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Ferris Jabr

lines on the record: 38
first: 2024-08-28
most recent: 2024-08-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“They recognize they're not delusional about what's happening to the planet right now. They fully recognize that, but they're not willing to just throw their hands up. They very much want to try something, do something, and they're willing to throw their entire selves and their entire lives into those projects.”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, really important for keeping the permafrost frozen and keeping the landscape and atmosphere cooler, basically. And then that's part of what they are trying to do. But the scale they want to do this on, ideally, is so vast and they have so few resources that many of their scientific peers, while they respect them, just think that what they're trying to do is just kind of bonkers. That it's never going to happen at a meaningful scale or in time to really make a difference for global climate, but they are absolutely 100% dedicated and committed to it. Like that is their entire focus of their life and work. And their station is important for other reasons. You know, scientists visit their research station to conduct really important Arctic ecology research. But this is their kind of a primary mission and focus in their life. And so I do find it inspiring people who basically do not give up in the face of extreme inverse.”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Frank Lake's story is particularly inspiring and profound. And I think the work he does is a really great example of how to work with the ecosystems in which we are embedded instead of trying to always overpower them or subjugate them. You know, I also went to this experimental nature park in Siberia called Pleistocene Park, which is managed by a team of Russian scientists, the Zimovs and their families. And, you know, what they are trying to do is truly mind-bogglingly ambitious. You know, they're trying to bring back large grazers to the Arctic and recreate some version of the Pleistocene grasslands that existed there tens of thousands of years ago. All this part of this larger project of rewilding and ecological restoration and also combating climate change because the way they see it, the symbiosis between grazers and grasslands was actually”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and those cases are real and they're becoming increasingly common. More and more people are taking that approach, saying that this river or this glacier or this forest deserves legal rights as a person, as an entity and should be protected in that way. And these are real cases, you know, proceeding and sometimes being victorious and getting these kinds of rights for more than human ecosystems.”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm certainly the newest. And next year, the British nature writer Robert MacFarlane is releasing a book called Is A River Alive, question mark, which he explores animism and the concept, you know, of life and sort of agency being extended to non-human systems, including rivers and mountains and ecosystems. And he's also looking at legal personhood rights for these systems. So I think that's going to intersect in a really interesting way and be really fascinating book. Yeah, those are a few of the ones I know about.”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the overstory was hugely influential on me, and I actually read it twice and I had the chance to meet Richard Powers when he came to Portland for a vent and I had a chance to meet him because I wrote about the Canadian forest ecologist that inspired one of his characters. So I was really fascinated by what he did there. You know, there's a book by Tim Flannery called Here on Earth. It was published quite a while ago, but it is very similar in theme and scope where he's sort of also looking at these interconnections between life and the planet. The philosopher writer Peter Godfrey Smith has a new book out right now called Living on Earth, which also explores how life has transformed the planet, but he's really interested in sentient animal life in particular. So that's really his focus is how has sentient animal life of all kinds really changed the planet. The British journalist Jonathan Watts has a new biography coming out called The Many Lives of James Lovelock, and I think it will be probably the longest, most in-depth re-examination of his”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he himself has admitted that he made mistakes in his very original articulations of Gaia, and he and Lynn Margulis, the American biologist that he co-developed this hypothesis with, really refined those ideas over time. And I think Margulis deserves more credit for helping us understand that they were really talking about life as this emergent phenomenon at the planetary scale and that the planet as a whole really does have these rhythms to it and that these rhythms can be massively disrupted, but they can also be restored. And that's kind of the central challenge that is facing us right now is that we have introduced this massive disruption to the planetary rhythms and we need to find a way to bring those back in balance as quickly as possible.”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we have inadvertently in first and then more recently knowingly really warped the planets, rhythms, particularly the carbon cycle. And so, you know, you have to acknowledge and recognize all of that to truly understand the Guy hypothesis and Earth system science. And, you know, Lovelock himself, you know, he had a wide range of opinions on many different things, but he was never a climate denier. He was very much aware of the seriousness of the climate crisis and the need to replace fossil fuels. And, you know, I think that we're continuing to see this sort of evolving legacy and ongoing discussion and debate about how best to think about his ideas and theories and sort of how to adapt them for the 21st century.”