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by Garth Greenwell
A poet's life is turned inside out by a sudden, wrenching pain. The pain brings him to his knees, and eventually to the ICU. Confined to bed, plunged into the dysfunctional American healthcare system, he struggles to understand what is happening to his body, as someone who has lived for many years in his mind.
This is a searching, sweeping novel set at the furthest edges of human experience, where the forces that give life value―art, memory, poetry, music, care―are thrown into sharp relief. Time expands and contracts. Sudden intimacies bloom. Small Rain surges beyond the hospital to encompass a radiant vision of human life: our shared vulnerability, the limits and possibilities of sympathy, the ideal of art and the fragile dream of America. Above all, this is a love story of the most unexpected kind.
At the beginning of Garth Greenwell's novel Small Rain, the protagonist, an unnamed poet in his early forties, is stricken with acute abdominal pain. The COVID pandemic is raging and he's reluctant to visit the hospital, but after suffering at home for a few days, he finally capitulates to his alarmed partner and ends up in the ER, where doctors discover that he has a life-threatening aortic tear.
The rest of the novel is mostly set in the ICU, where the narrator is tethered to his hospital bed with IV lines and sensors, but where his mind roams freely and widely. Greenwell is a master at creating intimacy; the poet seems to speak directly to the reader, and his narrative voice is compelling: sometimes self-critical and dismissive of his perceptions, but also empathic and reflective.
"I sat in a chair while she took my blood pressure and temperature….I disliked her, I realized, I felt an antipathy she hadn't earned. Probably she was exhausted; I can't imagine it, day after day seeing people in pain, at their worst moments, over years; how could you protect yourself from that, I wondered, there was some human regard I wanted from her that I had no right to demand."
The protagonist in Small Rain bears a close resemblance to Greenwell himself: a writer raised in Kentucky and living in Iowa City with his partner. Greenwell's previous novels, What Belongs to You and Cleanness, shared a similar first-person voice, but the landscapes of the novels are very different. Both earlier novels are set in Sofia, Bulgaria and explore queer sexuality and desire. In Small Rain, the subject of illness and its attendant concerns appear alongside the protagonist's quiet, domestic life in Iowa.
The poet also meditates on art and beauty; in one particularly significant section, he reflects on his attempt to introduce his literature students to a favorite poem by American poet George Oppen (see Beyond the Book), about a sparrow: "I wanted to tell them, this record of a mind's noticing, a moment of particularizing attention. From a flock of sparrows this sparrow, in a forest." The sparrow of Oppen's poem is both individual and representative of other sparrows—perhaps all sparrows—throughout time. This is a key to the novel's larger ideas about art: the poet thinks about the core challenges of creating art, wanting to be "faithful to the concrete, particular thing," but "wanting too to pull away from the concrete, to make it representative."
It's also a key to the novel's own form, which continually adjusts its narrative lens from the close-up and personal to the wide-angled and universal. As the poet is experiencing his own unique medical crisis, the outside world faces an unprecedented pandemic; both the individual and the larger world suffer from anxiety about the uncertain future. The novel's title, too, reminds us how connected this one man and his experience is to all of humankind. "Small rain" is taken from the medieval poem "Westyrn Winds":
Western wind, when wilt thou blow
That the small rain down can rain
Christ, that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!
The lament of this poem reminds us that people throughout history, like Greenwell's narrator, have turned to poetry to help articulate the depth of their desire and pain, and that the yearning for home and family is universal.
As the poet in the novel processes his time in the hospital—the vague and inconclusive tests; the cheerful but evasive jargon of doctors and nurses; the days that blur into one another; the sharp and constant fear—his appetites for the world are sharpened. He eats a potato chip, and it is like eating one for the first time. He drinks a coffee, and coffee has never tasted better. As he realizes how close he has come to death, his life becomes very sweet. In his newly weakened state, he holds the world close. This is Greenwell's gift: to ask the reader how one can live a life with true appreciation, paying close attention to the full gamut of sorrow and joy in the world.
