A GLOBAL VIEW 5 



are electrons? Negative charges of electricity. Protons? Positive 

 charges of electricity. Neutrons? Neutral charges. And what, the 

 botanist inquires, is electricity? The physicist says it is a form of 

 energy, force, power. 



The plant, it appears, is an organized collection of energy. Some- 

 what timidly, the botanist asks ''What is energy?" The physicist 

 can only reply "I am working on that," which is his way of saying, 

 "I don't know much about it, except that it can do work, produce 

 action." 



The botanist and his chemist friend go to work. They find that 

 the plant gets its elements from three sources: air, water, and soil. 

 A seed lies in the skin of the earth. It lies in soil, and the soil con- 

 tains air and water. The plant grows. It takes in elements, and from 

 them constructs itself, according to a certain, largely hereditary, pat- 

 tern. For something that has no brain, the plant does an amazing 

 architectural job. 



Having traced the plant down into the very bowels of atoms, the 

 botanist becomes curious about the air, water and soil those ware- 

 houses of raw stuff from which plants are constructed. The water, he 

 knows, usually conies as rain or snow. In the days of his youth he 

 learned in geography class how the intimate and wonderfully con- 

 venient relationship of sun and earth produces weather and climate, 

 how weather turns big rocks into little rocks, even into dust. The 

 effect of sunlight on plants is knowledge which a human can hardly 

 escape. The astronomer tells him that these actions weather, soil 

 formation, growth all originated in the energy of the sun. 



And so, it becomes clear that the tremendous largeness and pre- 

 cision of the solar system, as well as the unimaginable smallness and 

 precision of atoms, play their parts in the intricate operation of pro- 

 ducing a living plant. 



Life the Master Organizer. The solar system is dead. The atoms 

 of mineral elements are dead. With all their clockwork organization 

 they are dead. The air, the waters, the rock dusts, the sunshine are 

 dead. It is these dead things which the chemist and physicist analyze. 

 Yet, out of this death has come life. Life draws upon them all, these 

 simple, natural forms, and transforms them quietly and with ease 

 into such complex living compounds that our greatest scientists are 

 thus far baffled by many of them. If undisturbed, these living or- 

 ganisms grow, reproduce, and die, always enriching that thin zone, 

 enriching that one foot (so far as we know) in all the millions of 

 miles of the solar system 's axis which supports life the topsoil ! 



This enrichment of soil is an active, energetic process. It is a 

 cumulative process. In it, life overlaps and continues, generation by 

 generation, working over and over the elements life uses, reaching a 

 bit deeper into the rock dust as each century passes, building fertility 

 slowly. As the fertility level rises, the life level inevitably rises. The 

 level of life rises not only in numbers of living things but in com- 



