Becoming Earth by Ferris Jabr review – our planet: a living, breathing, mutating miracle

The US-based journalist has fashioned a wide-ranging and thought-provoking study of how everything from microbes to mammoths transformed our world into a living organism

Why read popular science? The best books manage to entertain, educate, astonish and even galvanise the reader, bringing an appreciation of new realms of knowledge. They expand awareness, not just of the beauty and complexity of the universe, but our place in it as human beings. They serve as celebrations and warnings, challenges and pleas. Traditionally, the genre tends to garland hard data with lashings of anecdote and well-turned, elegant metaphor. With Becoming Earth, Oregon-based journalist Ferris Jabr achieves all of these aims and more. He takes James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, which proposed a reframing of Earth as a living being, and shows how the history of life on Earth is the history of life remaking Earth" in perpetual feedback spirals. Becoming Earth is an exploration of how life has transformed the planet, a meditation on what it means to say that Earth itself is alive, and a celebration of the wondrous ecology that sustains our world."

It's a vision thick with baroque possibilities, potentially endless, and Jabr simplifies his mission by dividing his book into three sections: rock, water and air. In Rock, he journeys a mile underground and learns that as much as 20% of the Earth's biomass - the collective weight of all living things - may be simple organisms that live deep within the earth. There are some microbes that flourish in the cracks between rocks, magma-heated to 60C, and which get their energy from radioactive uranium; he describes others that live for millions of years. The weathering effect of bacteria, fungi and lichens has, over eons, created the silts that have lubricated plate tectonics, creating our continents. Computer models suggest that on a barren planet, the expansion of the continents would have been severely stunted and Earth would have remained a water world flecked with islands."