BookBrowse Reviews Becoming Earth by Ferris Jabr

The idea of Earth as one living, breathing organism is an age-old one, found in belief systems all over the world. Yet when it was first seriously proposed as a scientific hypothesis in the 1970s—the Gaia hypothesis, named after the Greek goddess of the Earth, which posited that the planet itself is alive via interconnected systems—it was the subject of ridicule among scientists.

Now that outlook is changing, and the scientific community is increasingly aware of and interested in the previously overlooked interplay between living organisms, as well as between living and non-living components of ecosystems. Ferris Jabr's new book, Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life, is an easily readable introduction to the science of ecological interconnections, and it serves as a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the planet's physical and biological forces acting upon each other in ...