January 2025

First time reads:

• Becoming Earth: How our Planet Came to Life, by Ferris Jabr

A fascinating account of how all sorts of species, from single-celled microorganisms to large plants and animals, including humans, in all sorts of times, from billions of years ago to the present, have shaped the environment in which they live in a way that prepared the earth for other creatures that evolved elsewhere. I can’t/won’t capture all of the detail, but microorganisms in the earth facilitated the breaking down of some minerals into a more complex collection of minerals, so that there is a much wider variety of metals on earth than we know to exist on other planets. The life forms that emerged later, including plankton in the ocean, gradually added oxygen to the atmosphere to a happy medium – less oxygen, and the larger animals couldn’t exist; more oxygen, and wildfires would be more prevalent and destructive.

So it’s not just humans that shape the larger environment in which they live. The earth itself is better viewed (either metaphorically or literally) as an organism seeking its own balance. It’s not a perfect balance, but the overall system adjusts. The unsettling of the earth prompted by our burning of fossil fuels and our destruction of forests and other parts of the environment is not the most severe crisis in the earth’s history, but it’s different in its timeline – we have made so many drastic changes so rapidly that the impact on us and the world is likely to be severe.

However, Jabr is not as pessimistic as many about our future. He thinks, and cites climate scientists and others in support, that we could still escape the worst of it.

• Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness and the Making of the World, by Peter Godfrey-Smith

In the first third (or so) of this book, Godfrey-Smith covers much of the ground covered by Jabr’s book, described immediately above: how life emerged on earth and then shaped the earth in ways that allowed the development of ever more complex life forms, culminating (so far) in the evolution of humans. As one would expect from a philosopher, Godfrey-Smith’s perspective is somewhat different — more, well, philosophical. The philosophical perspective becomes more important in the latter two-thirds of the book, when Godfrey-Smith turns to a development of the difference in humans and the difference it makes. Both consciousness and culture are crucial here. When teaching I often claimed that there was a time when humans developed the ability to imagine alternative futures – this ability depended on the ability to construct symbols in which these alternative futures are expressed. That ability imposes the practice of choosing. I would say that a constitutive characteristic of human beings is that humans cannot choose not to choose. Godfrey-Smith emphasizes what I see as a similar and related turning point, suggesting that there was a period in human development in which humans came to rely so heavily on culture “that it [became] hard or impossible to get by without culture” (p. 124).

In the last third of the book Godfrey-Smith explores questions about the implications of this for our current life in the world. Given that we – like all those life forms that came before us and/or live now alongside us — are part of the natural world and continue to shape it, and also that we are forced to choose just how we will act in the world, and also that our choices are shaped by inherited and developing cultural traditions, what choices should we make about how we’re living now?

Obviously Godfrey-Smith can’t explore all such questions. He focuses on two general areas – how might we treat other animals, focusing here on both domesticated (farmed) animals and on animals living in the wild? And how should we interact with nature more generally, focusing here on climate change and habitat destruction? He acknowledges that there is considerable overlap in these questions.

I’ll not introduce the spoilers of Godfrey-Smith’s answers to these questions. But I’ll say that I found his discussion of these issues very interesting and helpful for my own deliberations. Overall, I think, a book well worth reading.

• The Message, by Ta-Nehisi Coates

This is a powerful book, offering both a poignant account of how Coates’s life is anchored in personal experience and the history of the United States and the world more generally and also insight into the power of writing, of telling one’s story. I was especially moved by the description of his time in Israel and Palestine and how he directly confronted his own naivete about Zionism and the role that Israel currently plays in the Middle East. While in earlier writings he noted the analogies between oppression of Jews and oppression of people of color, during his time in Israel and Palestine he came face to face with his realization Israel is now an oppressor. He doesn’t discount the complexities of the current situation, but he makes a strong case that neither Israel nor the United States lives up to the democratic ideals that both nations claim for themselves.

Definitely a challenging read for this white cis straight male living a privileged life in the United States. But I’m grateful for the challenge. The next (rather more painful) step is figuring out just how I respond to the challenge.

• On Thomas Merton, by Mary Gordon

I’ve read very little of Thomas Merton’s work, but my reading of Mary Gordon’s book leaves me with a better understanding of the person he was. I’m confident in this judgment because the book includes so many quotations from Merton’s writing, especially from his journals. We see him struggling with himself, with the church, and with the world. Gordon’s observation at the beginning of the book sets the tone: “If Thomas Merton had been a writer and not a monk, we would never have heard of him. If Thomas Merton had been a monk and not a writer, we would never heard of him. Merton’s dual identity contained within itself a particular irony: in becoming a Trappist, he entered an order devoted to silence, and yet his vocation was based on words” (p. 1). Gordon agrees that Merton’s person is expressed most powerfully in his journals, and it’s in that section that I find her account of him most poignant.

• Meditations for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman
• Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence, by Sara Imari Walker
• Wonderstruck, by Helen De Cruz
• Orbital, by Samantha Harvey