Ecology

Living on Earth: Life, Consciousness and the Making of the Natural World Peter Godfrey-Smith William Collins (2024)Philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith has devoted his career to examining how animal minds evolved. He blends formidable analytical skills with a deep curiosity about the natural world, mostly experienced at first hand in his native Australia. While writing his latest book, Living on Earth, he spent many hours scrutinizing noisy parrots and cockatoos in his back garden, weeks observing gobies building underwater towers made of shells and seaweed and years closely watching how octopuses behave (P. Godfrey-Smith et al. PLoS ONE 17, e0276482; 2022). The result is an inclusive perspective on Earth’s many distinct minds and agents that urges readers to consider humans’ collective choices and their diverse consequences.Is ‘speciesism’ as bad as racism or sexism?Living on Earth offers an extended philosophical meditation on life, mind, the world and our place in it, completing a trilogy of works on the nexus of agency, sensation and felt experience. His 2016 book Other Minds explored octopus cognition and evolution. And Metazoa (2020) appraised the subjective experiences of animals, concluding that there exists an “animal way of being” that arises from the integration of sensory information in nervous systems. This implies that sentience and subjectivity — life-shaping combinations of perception, goals and values — are widespread across the tree of life.In his latest book, the author casts his net wider still, asking how the minds and agency of living things have affected Earth. “The history of life is not just a series of new creatures appearing on the stage,” he notes. “The new arrivals change the stage itself.”The arrival of animalsGodfrey-Smith starts by explaining how the earliest lifeforms altered our planet’s chemistry and geology. Photosynthetic bacteria released oxygen, which gradually blanketed Earth and left their mark on the composition of rocks and minerals in the form of new minerals, such as malachite. Eventually, enough oxygen accumulated to power the evolution of aerobic life — a stark example of the transformative impact of some lineages constructing environments in which others can thrive.The arrival of animals that could undertake purposeful actions, such as feeding, interacting with others and gathering information, meant that Earth was transformed further. As their capacities for controlled movement evolved, animals became able to actively engineer their environments. Defecating migrating whales, for instance, redistribute nutrients and support other species in the food web, which in turn benefits the whales.The lyrebird (Menura novaehollandiae) mimics the calls of other bird species.Credit: GettyFocusing on communication, Godfrey-Smith describes its powerful effects with a riot of avian sound and colour. On a rainforest walk, he encounters a lyrebird (Menura sp.), known for its expert mimicry, which it uses in part to attract mates. “In quick succession, he was a whipbird, a black cockatoo, a Laughing Kookaburra, a magpie, and many I didn’t know”. Fork-tailed drongos (Dicrurus adsimilis) use alarm calls copied from other species, to cheat other species out of well-earned meals (T. P. Flower et al. Science 344, 513–516; 2014). This capacity to deceive, as well as to communicate honestly, further transforms what an organism can experience and what effect it has on its surroundings, by creating ever-changing visual and audio environments.Turning to hominids, the author considers culture, which he characterizes as the ability to learn sets of norms that are passed between peers and down generations. Humans are primed for such learning, exhibiting an awareness of rules early in childhood. He argues that the ways in which people help others to learn those norms — through informal apprenticeships, for example, in which older individuals teach skills to younger ones — sets us apart from many other species. They have also enabled humans to develop distinctive aspects of communication, such as an ability to understand from a person’s words what they are thinking. This skill makes it possible to coordinate behaviour more effectively, helping people to live together in large, stationary communities and thereby increase humanity’s ability to control and modify nature, for good or ill.Human influencesThe fact that humans can exert agency in many ways — through physical actions, culture and communication — goes hand in hand with increased abilities to change the world. Thus, Godfrey-Smith argues, all these aspects of human agency come with a responsibility to think hard about what forms of control or modification of other living beings are ethical. Our intuitions of harm, fairness and loyalty, along with basic norms derived from habits of nurture and protection, such as caring for one’s offspring, must all be considered to define moral imperatives for societal behaviour towards all forms of life.Take modern industrial farming — which should cease, the author contends. People can understand how it arose from the need to feed growing communities. But individuals can also engage in imaginative and sympathetic ethical reflection that considers the lives of factory-farmed animals. If the animals that humanity controls in this manner do not seem to have “a life worth living”, Godfrey-Smith asserts, people should acknowledge that these practices are unethical.A tour of the evolution of mindsHowever, that doesn’t mean it’s obvious what should be done instead. Godfrey-Smith emphasizes that the most ethical choice is not necessarily to relinquish control over other living beings and stop farming. After all, human actions of control and modification are part of the natural world, too. Some people might advocate justly that humane farming — such as raising animals in environments with the freedom to roam and a healthy diet, or using effective stunning methods before they’re killed — is an appropriate solution. Others might think this is a contradiction in terms.The author is well aware that human actions have produced huge, planet-wide problems, including climate change. However, he encourages people to use their agency and address such problems on a local level, at scales that individuals can most readily influence. For example, I am more likely to be effective at improving habitats by coordinating with members of my local township to reduce the waste that enters a nearby ecosystem than at reducing fossil-fuel use by industry worldwide.Controversially, Godfrey-Smith wants us to see our moral responses to these two types of problem — habitat degradation and climate change — as separable. This is in part because they prompt different types of ethical reflection and in part because they demand distinct kinds of coordinated control and modification. In terms of ethical reflection, people are more likely to take actions that support and protect the lives and experiences of other species when they value them explicitly. The lives of local bird or butterfly populations are more tangible, and so easier to value, than is life on a global scale. And in terms of coordinated control, collaborative efforts with one’s neighbours can have great staying power and effectiveness at a scale that differs from governmental policies that provide incentives for individual consumers across society.In places, Godfrey-Smith’s considered tone and judicious presentation of subtleties might seem frustrating, considering the stark situations we face because of humanity’s misused agency. If ‘we’ are in this together with other life on Earth, then don’t we need to act accordingly (and urgently)? Yet solutions are not black and white. For example, reducing pain by experimenting on fewer animals does not necessarily mean that researchers should aim to cease experimentation for medical benefit. Such trade-offs are central to Godfrey-Smith’s narrative and what make it so insightful.Overall, Living on Earth successfully fills readers with wonder at the natural world, while maintaining a clear, analytical style. Godfrey-Smith argues compellingly that, although we live in a world shared with other species, humans have distinctive responsibilities because of the “unusual efficacy in our actions”. I tip my hat to his uncanny ability to make his case in a temperate voice with both intellectual acuity and passionate conviction. More

