Liber Terrae - Chapter 53

Verses

Verse 9

There is no forest organism called “the forest,” yet remove enough relations and the forest disappears.

Verse 10

This is how wholes haunt science: real without being single.

Verse 11

A tree is sunlight, carbon, water, fungi, bacteria, minerals, ancestry and accident held in temporary agreement.

Verse 12

So are you.

Verse 13

Oxygen feels free because plants invoice slowly.

Verse 14

Soil seems inert because most of its laborers are small enough to escape your gratitude.

Verse 15

The ocean is not scenery. It is chemistry negotiating with atmosphere on a planetary scale.

Verse 16

Life changed the air and then evolved lungs suited to the air it had changed.

Verse 17

Organisms inherit worlds partly built by organisms that are dead.

Verse 18

Evolution has no foresight, yet it leaves structures that look uncannily like intention to creatures addicted to stories.

Verse 19

Earth is not balanced like a statue. It is balanced like a bicyclist—through constant correction and motion.

Verse 20

Stability is sometimes the visible average of countless disturbances.

Verse 21

Extinction is natural. So is fever. The word natural is not a moral defense.

Verse 22

Humans are not outside the biosphere when destroying it; that is what makes the destruction biologically interesting and personally stupid.

Verse 23

You cannot win a war against your life-support system. Victory is included among the failure modes.