Book reviewed by Danielle McClellan
In Garth Greenwell's novel Small Rain, the unnamed protagonist—facing a difficult and uncertain medical diagnosis—finds solace in a poem by the poet George Oppen. The poem is only a few simple lines, but the protagonist marvels at how much unfolds when one sits with Oppen's work and lets it quietly speak. "I loved how, among the abstraction, his images became luminous, shards of the real, non-abstract world, occasions for wonder," he thinks.
Even for poetry lovers, the name George Oppen may be unfamiliar. However, he is a fascinating and significant figure in twentieth century American poetry.
Born in 1908 to an affluent New York family, Oppen lost his mother to suicide when he was only four years old. His father soon remarried, but he had a difficult relationship with his stepmother, and his childhood spent in New York and San Francisco was not a happy one. After tumultuous teenage years, Oppen met his wife, Mary Colby, at college in Oregon. The two eventually began a long road trip across the country, where they worked any jobs that they could find, and Oppen wrote poetry.
When George and Mary reached New York, he became involved with a group of poets creating a new movement they called Objectivism. The idea was to emphasize "simplicity and clarity over formal structure and rhyme." Oppen came into a small inheritance when he turned twenty-one, and together with the poet Louis Zukofsky, he started a short-lived poetry magazine that published work by William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound, among others. Later, he would be a cofounder of the Objectivist Press, which would publish numerous books of poetry, including Oppen's own first book, Discrete Series, with a preface by Ezra Pound.
During the Great Depression, the Oppens became increasingly interested in progressive politics and activism. George would stop writing poetry entirely, finding it inadequate to address the demands of the times; in his essay "The Mind's Own Place," he argues that poetry is not a form of political action. "There are situations which cannot honorably be met by art, and surely no one need fiddle precisely at the moment that the house next door is burning," he wrote. He began working for the American Communist Party in various roles, including serving as an election campaign manager in 1936. However, by 1942, the Oppens were disillusioned with the Party, and George quit his job to join the military, believing that the World War II fight against fascism was paramount. After being badly wounded in battle, he was awarded a Purple Heart.
Soon after returning to New York after the war, George and Mary were targeted by the House of Un-American Activities Committee led by Senator Joseph McCarthy. They fled to Mexico, where they lived for most of the next decade. When they returned to New York in the late 1950s, Oppen began writing poetry again. He published several more books of poetry, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for Of Being Numerous, his most critically acclaimed collection; the title poem is "widely considered his masterpiece" and "examines questions of singularity within a diverse and crowded world."
Oppen's poetry is spare and precise, with "terse, powerful lines and strong, focused syntax." Like other Objectivist poets, he "emphasized the poem as an object in itself, not as a vehicle of meaning or association." The poet James Longenbach wrote that "Oppen's respect for the art of making, no matter how small, is at every moment palpable, and it infuses his work with sweetness that makes difficulty feel like life's reward."
George and Mary moved back to San Francisco in the late 1960s. His final work, Primitive, was completed with Mary's help in 1978, after he became stricken with Alzheimer's disease; Mary also published an autobiography, Meaning a Life, that year.
by Jessica Anthony
It is an unseasonably warm Sunday in November 1957. Katheen, a college tennis champion turned Delaware housewife, decides not to join her flagrantly handsome life insurance salesman husband, Virgil, or their two young boys, at church. Instead, she takes a dip in the kidney-shaped swimming pool of their apartment complex. And then she won't come out.
A riveting, single-sitting read set over the course of eight hours, The Most breaches the shimmering surface of a seemingly idyllic mid-century marriage, immersing us in the unspoken truth beneath. As Sputnik 2 orbits the earth carrying Laika, the doomed Soviet dog, Kathleen and Virgil hurtle towards each other until they arrive at a reckoning that will either shatter their marriage, or transform it, at last, into something real.
In November 1957, Kathleen and Virgil Beckett are living at Acropolis Place, an apartment complex in Newark, Delaware, an arrangement that was supposed to be temporary after their move from Rhode Island but has been drawn out by inertia. It's an unseasonably warm day and the Russians are launching their satellite Sputnik 2 with its canine captive Laika aboard. Virgil readies the Becketts' two children, Nathaniel and Nicholas, for church, while Kathleen, opting to stay home, gets into the complex's swimming pool.