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Argued for either of those extremes. These were ways other people took his words and ideas and twisted them for their own purposes. Central to his idea is that life always changes its environment. So all life has the power to contribute to planetary change, and we are no exception to that rule, even though we are just one species and we are so small compared to the planet, we absolutely have the power to change it as a whole. And that's exactly what we have been doing for the past thousands of years. And in general, when life and environment are given enough time and opportunity, they do seem to converge upon relationships and rhythms that ensure mutual persistence and sort of lead to an amplification of self-regulating processes. But we are so unique in being with a degree of self-awareness that we have and the degree of technological sophistication that we have.”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That we have now greatly reduced thanks to that discovery. So as soon as Lovelock published his first book on Gaia in 1979, it became a cultural phenomenon and many different groups of people latched onto it for many different reasons. You had kind of the hippies and extreme greenies and they loved it because they were kind of thinking about this mother earth Gaia goddess kind of way of thinking about the planet. But then you also had the industrialists and the fossil fuel industry folks. You know, they liked it because it gave them a way to say that the planet party has these self-regulating mechanisms and as you said will kind of just take care of itself. So it doesn't really matter what we do. But in my opinion both those extremes are profound misunderstandings of what Lovelock is saying himself and what Earth system science shows us. He certainly never”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so Lovelock was really very much an independent and maverick scientist. For most of his career, he was not working for anyone, organization or university. He was basically a freelance scientist, and he had a lot of consulting positions with many different organizations. One of them quite early on was for Shell and he was looking into all kinds of things, including the way that plankton and algae can modulate global climate and basically what do the chemical byproducts of organisms, including humans, how do they affect the atmosphere and the climate. And he also invented this incredibly exquisitely sensitive device that is able to detect trace amounts of chemicals in the atmosphere. And that was actually really important for discovering some of the pollutants in the atmosphere that were harming the ozone layer at the time. And certain refrigerants and such.”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“in India in particular that and so lethal that out of desperation the Indian government just takes to the skies and releases aerosols into the atmosphere to cool at least the planet at least locally over there and this is something that has been debated for a long long time you know what would the consequences of doing this be is it worth doing it and I it now seems increasingly likely that extreme weather events and climate change will become so bad so quickly that somebody might try this kind of technological based geoengineering just out of desperation”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Creating them to be that way. And we now have this resurgence of recognition of the value of what's called prescribed fire or controlled fire deliberately using fire, low-grade fires to shape ecosystems in ways that reduce the chance of later much more catastrophic fires. And there are state and federal agencies that are increasingly open to using indigenous practices, indigenous fire management, and prescribed burns to help combat the current wildfire crisis. So that, you know, there is possibility there, but it's just, it's very challenging. It's something that has to happen over a very long period of time. And we're kind of running out of time, which is one of the problems. And I do think we are unfortunately going to see more geoengineering out of desperation. This is how Kim Stanley Robinson opens his novel, The Ministry for the Future, and this novel heat waves have become so extreme.”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely, you had the legacy of fire suppression in the West has definitely been contributing factor to the current wildfire crisis. And so, you know, it's very, very challenging to understand the complexity of these ecosystems at a high enough level to actually manipulate them in a beneficial way. Actually, fire is probably one of the best examples of how we as humans can learn to work with the ecosystems in which we are embedded, because the indigenous peoples of Western North America have been doing this for millennia. They have used fire to shape the landscapes and the ecosystems of which they are part in ways that benefit themselves and the species they depend on. And then the colonists came over and saw these Eden-like settings and thought that was just the way it was and that it was just there for them to take, not recognizing that indigenous peoples had been cultivating and shape actively shaping those landscapes.”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“History trend we have as humans of really just mucking things up ecologically, like trying something out and goes horribly wrong. I sometimes call it the cane toad phenomenon because one of the most famous examples is when we introduced cane toads to Australia to try to devour the beetles that were these crop pests, and then the cane toads themselves became pests. They took over because they were not native and they're now very invasive and toxic. So we do that kind of thing all the time.”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Protect, enhance the planet's innate ability to do that. And perhaps the single best way to do that is to protect and restore the ecosystems that are already doing this. So things like forests, grasslands, kelp forests, undersea meadows, wetlands, peat bogs, these are all incredible ecosystems with an astonishing capacity to absorb and sequester carbon. And indeed, if it were not for these ecosystems and for the ocean and the terrestrial biospheres, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere right now from our emissions would be so much greater. I mean, they've already absorbed so much of our emissions for us. So in addition to that, some people get interested, and can we take a more technological approach to sort of harness the power of these ecological systems to learn how to work with them ideally and kind of hopefully reverse that horrible...”