‘community assembly’ studies started to show up in the literature, and they suggested that you could get persistent communities containing as few as eight species.

Cornell University ecologist David Pimentel reckons that society spends ten kilocalories of hydrocarbons to produce one kilocalorie of food.

warm-up for our real break from Earthly orbit—the Petrochemical and Genetic Engineering Revolutions.

other than rocks and metals, it’s hard to find any raw material we use that was not once alive, owing its ultimate existence to plants.

keeps us too busy to think what the real problems might be. Fertilizer, for instance, masks the real problem of soil erosion caused by a till agriculture of annuals.

nature’s first trick of the trade is that nature manufactures its materials under life-friendly conditions—in water, at room temperature, without harsh chemicals or high pressures.

Hard rain hits this canopy of plants and it either runs gently down the stems or it turns into a mist. By contrast, when rain hits row crops, it strikes exposed soil, packs it, then runs off, taking precious topsoil with it.”

The multileveled complexity of these materials is referred to as an ordered hierarchical structure, which seems to be nature’s second trick of the trade. From the atomic level all the way to the macroscopic, precision is built in, and strength and flexibility follow.

James Drake and Stuart Pimm of the University of Tennessee study what it takes to arrive at an assembly of species that remain in equilibrium, a condition farmers would obvously want for their domestic prairie. Unlike The Land staff, they do their experiments with ecosystems in a computer (artificial life) and with aquatic organisms in glass tanks