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A literary scholar and a planetary scientist look at the Earth as object, viewed from the outside, and as a singular orb that is a challenge to scale and human self-importance.

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Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

In Earth, a planetary scientist and a literary humanist explore what happens when we think of the Earth as an object viewable from space. As a "blue marble," "a blue pale dot," or, as Chaucer described it, "this litel spot of erthe," the solitary orb is a challenge to scale and to human self-importance. Beautiful and self-contained, the Earth turns out to be far less knowable than it at first appears: its vast interior an inferno of incandescent and yet solid rock and a reservoir of water vaster than the ocean, a world within the world. Viewing the Earth from space invites a dive into the abyss of scale: how can humans apprehend the distances, the temperatures, and the time scale on which planets are born, evolve, and die?

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

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1. Prologue: Genesis
2. Orbit
3. Ground (Why Earth?)
4. Scale (Barriers to Understanding)
5. Radiance (Earth´s beauty)
6. Gravity (Earth´s Pull)
7. Interlude: A Hike Around Piestewa Peak
8. Imagination
List of Illustrations
Notes
Index

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[An] alchemy of unlikely ideas ... [The authors] reflect on the geological history of the earth and humanity´s understanding of it over the millennia. Sydney Morning Herald 20170420

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Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome
Jeffrey Jerone Cohen is Dean of Humanities at Arizona State University, USA, and co-president of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. He is the author or editor of 13 books, including Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (which received the 2017 René Wellek Prize for best book in comparative literature) and in collaboration with Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Earth (Bloomsbury, 2017), a re-examination of planet from the perspectives of a planetary scientist and a literary humanist.

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