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, I think Earth system science is a really powerful guide to how we should respond to the climate crisis because it really underscores these incredible interconnections between biology and geology, between life and the planet as a whole. And it's clear if you understand Earth system science and how carbon moves through the planet that the central focus has to be replacing the fossil fuel industry with renewable and clean energy and also reforming industrial agriculture because fossil fuels and industrial agriculture are the two major sources of greenhouse gas emissions. But there's a complementary approach that's also emphasized by this way of thinking about the planet, which is to recognize where is the planet already evolved, these incredible living systems that can transport and store and sequester carbon. How can we amplify?”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Process of relationship and interaction and interconnection. And so I really, when I'm in my garden now, you know, working in the soil, I really feel that visceral connection to the greater life of the planet in a way I did not before. And I've come to see life not as something that simply resides on the planet or inhabits the planet, but really as a physical literal extension of the planet. And I think plants exemplify that so well because they are literally rooted to the earth.”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Garden is so amazing and a huge difference from what there was before. Initially, we would see the occasional spider crawling through crunchy grass. We now have a multitude of insects and bird life and even mammals like raccoons and jumping mice. There's hummingbirds, dragonflies, damsel flies, even predators like hawks have shown up. And that's been a real joy. And, you know, so it's been this real process of, you know, learning what soil really is and how to restore it, cultivate it, nurture it, bring it back to life, and also coming to see soil as a microcosm for our living planet because both soil and earth are these networks of rock, water, air, and creature, and it is really the ways that these different components interact with each other that is the phenomenon we call life. It is this active”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and protecting its unique architecture and ecosystem, and you want the plant roots to perfuse the soil and to bring in their symbiotic partners the microbes and fungi. And once you have that established, that is what really starts to bring back the soil ecosystem as a whole, bring it back to life. So that's what we started to do. We brought in a lot of young, healthy, diverse plants, a lot of natives, a lot of drought tolerant perennials. And, you know, it was astonishing how quickly they grew and kind of started to do the really hard work themselves. If you give plants the space, the time and opportunity, they will astound you with what they can do. And we have definitely noticed within the past four years a market difference in the soil quality. It has become darker, richer, looser, softer, more workable. The wildlife that is now present in our”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Took billions of years of the element's weathering rock, breaking down rock, and then hundreds of millions of years of complex life on land, enriching that crumbled rock with their remains and their organic byproducts to create the kind of rich fertile soils that we depend on. It takes something like a century to establish a single inch of fertile topsoil. So it's a very gradual process of ripening and maturation. So I realized that I needed to not just dump a bunch of fertilizers or nutrients back into the soil, I needed to actually bring the soil back to life to restore this ecosystem that had been so abused and neglected for so many years. And one of the best ways to do that is to introduce a large and diverse arrangement of healthy plants because what you really want is this living mantle, this living cloak of vegetation covering the”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nutrients back to the soil, but I quickly discovered by studying soil science that it's actually much more complicated than that, and that that was not the right way to think about soil, that I really didn't understand what soil was and how to nurture it. And I've come to see soil not simply as this substrate or medium for life, but as a living entity in and of itself, and there is growing recognition within mainstream scientific circles that soil is alive, that we can think of it as alive. You know, the soil science society of America, the USDA, they've described soil as alive. It is this dynamic network of rock, water, air, and organisms. And it is really the interconnections between them, their relationships that create soil as we understand it. For the majority of the planet's history, soil, the kind of soil we depend on to farm and grow things did not exist.”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so when my partner and I bought this house in Portland about four years ago, we knew we wanted to create a garden, and so we ripped out all that was here in terms of a yard was just a derelict grass lawn, just turf grass. So we ripped out all the grass and we set to work, but we quickly discovered that the soil was in really bad shape. It was clay heavy, like a lot of soil here is in Portland. It was full of rubble because this used to be a construction site and a parking lot. It was very unyielding and unworkable. And this was the first time I had a garden of this size to cultivate. In the past, I'd always worked with containers or small raised beds or much smaller spaces, so it was easy enough to go to the nursery, buy a few bags of high quality soil and just call it a day. Now I have this much larger quantity of soil to deal with to remediate in some ways. And I thought I needed to learn basically how to add new.”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is ancient marine life, primarily, you know, photosynthetic plankton that sunk to the bottom of the ocean when it died and it was compressed and petrified and eventually turned, some of it turned into this oil. So we dig that up and we turn some of it into plastic, then we pollute the ocean with it and it breaks down into innumerable microparticles. And then these microparticles of plastic, they become like ecological imposters. They start to mimic true plankton in very weird ways, predators start to eat these tiny particles of plastic because they smell and look like they're prey. And these microparticles sink to the bottom of the ocean and join the real plankton in these deep sea sediments so they are warping the ocean carbon cycle in ways we do not fully understand. So I've really come to see plastic as this kind of chemical necromancy.”