabr: Yeah, I mean, well, I'm a very idea driven person. I'm very interested in how do we best [00:49:00] understand the world that we are part of. And so, honestly, for me, it almost always begins with intense curiosity that is, driving towards deeper understanding. That's what I'm always pursuing.

It's a deeper, truer understanding of the world. And that's something I very much want to get across with my writing. So at a most basic level, if I'm helping people change the way they see the world, they think about the world and understand things more clearly, more compellingly, that for me is, already enough.

That is really one of my main goals, but then in a more pragmatic way, on top of that, as you're saying, there's a lot of discussion in this book about how do we as a species, as communities best respond to the current planetary crisis? What are the specific things, actionable things we can do?

And of course, a lot of what I draw on, I mean, the IPCC reports, I mean, the top climate experts around the world have been doing this every few years for decades. Like they've been literally sitting down and being like, here is what we need to do as a society, they've been spelling it out for us. And so it's become like the [00:50:00] knowledge base is there and the tools are there, but it's the politics of it and it's the entanglement of the economy, where the money is coming from and where it is going and how it is entangled with our politics and our culture and society and all of that needs to change.

And not that long ago, it was also about a cultural shift. I think we're finally seeing more and more people accept the reality of climate change. I think my understanding is polling is showing that within America, most people do accept the basic scientific reality of what is happening, but that even that took way too long, and now it's more about turning that acceptance into actually motivating the necessary social political change.

And it doesn't have to be everybody, but you need to reach a certain threshold to get to that necessary level. So, yeah, there's so much there to discuss. And I hope this book helps people see the world in a new way, appreciate it in a deeper way.

But also gives them some ideas for what they can do personally. And, to help better understand what we as a species [00:51:00] and as a society need to be doing as well.

Quinn: I love that. Who is someone in your life that has positively impacted your work in the past six months? I guess as you've been bringing this baby home.

Ferris Jabr: Ooh, yeah, that's a good question. I have to give a shout out to my partner, Ryan, and our dog, Jack, because, I mean, first of all, Ryan has been with me the closest of anybody throughout the whole book writing journey. Seeing everything I've gone through, the high points and the low points and all the frustrations and the delays and everything.

And with that, his support was so essential throughout this process. And Jack, he's our best friend and our child and so many things to us. And he's our eight year old Brittany Spaniel. And he is a very high energy dog. I would say I walk him at least three to four times a day, and those walks have become a very important part of my kind of day to day life and also creative process, because it is on those walks where I get a lot of my best ideas, solutions pop into my head for things I've been struggling with on the page.

[00:52:00] There's a whole robust field of research that fascinates me about how certain kinds of activities, like walking, allow our minds to reach these creative solutions to problems in a way that sitting down at a computer doesn't allow you to do. So I've really come to depend on that. And then I'm fortunate to be part of several kind of literary communities and just groups of writer peers and we stay in touch through Slack and sometimes we meet in person for the ones that are here in Portland.

And those communities are so important because the way we live now, like all of my closest friends are scattered. We all live all over the place. We all have our own families and our own lives going on in different cities. And we only get to see each other in person every so often, so this kind of virtual digital mycelial tissue that is connecting us all has become very important for me and makes me feel like, I have a community present, in my day to day life working from home, and I'm not completely isolated in this box despite not actually seeing people in person most of the time.

Quinn: Yeah. No, it [00:53:00] matters. The number of text threads we've got that are like specifically topical and it might even include all of the same people of we have one called the Oasis and you just genuinely cannot talk about bad things in there. It's like just, it's like recipes or dogs. You want to like bitch about your kids. Like that's the other one. Scroll down. We'll find it,\.

But it really does matter. Right. To feel like you have that every day. Well, I appreciate you sharing all that. And the last one in all of your time a book you have read in the past year or so that has changed you.

It has opened your mind to a topic you haven't considered or changed your thinking, or it could just be fiction that turns your brain off.

Ferris Jabr: Yeah. A book I've been recommending to everybody is The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. Have you heard about this science fiction novel?

Quinn: I don't think so.

Ferris Jabr: So Ray Nayler is an amazing science fiction writer. He's mostly written short stories. This is his first full length novel. And I won't give too much away, but the basic idea is that humans encounter a self-aware, language capable octopus [00:54:00] species living in the ocean.

And he parallels that with the advent of true AI, like a genuinely self-aware, sentient Android. And the whole book explores questions of language and intelligence and self awareness. What do these concepts really mean? What would it look like if we discovered another species that was as self aware and intelligent and language capable as we are right here on our planet, not even going to another planet.

And yeah, there's two fictional books that are excerpted throughout this novel. So it gets meta and messy that way.

Quinn: Yeah, yeah.

Ferris Jabr: And the passages from those books are themselves worth the price of admission. I think one of them is called How Oceans Think, and it's written by this fictional leading oceanographer and what she has to say about the life of the ocean.

And the origin-evolution of intelligence and how the life and marine ecosystem are tied together is just fascinating. So I highly recommend this novel, The Mountain in the Sea by Ray [00:55:00] Nayler.

Quinn: Could not be more up my alley. If anyone ever wants to, if you ever want to be like, are there aliens? I encourage you to go deep on octopuses and octopi. I think you can say both.

Because truly like it does make you go, I don't know how we could be so fundamentally different and yet every time someone talks about eating them, I'm like, what are you doing? There's a 50 percent chance they're smarter than you are.

They're incredible. I love that. Well, I'm going to dig into it. I love short stories too, so I'll just do all of those as well.

This has been so wonderful, Ferris. I hope this book is everything you hoped, it is everything I hoped. Just reading the blurbs, I was like, Jesus, okay, I guess I'm doing this. So I appreciate you for the years and years of work you put into it. It's very personal. It's very beautiful and telling. And yeah, I hope the rest of the launch goes well for you.

Ferris Jabr: Well, thank you. Thank you so much for having me, this as a really fun conversation. I really appreciate it.