The day unfolds in leisurely but taut fashion. Virgil returns from church and Kathleen refuses to get out of the pool. He goes golfing with colleagues and returns again, and Kathleen still will not get out of the pool. People are staring from their balconies and apartments. What is wrong with this strange woman who will not answer her husband's pleas to emerge from the water and make dinner for their sons?
All the while, the narrative alternates between Kathleen and Virgil's perspectives and memories, unearthing their separate and mutual (but largely separate) disappointments, despairs, mistakes, and regrets. Kathleen was a talented college tennis champion with thoughts of an athletic career when she met Virgil. He was a California native with vague musical aspirations coasting on the same good luck that got him medically discharged from World War II without ever seeing combat.
The Most is a novel about unhappiness in marriage in the vein of Raymond Chandler, John Updike, or Alice Munro. But the most obvious comparison is that it feels like a lost season of the television show Mad Men in its representation of how the strains of marriage, or monogamy really, can pull two people apart, especially when they are living in the pressure cooker of traditional gender values imposed and strictly enforced by mid-century America. It is more engaging than Mad Men in that it focuses more centrally on a repressed housewife who is both vibrantly compelling and unfailingly sympathetic (even when her actions are inscrutable) but less so in that the husband is as handsome as Don Draper but without the intelligence or charm. Virgil's most interesting quality is that he likes jazz and longs to play the saxophone. The fact that he has never bothered to pick up the instrument or learn a note tells you everything you need to know about this character. He's an ambitionless man who breezes through life on his good looks and is too cowardly to pursue his dreams because they would make him different in a way that might bring discomfort. So instead, he cheats on his wife. This is not to say he is an unpleasant character to explore as a reader. Jessica Anthony brings him to life, and takes him apart, with a deft and often excoriating touch.
But Virgil is not the only Beckett who has been unfaithful, and uncovering the extent of Kathleen's duplicity, and the consequences of it, brings a genuine layer of fraught tension that energizes the story. While Virgil dreams of the counterculture, Kathleen is more legitimately chafed by, and dismissive of, the traditional WASP values her husband feels obligated to pursue. In this way, it is clear that despite their differences and their mutual adulterous affairs, the Becketts actually have a lot in common—are perhaps even perfect for each other—in ways that society tries to prevent them from seeing. At a different time, they might fall naturally into an open marriage or some other arrangement that is more suitable than what they have on these pages.
The Most is absorbing, but it feels like it comes from a different era of storytelling. Its depiction of a woman unraveling as a result of misogynist societal expectations and a philandering husband is not especially novel or fresh. That said, there are some exceptional scenes that make the experience worthwhile, and the book is only 150 pages. Like floating in a swimming pool listening to the launch of a Russian satellite on a portable transistor radio, it's a fine way to spend an afternoon.
Book reviewed by Lisa Butts
Though the story unfolds largely through flashbacks, the present-day events of The Most occur on November 3, 1957, which is the day the Soviet Union launched its satellite Sputnik 2 into space. This date was chosen at the behest of Premier Nikita Krushchev to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Occurring at the height of the Cold War, the three Sputnik missions brought considerable consternation to the United States, which had announced its own plans to orbit Earth with a satellite in 1955, only to be upstaged by its Soviet nemesis with the launch of Sputnik 1 in October of 1957. To make matters worse, it was believed that the satellites were evidence that the Soviets could launch ballistic missiles capable of reaching the US.
Sputnik 2 was the second satellite to travel to space and, controversially, it carried the first living being to orbit the Earth: a stray dog named Laika, found on the streets of Moscow. The experiment of launching Laika into space was intended to provide information about what the effects of microgravity on a human body might be. According to a representative from the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, Laika's journey was key to ensuring that spaceflight might be feasible for humankind: "There were things that we could not determine by the limits of human experience in high altitude flight … [Scientists] really didn't know how disorienting spaceflight would be on the humans or whether an astronaut or cosmonaut could continue to function rationally."
