Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World

The bestselling author of Other Minds shows how we and our ancestors have reinvented our planet.

If the history of the Earth were compressed down to a year, our species would arise in the last thirty minutes or so of the final hour. But life itself is not such a late arrival: It has existed on Earth for something like 3.7 billion years—most of our planet’s history and over a quarter of the age of the universe (as far as we can tell).

What have these organisms—bacteria, animals, plants, and the rest—done in all this time? In Living on Earth, the philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith proposes a new way of understanding how the actions of living beings have shaped our planet. Where his acclaimed books Other Minds and Metazoa explored the riddle of how conscious minds came to exist on Earth, Living on Earth turns to what happens when we look at the mind from another side—when we come to see organisms as active causes, not merely as results of the evolutionary process. The planet we inhabit is significantly the work of other living beings, who shaped the environments that we ourselves later transformed.

To that end, Godfrey-Smith takes us on a grand tour of the history of life on earth. He visits Rwandan gorillas and Australian bowerbirds, returns to coral reefs and octopus dens, considers the impact of language and writing, and weighs the responsibilities our unique powers bring with them, as they relate to factory farming, habitat preservation, climate change, and the use of animals in experiments. Ranging from the seas to the forests, and from animate matter’s first appearance to its future extinction, Godfrey-Smith offers a novel picture of the course of life on Earth and how we might meet the challenges of our time, the Anthropocene.

ISBN: 9780374189938
Format: Hardback
Pages: 336
Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
Published: September 03, 2024

"[Godfrey-Smith] is possessed of a prodigious curiosity . . . His delight in the natural world is infectious, and Living on Earth brims with intriguing and endearing novelties . . . It is best read, I think, as an ethical exemplar: a model of the sort of attitude that we ought to adopt in our dealings with nonhuman life . . . [Godfrey-Smith's] luscious and amazed language befits the treasures that we have been vouchsafed and that we have so badly betrayed." —Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post

"[Living on Earth] beautifully describes how birds, octopuses, and even fish can lead lives full of 'richness,' in which past events give meaning to future ones . . . Godfrey-Smith doesn’t just want to understand [a] way of looking at the world. He wants us to feel it, and to experience ourselves within it." —Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker

"Living on Earth is consistently rewarding, packed with insights and invitations to reflect, and blessed with some exquisite writing . . . Godfrey-Smith insists on identifying with nature instead of standing outside as steward: and on 'gratitude and a sense of kinship' with the process that delivered our species into the world." —Philip Ball, The Guardian

"A thoughtful meditation on how the actions of organisms, even the most primitive (ticks, snails), have generated the world humans have inherited . . . [Full of] enlightening insights into the natural world and our often perilous relationship to it." —Kirkus Reviews

"Godfrey-Smith finds a purpose for philosophy and ethics in the discussion of biology . . . Attention-grabbing . . . Particularly poignant are his musings on human relationships with animals." —Booklist