When the Earth Was Green: Plants, Animals, and Evolution's Greatest Romance

by Riley Black

Take a step back for a moment. Imagine your favorite dinosaur—or some other terrestrial creature if the saurians are not to your personal taste. Think of that animal carefully stepping through the evening forest, the low-angled glow of the sun sending shafts of orange and gold through the shadowy rows of tree trunks. That animal is moving through a grove of living things, not just knowable as individual plants but lives that are literally intertwined from canopy to runs sunken into the ground. Leaf-munching insects, lichen dotting the bark, fungus growing along the roots, and more, discernible from each other but all connected. The entire scene is alive, a tangle of stories so varied and intricate that you could start following a single, small thread of existence and spend the rest of your life tracing the snarled, pulsing web of life it’s part of.

jfc this is written so beautifully. I'm sitting here echoing with her thoughts.

Genetic material is often considered a blueprint for making an organism. But that’s not quite right. If DNA is a blueprint, then it’s a blueprint that includes instructions for when to tackle certain construction projects and the various possibilities for what could happen in a different circumstance. Genes don’t dictate so much as offer a range of outcomes that requires input and interaction from the outside world, just as they may change with mutation.