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Chapter 9: Life Gave Earth The Blues
- University of Minnesota Press
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C H A p T E R 9 l I F E G A V E E A R T H T H E B l U E S NATuRE IS NOT juST RED IN TOOTH AND CLAw but green with symbiotic chloroplasts, yellow with chrysophyte algae, and flamingo-pink with ingested carotenoids.It is an amazing psychedelic display of spiraling foraminifera , radiating radiolaria, and diatomaceous earth-making diatoms. It is not just hemoglobin red with the blood of animals but nacreous and jeweled with strange partnerships,luminous microbes illuminating deep-sea animals, floating cathedrals of calcium and silicon, oceans full of miniature filigreed and fragile pillbox,star-shaped,and coin forms.On land, hordes of green beings alchemically transform sunlight and dirt and animal exhaust into fruit and flowers and, at another remove, lovers and meat, their shining, glistening, mutually orgasmic bodies a billionyear refrain of triumphant partners, a buoyant rejoinder to chromatic oversimplification, a multicolored splendor. Life is not all roses, but neither is it the opposite. A more profound poet than Lord Tennyson, William Blake, said,“Exuberance is beauty”and “Energy is Eternal Delight.” EARTH IS NO ORDINARy pl ANET. We may pride ourselves on our scientific instrumentation, our thermal satellites and X-ray diffractometers, our magnetic resonance imagers and gas chromatographs determining the atomic composition of crystals and the chemical composition of stars. But the biosphere uses more ancient, distributed self-growing and 112 G A I A S I N G S T H E B l u E S self-repairing instruments to recognize and maintain its manifold operations . Global humanity is a modern variation on an ancient theme. The biosphere builds an endless variety of biomolecular concentrators and redistributors,organo-devices such as water scorpions (family: Nepidae ) with built-in fathometers, plants with gravity sensors and exquisite animal behavior–modifying compounds, algae with barium sulfate and calcium ion–detection systems. Magneto-sensitive bacteria detect true magnetic north,homing pigeons and bees fly home on cloudy days.Electric fish generate and sense, via electroreception, magnetic fields, which they use to locate and communicate with one another. It is a psychedelic planet and life lights it up. It parties with fireflies, luminous fish,glow-in-the-dark algae in Vieques Island’s bioluminescent bay,and Gonyaulax that flash circadianly wherever they are.Green plants, red algae,and cyan-colored bacteria join us and most animals in perceiving the visible slice of the electromagnetic spectrum,which extends from 400 to 700 nanometers in wavelength, and which we see as the colors of the rainbow spanning from purple (the shortest wavelength) to red (the longest). But pollinating insects detect pretty patterns of petals visible only to those that espy within the ultraviolet range at wavelengths below 400 nanometers. Honeybees navigate by polarized light. Pit vipers such as rattlesnakes track their warm prey via infrared. Dogs detect ultrasound; bats not only detect but emit it at ultrahigh frequencies, some 100,000 cycles per second. Together we living beings make and sense and alter the composition of the soil, ocean, atmosphere, and even lithosphere, where microbes that live in the rocks, endoliths, live. Everyone alive has a history of uninterrupted life that goes back for more than three billion years.That includes you,but it also includes inchworms and E. coli. In that sense, there are no extant “highest” or “lower” organisms: although they may not act like it, each present-day life-form represents a successful track record of some 3.8 billion years of evolution. The numinous feeling of aliveness we get in seeing our blue sphere from space finds support in multiple lines of evidence that show that global life is physiological. The continuous use of matter and energy by multifarious living beings combines to impose regularities and boundaries of action on the planet’s oceans, land, and air. Biospheric life is not an organism,technically,because organisms don’t completely recycle all their available atoms; they share them with other organisms in ecosys- [34.204.52.16] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:25 GMT) l I f E G A v E E A R T H T H E B l u E S 113 tems. Earth is thus a kind of superorganismic being or, more academically , a global ecosystem. A kind of closed causal nexus, the blue planet not only reacts but responds, including to its own plentiful inhabitants/ constituents. The notion that Earth is a rock with some life on it...