Pulsating beneath it all is an insistence that it is not too late to change the catastrophic course of ecology, that it can only be done by listening closely and creatively to nature's own silent lessons, intimating that our mightiest instrument of resilience is rapturous wonder.
This twilight band is believed to contain 70 per cent of all animal life on Earth. It also performs one of the planet's most important climate functions. Each night, billions of organisms migrate upward to feed near the surface, then return to depth by morning. In doing so, they transport carbon from the atmosphere into the deep ocean, where it can remain sequestered for centuries. Without this biological pump, global temperature targets would already have been exceeded.
When we fail to see the connections between things, we fail to anticipate the consequences of any one thing. A century before we began slaying entire ecosystems with pesticides meant to eradicate individual species, before we began tinkering with individual genes in the complex cathedral of the genome, the naturalist John Muir exulted that "when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe" — an exultation that now reads as an admonition.
Florida residents report 10,000 "nuisance" gators annually; each call starts a process that, over the past 30 years, has killed nearly 200,000 of the creatures. "What remains a mystery to me," writes Winkie, considering the reptile he straddles, "is why this particular alligator—floating peacefully in a retention pond—was deemed to be a threat."
2mo ago
We have not the reverence for what is green and growing that we ought to have. A man's relation to Nature must be humble, as his relation to God. He must not think himself greater than the grass.
2mo ago
We are all of us the living graves of extinct beasts, and hold within us the sheep, the lion, and the eagle of our forefathers. Strange kinships bind us to the creatures of field and forest, and the blood in our veins runs down from a time when the world was young.
Today, we know that diatoms — thousands of species of unicellular algae, each a living Noether theorem housed in a shell of opal — are not created for admiration but create the admirer: Every life-form on Earth depends on them.
Warm weather has fueled a bloom that National Park Service workers are trying to kill using everything from hydrogen peroxide to nanobubbles ahead of July 4 celebrations.
3mo ago
Nature is not a place to visit. It is home. And within that home there are no sermons preached, no creeds recited; only the ancient, wordless liturgy of wind and stone.
Their leaves send about two thirds of all the food they make to the underworld. There, roots tunnel many meters down. As they grow, they break up clay and rock, exude sugars and other molecules, and interweave their cells with fungi. When the roots die, they add spongy organic matter to the soil.
Human overpopulation is not the only factor driving ecological overshoot, but it is the most neglected one, and the factor that intensifies every crisis confronting us. And it really should be one of the most important progressive issues given its patriarchal roots.
6mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
