I really highly recommend Robert Hazen's _Story of Earth_ [1] if you're into this sort of stuff. Highly knowledgeable and entertaining geologist argues that the geosphere and the biosphere should really be viewed as one co-evolving system, over deep time. There are thousands of species of minerals that can only exist because of the action of life, and those minerals in turn enable new forms of life, which enable new species of mineral, and so on in a complex and ever evolving system within which we exist for only a fraction of an instant.
You can call it the revenge of the softies. Rock thought it had it all worked out, geometric purity, eternal hardness, high atomic numbers, crushing abundance, first mover advantage. Then comes along Life, a freak aberration, barely indistinguishable from water, chaotic and brittle, ugly and arbitrary in structure, and it starts chewing on the mighty Rock.
Fast forward billions of years: the entire volume of the planet (where temperature allows macromolecules to exist) is alive somehow... Rock retreats to the molten interior
Microbes also started the oxygenation of the atmosphere. Some microbes were off-gassing oxygen.
There was a cartoon in one of my college textbooks where some microbes were decrying how their oxygen-producing neighbors were ruining the environment with their high levels of poisonous oxygen off-gassing.
seems like a good analogy that it's entirely possible for earth's inhabitants to produce so much poisonous waste gas that a new equilibrium is found in which basically none of the original organisms survive and the old status quo never returns.
Hopefully CO2 doesn't do anything quite so drastic for humans.
On this topic, I would highly recommend Nick Lane's Oxygen: The Molecule that Made the World. Interesting learning about how life worked different when oxygen was much lower, and much higher than today.
For a salient discussion of how biotic cycling can be used in agriculture, microbiologist Elaine Ingham gives a practical talk to audiences of actual farmers.[0]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Story-Earth-Billion-Stardust-Living/d...