Book review: Once, there was a clever creature that came up with a new way of making energy out of sunshine. It was so successful that it outpaced other living things and, over time, dramatically changed the chemistry of Earth’s atmosphere.
Peter Godfrey-Smith’s prose is more elegant than this, but this still describes the opening scene of an early chapter of Living on Earth, the Australian philosopher’s last book in a trilogy. It began with the surprise bestseller Other Minds, which focused on whether octopuses can feel consciousness, and continued with Metazoa, a broader exploration of animals’ capacity to have subjective experiences.
This time, however, he is not talking about us. People and the impacts we have on Earth through burning concentrated sunshine in the form of fossil fuels feature only 100 pages later. By that point, Godfrey-Smith has established his main argument: that life transforms the very environment that shapes it, for better or worse.
These changes can be so powerful that he describes the cyanobacteria he introduces early in the book as “central to the history of life” because the photosynthesis they first began to practise some three billion years ago enriched Earth’s atmosphere with oxygen. Without this, life as we know it now may never have evolved or would have “remained more a fringe dweller than an Earth changer”.
Godfrey-Smith’s approach is eye-opening as well as humbling. At first, learning about the ancient planetary impact of simple microbes may appease some guilt about our own destructive habits. But realising just how devastating the oxygenation of the atmosphere was to other things alive at the time quickly brings an end to any temporary relief.
Another perhaps more subtle realisation comes as Godfrey-Smith describes the cascading and interlocking effects between species and the world around them. Anyone still thinking of humans as some lone pinnacle of evolution, independent of other living things and a healthy planet, may have to rethink their position.
From microbes to humans, including the evolutionary paths of algae to ferns and trees, and from the early “protists” to invertebrates, fish, dinosaurs, birds and mammals, Godfrey-Smith charts a history of organisms not solely as products of evolution but as causal agents – life itself shaping the world to make it liveable.
Given that some form of life thrived on Earth for 3.7 billion years – a big part of our planet’s 4.5-billion-year history – its environment-shaping power is neither new nor surprising. But this is where philosophy comes into its own. Instead of genes and natural selection, Godfrey-Smith’s focus is on questions of mind and agency, goals and purpose.
This allows him to critique earlier thinkers, such as Baltic-German biologist Jakob von Uexküll, who first described a creature’s umwelt as the world it can perceive through its senses and actions. What is missing, Godfrey-Smith argues, is the complex network of relations to other lifeforms. The Gaia theory, developed in the 1970s by biologist Lynn Margulis and the fiercely independent scientist James Lovelock, also comes in for some review.
Godfrey-Smith concludes that the metaphor of Earth as a self-regulating meta-organism is ultimately unhelpful. “Talk of Gaia invites us to think the Earth will take care of itself, if given time to adjust. It invites us to think there’s something big and thoughtful in the neighbourhood that can compensate for our errors.”
Living on Earth is a book of subtle reflections, all coming to the undeniable conclusion that the actions of our ancestors shifted from being “habit-based to plan-based” and hence led to our alarming power to dominate the biosphere and alter the environment on a planetary scale.
If this sounds gloomy, rest assured. There are delightful passages about field trips Godfrey-Smith takes to visit octopuses in some of his favourite dive spots off the coast of New South Wales, mountain gorillas in a Rwandan bamboo forest and the world’s largest living remnants of ancient cyanobacteria in Western Australia.
Often described as the scuba-diving philosopher, Godfrey-Smith shares a kinship with other animals that comes through clearly, and it’s easy to forgive the odd bit of anthropomorphising, especially in a passage describing a freshly awakened lyrebird.
Frequent references to topics or thoughts mentioned in earlier chapters were a slight irritation as I invariably had to go back and forth to connect passages
in my memory – until I accepted a somewhat loose narrative structure. It doesn’t detract from the book’s central theme that traces the actions of an “initially unremarkable mammal” to the point where it begins to change its world so quickly it could outpace itself.
Living On Earth, by Peter Godfrey-Smith (HarperCollins, $39.99), is out now.