The satellite was 13 feet tall and 6.5 feet wide, and weighed around 1,100 lbs. Laika could sit or lie down in the cabin, where oxygen was generated, and she was provided with food and water "in a gelatinized form," according to NASA. It is unclear to this day how long Laika survived: the American Astronomical Society claims she must have died from overheating within hours of the launch. NASA maintains that she "probably only survived a day or two." In any case, there was only enough oxygen to last for 10 days.
The batteries on Sputnik 2's equipment died on November 10, preventing any further data from being transmitted, but it continued to orbit until April 14, 1958, at which pointed it reentered Earth's atmosphere and burned up. It had circled the Earth a total of 2,570 times.
The US finally launched its own satellite, Explorer I, on January 31, 1958. That same year saw the establishment of NASA, created in part in the hopes that an organization devoted to research and development in the area of space exploration would ensure the United States would not fall behind the Soviets again.
Model of Sputnik 2 at the Musée des Confluences in Lyon, France
Photo by Ismoon (CC BY-SA 4.0)
by Fernanda Trias
In a city ravaged by a mysterious plague, a woman tries to understand why her world is falling apart. An algae bloom has poisoned the previously pristine air that blows in from the sea. Inland, a secretive corporation churns out the only food anyone can afford—a revolting pink paste, made of an unknown substance. In the short, desperate breaks between deadly windstorms, our narrator stubbornly tends to her few remaining relationships: with her difficult but vulnerable mother; with the ex-husband for whom she still harbors feelings; with the boy she nannies, whose parents sent him away even as terrible threats loomed. Yet as conditions outside deteriorate further, her commitment to remaining in place only grows—even if staying means being left behind.
An evocative elegy for a safe, clean world, Pink Slime is buoyed by humor and its narrator's resiliency. This unforgettable novel explores the place where love, responsibility, and self-preservation converge, and the beauty and fragility of our most intimate relationships.
Unsurprisingly, the 21st century has been something of a boom time for environmental disaster in fiction. The vein of anxiety over what humans are doing to the planet runs deep—stretching back to the 1970s, when films like Soylent Green and Logan's Run imagined far-off civilizational collapse—but recent novels like Omar El Akkad's American War and Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation have found acclaim with more proximate, recognizable visions of Mother Nature taking her revenge. Pink Slime, the gripping novel by National Uruguayan Literature Prize-winner Fernanda Trías (newly translated from Spanish by Heather Cleary), steps right into this tradition, presenting an unsettlingly plausible near future in which human beings have finally succeeded in knocking out their delicate ecosystem for good.
Trías's setting is more peri-apocalyptic than post; life in the unnamed coastal city hasn't ended with a bang, but instead weathers a long, drawn-out death rattle. People go stubbornly about their business, but it's been some time since the last bird was seen in the sky, and even longer since the ocean's last fish washed up dead on the shore. An unexplained crimson algae has poisoned the sea and rivers, and its deadly fumes—rumored to be noxious enough to flay a person down to the muscle—periodically send the city into lockdown when they blow in from the coast.
Far inland, safe from this ominous "red wind," an emboldened Ministry of Health governs the country through an Orwellian combination of opacity and slogans. ("Every life is unique," they repeatedly proclaim as justification for their ever-harsher measures.) To save the population from food shortages, the Ministry has inaugurated a new food-processing plant. Its star product is an "insipid, colorless, odorless" protein paste called Meatrite; those who produce it, however, know it simply as pink slime. Trías excels at gruesome descriptions of this ultra-processed monstrosity, but she knows too the power of leaving things unsaid. Where pink slime comes from, how it's made, and its worrying connection to the similarly colored algae infecting the coast are just a few of the mysteries left tantalizingly in place.
An unnamed narrator guides the reader through this reality—albeit obliquely. A woman of 40, recently divorced and newly out of work, she takes the end of the world as just another of her daily struggles. More present in her thoughts than the apocalypse are Max, the ex-husband for whom she still harbors conflicted feelings, and her mother, whose domineering presence is felt even in her absence. If the narrator knows she should follow her mother's advice and cut ties with Max, their tangled history makes this easier said than done—especially now that he finds himself in a chronic care ward, having been exposed to the vicious red wind.
