While our planet is moving towards a new climate balance, which our species may not be recovering, here is a precious and easy to access book, to change our eyes on the relationship we have with our environment. The natural phenomena that surround us are interdependent, life is not what we imagine.
Ferris Jabr is a journalist, and has traveled the planet on behalf of the American press, the prestigious New York Times, Wired ou Scientific American.
His book published under the title Becoming Earth : how our planet came to life was translated into French by Swiss Eso Eso editions. His reading invites us to change our gaze on the living: life on earth is much more than an event that would have “hatched” on its surface, our planet is not a wise and static millefeuille composed of a layer of rock, living, and a gaseous atmosphere! This creature called the Earth is a renewed surprise, as the boundaries between living and inanimate, between biology, geology and earth sciences in general are fading, blurred.
ReadThe land self -regulates its temperature … until human intervention
-Ferris Jabr takes us into terrestrial ecosystems that few will have the chance to see, and even less to understand if we are invited. We walk nearly three kilometers below the surface, at the top of the Amazonian canopy, on a Hawaiian beach, a giant algae forest off Californiaon the cold Siberian steppes or even … the author’s personal garden.
The exploration of these ecosystems at first glance very different leads to a single goal: that life is a demiurgic force in itself. It adapts to its environment, but it also adapts it. We, a human species, are not the only or the most active, in the metamorphosis of the earth system. Other organisms, although more “summary”, plankton, underground, atmospheric microbes, also make their share in this incessant transformation of the whole planet.
Three matrices visited to explain what the living
From the first paragraphs, we are caught up in the strangeness of the world that Jabr draws. Roche, water and air, these are the three super-milious explored. Western science in ign[…]
Read more on ScienceSetAvenir.fr
