A land full of life

It is time to recognize it: our planet is alive! This is in any case the unexpected idea offered by the American author and scientific journalist Ferris Jabr in his new book, This breathing land (titre original : Becoming Earth: How our Planet Came to Life). Based on decades of research, he comes to question the idea that living beings evolve according to their environment without having any influence in return on this environment. He demonstrates that it is largely the living beings who have always been modeled the face of the earth.
Fruit of 6 years of work, the work is articulated in three components (rock, air and water) and erases the boundaries between the animated and the inert, between biology and geology, and argue, science in support, that all this evolves jointly.
***
Québec Science In the introduction of the book, you take up the idea that the earth is alive, a concept close to Gaia or the mother earth. This idea has already had an echo with a part of the public, but not necessarily in the scientific community. What is the historical relationship of this thesis with science?
Ferris Jabr The Greeks of Antiquity and even the thinkers of the Renaissance were very comfortable with the idea that the planet is alive. It is with Charles Darwin that this type of idea becomes unpopular. Science then becomes much more empirical, based on evidence. Scientists want to classify things as precisely as possible. They want to separate the non-living from the living, which leads them to see life as a phenomenon that happens only on the surface of the earth and to consider that the rest is inanimate.
In the 1960s, James Lovelock, a British scientist and inventor, formulated what he called “the Gaïa hypothesis”, by opposing the dominant evolutionary model. For Lovelock, wherever life emerges, it inevitably transforms the environment. In collaboration with the American biologist Lynn Margulis, he developed this idea that life and the planetary environment constitute a single self -regulating entity. His first book, in 1979, was very popular with the general public, especially because he coincided with the rise of the New Age movement. But most biologists did not agree since the land is not a product of natural selection, which it has no genome, that it cannot happen again. In short, for them, she was not alive.
QS So how can you say the opposite today?
FJ Attention ! The earth is not a living being like a bird or a bacteria or a superorganism like a colony of ants. Our planet is the largest known living system – the confluence of all other ecosystems.
Thus, life is not an addition to the planet, but rather a physical extension of it: the earth is a planet that has come to life.
I now see living beings as the organs of the earth and their global activity such as the physiology of the planet. In addition, life and the planetary environment in the broad sense form a single highly interconnected system, which evolves over time. And this system has many characteristics specific to life, that is to say an anatomy, physiology, evolution and, perhaps the most important, an amazing self-regulation and resilience, partly because it can Stabilize its climate over long periods. This vision corresponds to the most recent scientific knowledge.
QS How to avoid falling into the trap of anthropomorphism as it happened in the past?
FJ It is indeed necessary to be cautious, especially in the choice of words. For example, Lovelock called her idea “Gaia”, like the Greek goddess who is a maternal figure, to the suggestion of the novelist William Golding, who wrote Lord of the Flies. This decision led to a great commercial success, but created a huge problem in the scientific world, which has really slowed down the spread of its ideas. It is not necessary to transform the earth into a religious figure or to present it as a sensitive entity.