To confound matters, the narrator is caring for Mauro, the child of a wealthy couple no longer willing to deal with his disability. Mauro's syndrome causes an insatiable hunger, compelling him to eat everything he can get his hands on no matter the damage it could do. Given the novel's themes, another author might have been tempted to reduce Mauro to a simple cipher of humanity's self-destructive greed. Thankfully, the depth and complexity of the narrator's feelings for the boy prevent his disability from being interpreted as a symbol rather than a human reality, and through this character Trías delivers a thoughtful, three-dimensional portrayal of what this particular reality might look like.
The narrative bones of Pink Slime may be those of a straightforward family drama, but Trías enjoys wrapping them in some meaty experimentation. Like the eponymous pink paste, however, the philosophical musings and stylistic flair that pepper her writing are only somewhat nourishing. The novel may touch on all the weightiest contemporary concerns—environmental disaster, democratic backsliding, class inequality—but it's the knotty personal relationships that give it such a strong emotional core.
Trías is expert in drawing out the paradoxes of these relationships, stretching the web of love and resentment, obligation and self-preservation in which the narrator finds herself caught. That society is collapsing seems almost incidental; the reader is gripped to this novel's compelling end as much by the quiet, personal disaster unfolding in the narrator's life as by the disaster unfolding in the streets. However plausible, the apocalypse Pink Slime offers up is imagined. The emotions that form its spine, on the other hand, are powerfully real.
Book reviewed by Alex Russell
Fernanda Trías's Pink Slime takes its title from the nickname of Meatrite, a fictional meat paste developed by the government to combat food shortages during an environmental collapse. Although set in an imagined near future, Trías's Meatrite could easily be inspired by the ultra-processed foods (UPFs) that have come to dominate the 21st-century diet. Once seen as a way to cheaply feed a growing population, UPFs are now linked to an increasing number of chronic conditions, such as asthma and type 2 diabetes.
The roots of UPFs can be traced back to the Great Depression and Second World War, when circumstances dictated populations be fed as cheaply and efficiently as possible. Highly processed products like Spam—inexpensive, easily transportable, and ready to eat out of the can—became ubiquitous among Allied servicemen. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev once even credited the product with saving the Russian army during the war.
Similar products like Swanson TV dinners and Cheez Whiz started becoming more prominent in the consumer market after 1945, but it wasn't until the 1980s that an explosion of convenience snacks and drinks popularized the term "ultra-processed foods." For several decades, however, the designation had no scientific basis or definition. Only in the early 21st century did Brazilian scientist Carlos Monteiro and his colleagues at the University of São Paulo propose what they called the Nova classification, a way of scientifically defining and categorizing the level of processing undergone by products. "Nova Group 4: Ultra-Processed Foods" cemented the term in scientific discourse and gave it a definition: "industrial formulations made entirely or mostly from substances extracted from foods, derived from food constituents, or synthesized in laboratories."
Since the definition of the term, scientists have been able to map out the extent to which UPFs have entered our food supply. The results are shocking. Recent studies show that UPFs make up more than 50% of the average American's energy intake. Similar research in the UK has found the same is true of the British diet.
Although the health effects of processed foods were causing alarm among some doctors almost immediately after the Second World War, UPFs have only recently captured the public's attention as a genuine health concern. (As the author Alan C. Logan writes, "The term 'ultra-processed food' is having a cultural moment.") Early in 2024, a review of existing data by the British Medical Journal found a direct association between exposure to UPFs and 32 different health outcomes—ranging from cancer to respiratory and cardiovascular conditions to anxiety and depression. Monteiro has called on advertisements for UPFs to be banned or heavily restricted and for packaging to feature warning labels similar to those found on cigarette packets. His recommendations may seem excessive, but the damage being wrought may be extensive. UPFs have been linked to heart disease, now the leading cause of death in America, along with many other conditions.
While much is still unclear about the exact reasons behind the associations between UPFs and poor health, there's evidence that what we're eating may be harming us—even killing us.
