How life's forms modify and evolve the Earth: (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, June 27, 2024, 22:28 (112 days ago) @ David Turell

A view from a book review:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-earth-went-from-a-sterile-rock-to-a-lush...

"Yet we know now that life left an indelible mark on the planet. The very air we breathe, for example, would not exist if cyanobacteria hadn’t begun spewing oxygen 2.4 billion years ago. Microbes carve subterranean caverns and transform barren rock into fertile soil. Large herbivores summon grasslands by trampling the ground. Life in the Amazon rainforest summons half of the rain that sustains it, making it a sort of “garden that waters itself,” Jabr writes.

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“'Life is not just something that resides on the planet; it’s an extension of the planet. What we call ‘life’ is the matter of Earth, animated.”

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"...the White Cliffs of Dover are made of the compacted remains of ancient single-celled ocean plankton that encased themselves in an intricate chalky exoskeleton. Most of the major chalk formations on the planet are made of the remains of tiny, ancient life—and therefore all the monuments we’ve ever made with limestone are made of plankton and other ancient sea creatures.

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"...a huge amount of evidence has shown that some of the core tenets of what Lovelock was saying are indeed true. His initial insight was that wherever life emerges, it inevitably transforms its home planet.

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"It seems like wherever Earth and life have found an equilibrium, we humans have found a way to tip that out of balance.

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"If you perturb it in the wrong way or to too great an extent, the whole thing starts to fall apart. But that’s happened so many times throughout Earth’s history, and every single time, Earth has not only recovered but has also arguably become more complex and diverse than it was before. Earth has this astonishing ability to endure these catastrophes, pull back to its fundamentals and then reflourish over time.

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"In contrast to many nonhuman life-forms, which have gradually co-evolved these rhythms that tend to stabilize the planet, we’ve done the opposite and, in a geological blink, have massively perturbed those rhythms. I think that clarifies for us exactly what our responsibility is, compared with all other life-forms. We may all be part of the system and participating in it, but as far as we know, only we are consciously aware of the system as a whole.

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"There’s something empowering about this framework. Whereas most species are stuck to the very slow process of evolutionary change, we humans can consciously choose in the moment to change what we are doing. We have both this privilege and responsibility, not just to each other and to other life-forms but to the larger living system of which we are a part. That’s something we’re seeing with this increasing movement of personhood rights for nature: for ecosystems, for mountains, and for rivers and forests. We have to recognize that this moral responsibility extends to our environments as well, not just to living things and certainly not just to our species." (my bold)

Comment: taken from an interview with the author. We have addressed this over and over in our discussions of ecosystems.