In this episode, host Susan Mathews is in conversation with Ferris Jabr, author of Becoming
Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life (2024), and a contributing writer for The New York
Times Magazine and Scientific American. The interview focused on the central question in
the book: in what ways and to what extent has life changed the planet? From microbes to
mammoths, life has transformed the continents, oceans, and atmosphere, turning a lump
of orbiting rock into the world as we’ve known it. In the conversation, Jabr spoke of how
Western science in particular has segregated geology from biology, regarding planet
Earth essentially as a giant rock that happens to have some life, minimising the role of life
in shaping the planet.

Ferris Jabr has 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 publications.

He is the recipient of a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant, as well as
fellowships from UC Berkeley and the MIT Knight Science Journalism Program. His work
has been anthologized in several editions of The Best American Science and Nature
Writing series.

He has an MA in journalism from New York University and a Bachelor of Science from
Tufts University. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his partner, Ryan, their dog, Jack, and
more plants than they can count.

You can find him @ferrisjabr on all social media (Twitter/X, Bluesky, Instagram, Threads,
Mastodon).