Hot dogs on buns
Photo by Polina Tankilevitch, via Pexels
by Ferris Jabr
One of humanity's oldest beliefs is that our world is alive. Though once ridiculed by some scientists, the idea of Earth as a vast interconnected living system has gained acceptance in recent decades. We, and all living things, are more than inhabitants of Earth—we are Earth, an outgrowth of its structure and an engine of its evolution. Life and its environment have coevolved for billions of years, transforming a lump of orbiting rock into a cosmic oasis—a planet that breathes, metabolizes, and regulates its climate.
Acclaimed science writer Ferris Jabr reveals a radical new vision of Earth where lush forests spew water, pollen, and bacteria to summon rain; giant animals engineer the very landscapes they roam; microbes chew rock to shape continents; and microscopic plankton, some as glittering as carved jewels, remake the air and sea.
Humans are one of the most extreme examples of life transforming Earth. Through fossil fuel consumption, agriculture, and pollution, we have altered more layers of the planet in less time than any other species, pushing Earth into a crisis. But we are also uniquely able to understand and protect the planet's wondrous ecology and self-stabilizing processes. Jabr introduces us to a diverse cast of fascinating people who have devoted themselves to this vital work.
Becoming Earth is an exhilarating journey through the hidden workings of our planetary symphony—its players, its instruments, and the music of life that emerges—and an invitation to reexamine our place in it. How well we play our part will determine what kind of Earth our descendants inherit for millennia to come.
The idea of Earth as one living, breathing organism is an age-old one, found in belief systems all over the world. Yet when it was first seriously proposed as a scientific hypothesis in the 1970s—the Gaia hypothesis, named after the Greek goddess of the Earth, which posited that the planet itself is alive via interconnected systems—it was the subject of ridicule among scientists.
Now that outlook is changing, and the scientific community is increasingly aware of and interested in the previously overlooked interplay between living organisms, as well as between living and non-living components of ecosystems. Ferris Jabr's new book, Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life, is an easily readable introduction to the science of ecological interconnections, and it serves as a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the planet's physical and biological forces acting upon each other in reciprocal and significant ways.
Jabr structures the book like the planet he describes—sections are arranged by rock, water, and air, with three chapters in each covering microbes, complex life forms, and, finally, humans' impact on each sphere. This form gives the book a rhythmic quality reminiscent of seasons, migrations, and other ecological cycles.
He takes the reader into the depths of the Earth's crust, miles below the surface, where recently discovered microbes modify the chemical composition of the rocks and sediments around them. Early microbial activity billions of years ago may even have influenced plate tectonics and the formation of continents by dissolving rocks and minerals on the ocean floor and accelerating the forces that produced new land.
This section is the most ground-breaking, no pun intended, since we most often assume the Earth's crust and plates only exert one-way forces on living creatures. But that's not to say that the hydrosphere or atmosphere are without surprises. Jabr describes how plankton in the oceans remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to the point that, if left unchecked, their activity cools the planet to ice age levels. Conversely, those ice ages stall the plankton's activity, which leads to a build-up of carbon dioxide and results in planetary warming. It's a poignant reminder of the strength of non-human organisms in driving the planet's crucial functions, but also a warning about throwing those organisms and planetary rhythms off balance.
In a similar vein, the revelation that geologic forces are merging plastic and rock into a hybrid called "plastiglomerate" is a stunning example of the Earth's resiliency, but it's also a depressing reminder of the levels our detritus have reached. Chapters on humans' impacts on soils with chemical fertilizers (see Beyond the Book) and suppression of fire cycles are also disheartening but finish on hopeful notes. In the latter, for example, Jabr discusses how Indigenous knowledge of fire's regenerative abilities is finally being taken seriously; in 2022, the Forest Service announced a strategy of more prescribed burns. When managed properly, prescribed burns can prevent bigger conflagrations by burning off excess fuel in forests and grasslands. With wildfires reaching increasingly disastrous levels, particularly in the American West, this change in strategy is not a moment too soon.
Throughout the book, Jabr does an excellent job of soberly explaining the climate crisis and humanity's responsibility for it while continuously emphasizing a path forward. There are ways to alter our decision-making to work in tandem with all of Earth's systems rather than trying to dominate them, including reintroducing grazers to permafrost ecosystems to cool soils, using fire to prevent bigger fires, and making the all-important shift to renewable energy. His cautious optimism is contagious, without being over the top.
