Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings
“Our origins are of the earth,” marine biologist Rachel Carson wrote in contemplating science and our spiritual bond with nature. “And so there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity.” In the same era, the anthropologist, philosopher of science, and poet Loren Eiseley — a great admirer of Carson’s — offered a consonant sentiment in his lovely meditation on reclaiming our sense of the miraculous in a mechanical age: “We forget that nature itself is one vast miracle transcending the reality of night and nothingness. We forget that each one of us in his personal life repeats that miracle.”
The biological, geological, and ecological nature of that miracle is what evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis (March 5, 1938–November 22, 2011) reflects on a generation later in a passage from Jonathan White’s wonderful interview collection Talking on the Water: Conversations about Nature and Creativity (public library), which also gave us Ursula K. Le Guin on art, storytelling, and the power of language to transform and redeem.
Margulis is known as the co-creator of the Gaia hypothesis, which holds that all life interacts with its inorganic environment to form…
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