Bloom: The Evolution of Life on Earth and the Birth of Ecology, with Emily Dickinson Set to Song

How flowers gave rise to life on Earth and made possible the human consciousness that came to see a world “thronged only with Music.”

This is the first of nine installments in the 2021/2022 animated season of The Universe in Verse — a celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry, in collaboration with On Being.

Two hundred million years ago, long before we walked the Earth, it was a world of cold-blooded creatures and dull color — a kind of terrestrial sea ...