Aarva

American Scholar ·For the curious

Our Energetic World

by Rebecca Boyle

Published 2026-09-08 04:07:38+00:00

If nothing ever lived on Earth, why would the planet have no chalk, marble, or fire?

0:00 / 8:33 · Narrator Gacrux

Context

Sand dunes can shift tens of feet in a single day, budding offspring and making sound as they move. A review published on 8 September 2026 pauses on this image to ask a disorienting question: what if life is not a passenger on Earth, but the physical force that built it? Science classes tend to treat the globe as a passive rock where biology simply resides. But evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson suggests that flesh and stone are part of the same continuous chemical reaction. The piece turns a basic walk outside into an encounter with a massive, working energy system.

Show notes

A review of Olivia Judson's book The Co-Creation, which argues that life and Earth are a single system driven by the transfer of energy. It details the book's five historical energy expansions—rock, light, oxygen, flesh, and fire—to explain how biology and geology shaped each other. The review compares Judson's work to other recent science writing that treats living things not as inhabitants of a passive planet, but as chemical reactions that actively built it.

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