Despite the depression, I can still appreciate the flashes of insight offered by good writers addressing big issues with compassion and care. Ferris Jabr's Becoming Earth really is a wonderful book. He is addressing how life has made the planet more suitable for life. I think I've already mentioned it - depression has an impact on memory and the sense of time. Did something happen yesterday or a month ago?
Anyway, his appreciation for soil is wonderful It turns out that some conceive of soil as a living entity. Just as we are made up of gazillions of cells, only some of which are human; so soil is something alive made of gazillions of cells. Of course, you can't take a wheelbarrow load of me and leave the rest of me to get on with it. But it's worth noting that just as you can't grate my surface and expect me to thrive, so you can't till soil without that entity suffering.
The chapter on plankton is really good too.
While I was thinking about all this, I wanted to work out why, to me, there is no depreciation of the value of the individual in acknowledging that a whole is greater than the sum of its parts. What it is, instead, is to say, look how fucking important the goddam whole is! This is where our prejudices about communism fail to track onto the reality of collectivisation in natural systems. It's through the sheer variety and difference of all the gazillion multifarious parts that we get a more resilient, creative, bountiful, and blessed whole. Differences, particulars, individuals are all precious AND they in their complex entanglements they are also the compost for yet more precious, divergent, vital becomings.
It's not hard to understand.
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