Conserving Communities

The third planet is unique. Luxuriating over our sphere’s surface, thinning up into the air, and etching its way down into the rocks is a layer in which something rich and new is added to the physics that unremarkably pervades the rest of the solar system. That special layer is, of course, the layer of life. It is not that the laws of physics are dis-obeyed at the planet’s rim: vanish the thought. But living matter deploys physics in unusual ways. So   unusual – ‘emergent’ –  that the error of believing the laws of physics to be defied is forgivable. Which is just as well, because everyone has been tempted by that error, most people through history have succumbed to it, and many still do.

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