In Becoming Earth, Jabr travels from the rainforest to Siberia, from caves deep within Earth's crust to towers thousands of feet above the surface, and along the way introduces the reader to scientists whose work is awakening humanity to the crucial connections between all living things. We meet cave-diving microbiologists, engineers growing kelp forests for carbon storage, a museum curator studying plastic pollution via autopsies on ocean mammals, and more. These people's stories and Jabr's observations of their work give the book the feel of an extended piece of reporting, not a dry textbook.
And Jabr's prose can be novelistic and exciting; he uses sweeping, dramatic descriptions to capture, for example, the collective impact of single-celled plankton: "In their eon-spanning metamorphosis—their transformation from floating cell to entombed rock to windswept dust and back again—they embody the reciprocity of life and environment and the perpetual reincarnation of Earth." Later, he describes "the tantalizing shimmer of a blue Morpho butterfly and the delicacy of a ghost plant's milky flower trembling on a wiry stalk." With his eye for Earth's beauty and his understanding of the impact of its smallest organisms, Jabr has written a book that celebrates the planet and inspires readers to see it differently—and to better protect it.
Book reviewed by Rose Rankin
As Ferris Jabr describes in Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life, he and his spouse discovered an all-too-common problem when they tried to plant a new garden—ruined, lifeless soil. Despite our millions of acres of farmland, the intensity of modern agriculture, grazing, deforestation, and land disturbance have severely depleted soils and the nutrients they contain that support crop growth. Jabr quotes a 2021 study that revealed that "about one third of agricultural land across the Corn Belt in the United States has already lost all of its topsoil."
This isn't a new problem, however; agriculture is thousands of years old, and by the 19th century, farmers were using a variety of fertilizer to replenish soils. These included bat guano and saltpeter because they provided nitrogen, an essential element that plants need to grow.
Nitrogen is abundant in Earth's atmosphere, but it must be converted to molecules that plants can take up through their roots. Bacteria and microorganisms in soil can do this, and manure naturally contains nitrogen. As guano and other fertilizers were limited in supply, countries, including Germany and Great Britain, started to fear large-scale famines would occur if new fertilizers weren't invented.
In the early 20th century, German scientists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch perfected the process of creating ammonia, a nitrogen-hydrogen molecule that provides plants with the nitrogen they need. By using extreme heat and pressure and finding suitable catalysts, they and their team were able to scale up industrial-level production of ammonia, which was used not only as fertilizer but also as chemical weapons and explosives in World War I. "The Haber-Bosch process, as it became known, is now regarded as one of the most important industrial processes ever developed," Jabr writes.
Following World War II, ammonia was primarily used as a fertilizer, and along with crop breeding improvements, it sparked the Green Revolution, which prevented widespread famine and supported Earth's growing population. Today, in fact, half of the world's population depends on food produced with synthetic fertilizers.
But this advancement hasn't been without costs. Manufacturing ammonia burns huge amounts of fossil fuels because of the heat and pressure required. Ammonia production alone makes up between one and two percent of all CO2 emissions.
The excessive use of fertilizers also damages land and water resources. When nitrogen-rich fertilizers run off into rivers, lakes, and oceans, they cause the plant life in those bodies of water to grow, just like any other plant. Those algae and aquatic plants die, and microorganisms break them down and deplete the oxygen present in the water. This means fish and other organisms die because of a lack of oxygen. Algal blooms cause dead zones in bodies of water, including the 6,500-square-mile dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico where nutrient pollution from the Mississippi River basin meets the ocean.
The synthesis of ammonia and the resulting Green Revolution were undoubtedly positive innovations for the world's population. But as we now contend with the consequences of the Haber-Bosch process, it's vital to seek out different solutions for soil health—ones that don't require intensive fossil fuel usage or cause significant environmental damage.
Haber himself noted as much in his Nobel Prize speech in 1920, as he spoke about humanity's need for better ways to improve agriculture: "Nature, with her sophisticated forms of the chemistry of living matter, still understands and utilizes methods which we do not as yet know how to imitate."
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BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