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“in Earth's history that is partly composed of plastic, so it seems what's happening is that the beach is so steeped and plastic waste that if anybody makes a campfire anywhere on the beach, that can lead to the plastic fusing with rock and shell and sand and forming an entirely new material called plastic lomerate that is incredibly durable. And one of the things that really fascinates and haunts me about plastic and plastic pollution is that it is this bizarre distortion of the ocean's native ecosystems and carbon cycles. So plastic is made primarily of petroleum, and petroleum is made primarily of ancient plankton. You know, what we call fossil fuels, petroleum and gas and coal, these are stores of ancient life that have been cooked and compressed deep within the planet, and most of the oil, the petroleum that we use.”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so you know, I went to Camillo in the Hawaiian Islands and the islands themselves kind of act like a strainer or a giant comb in the middle of the Pacific. So a lot of ocean debris and waste tends to accumulate on the Hawaiian islands, and in particular this one spot known as Camilo. And that particular beach in the past has accumulated piles of plastic trash, something like eight to ten feet high. More recently, thanks to these concerted cleanup efforts, that amount of plastic trash has really been reduced massively, but there's still a lot of microparticles buried in the sand, and if those cleanup efforts do not continue, the plastic would continue to accumulate to its past levels. So when I went there, you could still absolutely see all kinds of plastic buried in the sand, including this new material that scientists have dubbed plastiglomerate, which is the first rock tide.”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ubiquitous that the chemicals and gases they release probably influence global climate. There are certain kinds of plankton that release chemical compounds that increase cloud cover and when you do that you in enough quantity you're changing global climate because clouds are very reflective so they reflect a lot of heat and light back to space and they are typically cooling the planet but it gets really complicated because it depends where those clouds are in the atmosphere, what kinds of clouds they are. So there's actually a variable influence in terms of raising or lowering global temperature. But the point is to sort of underscore the profound power of these incredible tiny organisms that most of us do not see and have no idea even exist.”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then Plankton continued to be suffused in basically every part of the Earth's system. Not only are they in the ocean, but they're also being swept into the atmosphere, all kinds of microbes, microorganisms and their products are routinely swept into the atmosphere and they actually seed both rain clouds and ice crystals within those clouds so they stimulate precipitation. And, you know, there's even these incredible dust storms, these currents of dust that blow over from Africa to South America and fertilize the Amazon with the nitrogen and phosphorus it needs. And that dust is itself plankton. It's the remains of ancient plankton coming from this vast ancient lake bed in Africa, blowing across a modern ocean and fertilizing the modern Amazon ecosystem. And James Lovelock, he realized that plankton are so”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really responsible for some of the most fundamental features of the planet. So, you know, if we go back three to four billion years, there was probably, Earth probably had this hazy orange atmosphere with essentially no oxygen. And it was photosynthetic microbes in the ocean, cyanobacteria that began this long process of oxygenating the ocean and atmosphere and eventually raising in combination with land plants the level of oxygen in the atmosphere from basically zero to twenty one percent, which is what we have today. That was a probably the single most profound transformation the planet ever went through because once you change the entire chemistry of the planet like that, you change everything else. So we went from an oxygen poor environment to an oxygen-rich one that made new minerals possible, it made fire possible for the first time, it changed the color of the sky from orange to blue, it formed the ozone layer, just a truly profound change.”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the chapter on Plankton sits right at the heart of the book, and they really captivated me and continue to fascinate me. First of all, you know, the term Plankton refers to a multitude of typically tiny creatures that live in liquid environments and tend to kind of move or drift with the currents. And there's so many of these amazing single cell plankton that most people have never heard of or are really not familiar with, you know, things like coccolithophores, diatoms, radiolarians, foraminifera. They're just these incredible, you know, powerful, beautiful fundamental organisms, and many of them build these exquisite skeletons and shells for themselves that you can only really appreciate with a microscope, but they're just as complicated and in some cases more complex and beautiful than the kind of larger seashells most of us are familiar with. And plankton, they are”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“of the planet and the layers on it, starting with the tiniest creatures, the microbes and the plankton, and then sort of zooming out to the sort of overall impact that human systems are having on these parts of the planet.”