Living on Earth

Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World

De: Peter Godfrey-Smith

Narrado por: Mitch Riley, Peter Godfrey-Smith

Long-listed, Washington Post Best Books of the Year, 2024

"Listening to Godfrey-Smith's exploration of animal consciousness will rattle every nook and cranny of your brain with an onslaught of interesting questions...the author leaves listeners with a radical new perspective."—AudioFile on Metazoa

This program is read by the author.

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.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

©2024 Peter Godfrey-Smith (P)2024 Macmillan Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

"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

"Living on Earth is a hugely important book. The final installment in Peter Godfrey-Smith's essential trilogy, it give us a sweeping, careful, and courageous exploration of a natural world suffused with life, with minds, and perhaps with consciousness too. Godfrey-Smith writes with grace, humility, and wisdom about a dizzying array of topics, from the distant past to the far future, from the deep ocean to the frontiers of technology. The picture he paints reaffirms our continuity with the natural world, and impresses on us the urgency of the choices we now face.”—Anil Seth, director of the Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex and author of Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

"Only Peter Godfrey-Smith could write this book. It offers a vast, kaleidoscopic, and immensely thought-provoking overview of the development of life on Earth, with special attention to humanity's place in the bigger picture. We are often told that human beings are part of the natural world, but rarely is the mutual influence between people and the rest of our shared ecosystem spelled out with such care."—Sean Carroll, professor at Johns Hopkins University and author of Quanta and Fields

Worth every minute…

Learned so much and appreciated author’s concerns, considerations and thoughtful awareness for all…
interesting and educational too! An excellent read/listen.
Thank you!

Brilliantly written. Brilliantly narrated

An absolutely wonderful portrait of life on Planet Earth. And the narration was equally wonderful. So I absolutely recommend Living on Earth to everyone. I feel the same way about the first two books in the trilogy: Other Minds and Metazoa. But as with those other two I have one it-would-have-been-perfect-if-only. .. kind of complaint: I was left feeling that Godfrey-Smith had been trying to impart some brilliant overarching lesson, one that I was unable to grasp—almost, but, sad to say, one I never quite got.