RESEARCH BRIEFINGS
29 November 2024

To restore tropical forests at scale requires cost-effective methods. An estimated 215 million hectares — an area larger than that of Mexico — have potential for natural forest regeneration, which could lead to an estimated above-ground sequestration of 23.4 gigatonnes of carbon over 30 years. More

In 2023, governments adopted an agreement under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction, known as the BBNJ agreement (see go.nature.com/4fehwo7). This agreement is essential to define and enforce the target laid down in the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Global Biodiversity Framework to protect at least 30% of coastal and marine areas, including the high seas. So far, the agreement has 105 signatories, including the United States, China and the European Union. To enter into force, however, at least 60 ratifications are needed; there are currently only 14.
Competing Interests
The author declares no competing interests. More

RESEARCH BRIEFINGS
20 November 2024

As soil dries, plants limit water loss by closing tiny apertures called stomata in their leaves. A global analysis reveals that the soil water-content values at which this stomatal control starts depend on the hydraulic properties of the soil, and that plants’ ability to adapt to drought are specific to soil texture. More

Doug Weir and his colleagues are right to urge conservationists, conservation organizations and world leaders to address the environmental impacts of war, including on species and ecosystems (D. Weir et al. Nature 634, 538–541; 2024). Many conservation organizations already have engaged, in words at least. What’s lacking is the will to follow through.
Competing Interests
The authors declare no competing interests. More

A Comment article in Nature Climate Change argues that coral reefs are best saved by enabling natural recovery, rather than through “heroic interference” that involves manually outplanting coral fragments (R. P. Streit et al. Nature Clim. Change 14, 773–775; 2024). Meanwhile, in this journal, Lisa Carne argues that, in her coral patch in Belize, outplanted corals grow well, so maybe manual restoration is worth the effort (L. Carne Nature 634, 755; 2024).
Competing Interests
The author declares no competing interests. More

“In this photograph, I’m installing a chlorophyll fluorometer into a Scots pine tree (Pinus sylvestris) at a forest station in Hyytiälä, Finland, which is 200 kilometres north of the main campus at the University of Helsinki. I’m 20 metres above the ground, on a scaffold.The tool records the light emitted by leaves or needles in the far-red part of the spectrum. Almost every chlorophyll-containing organism creates this light. The intensity is very low — only about 1% of absorbed light is emitted as fluorescence – but its variations make the signal informative.Measuring the wavelength and intensity of this light, and comparing them with changes in carbon dioxide levels and the emissions of some volatile organic compounds from plant leaves, might make it possible to draw a relationship between them. Eventually, fluorescence data obtained remotely, from towers, drones, aircraft or satellites, might lead to a better understanding of how trees and plant ecosystems are responding to a rapidly changing environment.My colleagues and I have placed fluorometers and automated chambers in this hectare of forest to measure gas exchange. The area is filled with the sound of machinery — the hissing of the pumps that operate the gas-exchange chambers, the humming of small motors and the beeping of detection equipment. These aren’t the sounds of a normal forest, but they are the sounds of our science.My work is all about zooming in and out to understand plants at different scales, and how they interact with the environment on a local to global scale. Future work might move towards a detailed understanding of a single leaf or chloroplast. In many respects, the complexity inside a leaf is comparable to what we find in a forest ecosystem, but it is much more difficult to measure.” More

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