This chapter starts with Hawken talking about his love for the natural world as a child, and how school and science class taught competition, while he seemed to see cooperation in nature. I personally see both. Cooperation seems to me to be at the core of life, but I see plenty of competition – squirrels chasing each other out of their territories, birds doing the same, and plants crowding out each other (“no hard feelings, mate!”)

He then talks about the difficulty of defining life in the light of “recent biological discoveries”. I agree. I used to firmly believe in God, then a year of reading cosmology and quantum theory literature has left me without a floor to stand on), so I appreciate the question that he poses: “How do trillions of inanimate molecules in a single cell become sentient?”

Next up is a tour of the microorganism Hall of Fame:

Extremophiles, microorganisms that survive levels of heat, cold and pressure no other life form can withstand.

Tardigrades, also called water bears or moss piglets, have been around for over 500 million years and can be completely dehydrated, then sprinkled with water and brought “back to life.”

Rotifers, first discovered by the father of microbiology, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, are twin-headed blobs of zooplankton, one specimen of which, retrieved frozen from the Russian Arctic, is around 24,000 years old, and started to reproduce when thawed.

Next come viruses, which are not considered living organisms that do not eat or grow, but multiply at an alarming rate that we are all familiar with.

I did not know that not all viruses are harmful.

Apparently, without them life would not exist. Our bodies have a “virome”.

Scientists have attempted to define life several times.

In 1992 at NASA’s request, they arrived at the definition of life as a “self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution”.

In 2011, Edward Trifonov boiled it down to “self-reproduction with variations.” Unfortunately, that classifies computer viruses also as a life-form.

Carol Cleland however believes we need to understand “the nature of life, not life in nature…understanding life as a system”

This just in: there’s no life on Mars.

James Lovelock developed the Gaia hypothesis which proposes that the Earth behaves as a single living entity instead of a planet of divergent and competing entities (another idea that deeply resonates).

Hawken reels off the innumerable ways in which we are destroying or debilitating components of this living entity, including with sound and light pollution. The concepts of biophony (sound of living organisms in an ecosystem), geophony (natural sound of the landscape and geology), and anthrophony (sounds generated by human activity) coined by Bernie Krause and Stuart Gage are insightful, with discordant anthrophony drowning out the other two.

We are woefully ignorant of the deep intelligence and the amazing communication ability of this living planet, and like any other extrovert, we are drowning out the introverts, thereby losing something that’s almost imperceptible, but immeasurably important.