Sublime

At the height of the American chestnut blight, every woodland breeze would lose spores in uncountable trillions to drift in a pretty, lethal haze on to neighboring hillsides. The mortality rate was 100 percent. In just over thirty-five years the American chestnut became a memory. The Appalachians alone lost four

Beneath these giants, way down in the understory, her own body seems freakishly small, like one of those acorn-people she made in childhood.

For a brilliant evocation of this aspect of life, see “Shedding Life: On the Mysteries of Dying, Cell by Cell,” by Czechoslovakian research immunologist and poet Miroslav Holub, Science 86, April 1986, 51–53. See also Wicken, “Thermodynamics, Evolution and Emergence,” in Weber, Depew, and J. D. Smith, Entropy, Information, and Evolution, 166.

He would be called the second Columbus. He had rediscovered America, it would be said. He was also seeing relationships and interrelationships between the Earth and life on Earth in a way that others before him had failed to do. So it would be perfectly fitting also to say that he was among the first ecologists.

SAY THE PLANET is born at midnight and it runs for one day. First there is nothing. Two hours are lost to lava and meteors. Life doesn’t show up until three or four a.m. Even then, it’s just the barest self-copying bits and pieces. From dawn to late morning—a million million years of branching—nothing more exists than lean and simple cells. Then th