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this concept of a living planet that planets can come to life that there's a difference between dead planets like Mars and Venus versus living planets like Earth, that kind of thinking has really gained traction and become a lot more accepted. It remains provocative to say that Earth as a whole is alive, but there is very much an increasing recognition that life and the planet do form a single highly interconnected system. And there's an entire new mainstream field of science called Earth system science that is really founded on that idea and explicitly studies the interconnections between the animate and inanimate components of the planet and really pays attention to its self-regulating processes through geologic time.”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, synonymous with Earth. And what he was arguing was that wherever life emerges, it will inevitably transform its home planet, and that together life and the greater planetary environment form a single self regulating living system. And he was really fascinated by the parallels in the analogies between the Earth as a whole and its smaller constituent lifeforms, organisms, you know, the fact that the Earth seems to have some innate capacity to regulate its climate, to maintain a kind of homeostasis or something similar. And so he really came to see Earth as a whole, as alive, as a living planet. And for a long time, these kinds of ideas were harshly criticized and ridiculed within Western science, but there's been a shift recently. In the past few decades, that opposition has diminished significantly.”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“one it has a very long and sometimes controversial history, but the first modern scientist to really put the theory forward and champion it was an English scientist named James Lovelock, who you write about. He calls it the Gaia hypothesis. Can you just explain what the Gaia hypothesis is? Yeah, so, you know, as you were saying, there are really ancient antecedents to a lot of these ideas and themes, you know, this general idea of interconnectedness between life and the planet, and that the idea of a living world, that our world is alive in some meaningful sense that we can think of planet Earth as a living entity. And within the canon of Western science, it was James Lovelock who first articulated this in a way that really caught on for Western scientists and sparked a huge discussion and debate that continues to this day. And he eventually called his hypothesis the Gaia hypothesis after the Greek goddess Gaia of the earth.”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“evolved unique ways of getting energy such as breathing or eating metal and rock. So the biologist I went with will sample these microbes they literally sample water that is gushing out of the pores and fissures in the rock. There are spigots attached to the rock where miners have drilled into it previously and they'll take that water back to their labs and search for these microbes and study them. It's fascinating and that episode which is the opening chapter of the book really sets the stage for one of the central ideas in becoming Earth, which is about how deeply interconnected the Earth is and how its systems are very much intertwined in ways that we don't notice or aren't necessarily immediately aware of from microbes and rock turning rock into soil to fungal systems and trees that can influence rainfall or hail.”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That are involved with the Earth's geological processes in some way. And, you know, you take an elevator takes about 10 minutes to get all the way down to the lowest level. And then you travel through these extremely narrow shoots of rock on these really small rail cars that are kind of chachunk-chunking along. And the only light is coming from the light on your headlamp, on your helmet. And there are spaces that are extremely hot and humid so that you can only be in them for a few minutes at a time before you have to back out and get some fresh air. And there are other spaces that are much more cavernous and much air is circulating through them much more efficiently. And so they're a bit cooler. And the scientists I went with, you know, they're hunting for these deep subsurface intraterrestrial microbes that live in pores and fissures in the Earth's crust that are filled with water, but they often do not have access to sunlight or oxygen, so they've evolved.”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fascinating piece of reporting that you did about how these ancient rocks are teeming with life, and the piece starts with a journey you make an elevator deep into a tunnel in a mining site in South Dakota, which I thought would be a nice place to start today. Can you talk a little bit about that journey, what you are looking for, and what you found? Sure. Yeah, so in South Dakota, the former homesteak gold mine, which was once one of the largest, most productive gold mines on the continent, it was converted into a scientific laboratory of sorts when it closed down, and most of the scientists that go there are physicists, and they're conducting the kind of experiments that need to be shielded from cosmic rays. So they descend close to a mile beneath the surface of the planet into this former mind, and they use that mile or so of rock around them as a shield. I went with a team of geomicrobiologists. So these are biologists who study microbes.”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our guest today is Ferris Jaber, Ferris is a contributing writer for the New York Times magazine. He's also written for The New Yorker, Harper's The Atlantic, National Geographic, and Scientific American. He's a recipient of a witting foundation creative nonfiction grant and fellowships from UC Berkeley and MIT. His new book is Becoming Earth, How Our Planet Came to Life. It's been described as an exceptional exploration of the extraordinary tapestry of life in which Jaber demonstrates the curiosity of a reporter, the mind of a scientist, and the lyricism of a poet. Those aren't my words, but I did thoroughly enjoy reading Becoming Earth. Welcome to Intelligence Square Adverse. Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's so nice to speak with you because even before Intelligence Squared invited me to host this conversation, I'd encountered an excerpt of your book in the New York Times magazine about microbes that live deep under the Earth's surface, and I really loved it.”
2024-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Fresh Perspective on Life on the Blue Planet, with Ferris Jabr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT