More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
They suffuse our atmosphere with the oxygen we breathe, and they quite literally build our bodies out of sugars they spin from sunlight.
“Nature everywhere speaks to man in a voice that is familiar to his soul,”
Left to the sciences, which were never built to take up ethical questions of being and nonbeing, plants remain conceptually locked out in the inanimate cold.
Nature is chaos in motion. Biological life is a spiraling diffusion of possibilities,
The first plant was born a chimera, an organism composed of cells that are genetically distinct. The leaves of every green plant on Earth retain the genetic imprint of that first union. The plant cells that today catch photons as they fall from space are themselves chimeras in miniature; that first cyanobacteria is still within them, still faithfully alchemizing light into food.
If weighed, plants would amount to 80 percent of Earth’s living matter.
A leaf is the only thing in our known world that can manufacture sugar out of materials—light and air—that have never been alive.
takes six molecules of carbon dioxide and six molecules of water, torn apart by power from the sun, to form six molecules of oxygen and—the true aim of this whole process—one precious molecule of glucose.
One of plants’ greatest strengths is that they can regrow virtually any amputated part, but when a leaf grows back, it always grows back differently. The root cap is the only part to grow back exactly the same.
The language of scent, they said, was wafting messages on the air.
Plants are fully aware of our contact with them, and will rearrange their lives to respond to such treatment.
photosynthesis is an inherently electrical process.
magical plant habit of photosynthesis.
Conservatism in science is both a safety measure against false ideas and the thorn in the side of new breakthroughs.
when you stress a plant by damaging its leaf veins, it will make bad foraging decisions.
Genes are not exact instructions. They’re more like stage cues at an improv show. A lot of other things could happen along the way.
The green sea slug blurs the boundary between animal and plant.
Agency is an organism’s capacity to assess the conditions it finds itself in, and change itself to suit them.
Our bodies, Margulis wrote, preserve the conditions of that early Earth. The chemical compounds within us, and especially our watery interiors, could be seen as a replication of the cozy primordial world the bacteria first evolved in. We are, in a way, perfectly designed bacterial vessels.
