Woodland as an organism

In Borderland State Park, which straddles Easton and Sharon, Mass.

In Borderland State Park, which straddles Easton and Sharon, Mass.

"I have been trying to think of the earth as a kind of organism, but it is no go. I cannot think of it this way. It is too big, too complex, with too many working parts lacking visible connections. The other night, driving through a hilly, wooded part of southern New England, I wondered about this. If not like an organism, what is it like, what is it most like? Then, satisfactorily for that moment, it came to me: it is most like a single cell.''

-- The late Lewis Thomas,  physician, essayist and poet. wrote Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher.