introduction

If there’s a social hierarchy in heaven, I hope biologists get compliant angels, bottomless research grants and the residential equivalent of Bishopscourt, Houghton or Hampstead. Maybe I’m biased. But to me they seem, above all others, to perceive, through the myriad actions and processes of countless creatures, the vast and magical implications of life. They have a capacity for entrancement.

That’s not a word used much these days. In the fast-moving world in which most of us live, we seldom have time for entrancement beyond the gaze with which we regard the flickering screens of our entrapment. There are, however, those who regularly become fixated by the bark of a tree or a bug on a leaf or an animal doing very little at all. Or maybe a puddle or a platypus.

They tend to say things like if the DNA in one cell of a mouse were placed end on end and magically enlarged to the width of ordinary wrapping string, it would extend over 900 kilometres. Or did you know, there are over 500 species of friendly bacteria living symbiotically in your mouth and throat? Or to conserve biological diversity is an investment in immortality. Or I hate a man who skins the land.

There are giants among them without whom the world in which we live would be much less interesting. Think of life without Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, Carolus Linnaeus, Jane Goodall and EO Wilson, for starters. They were and are all afflicted with what the American entomologist and father of sociobiology, Edward Wilson, calls the naturalist’s trance. It’s the prerequisite of genius.

My admiration for their craft and their insights is the product of my ignorance. As an amateur, I have no training in science so it became my hobby. For many years I would return from a library or bookshop with treasures under my arm gathered simply because of the cool pictures on their covers. Many of these writers used arcane terminology that had me scurrying to a dictionary. Not infrequently I gave up and reached for another book or wandered through Google instead.

But gradually it all started making sense. Science wasn’t impenetrable to non-scientists, it was just written in a language you had to learn. The best part has been dealing with scientists themselves. For years, emboldened by a good number of books and journal articles, I pursued them, bothered them with uninformed questions and benefited from their good grace and patience.

I’d ask them about their passion and listen intently. They’d do the rest and seemed gratified that someone was interested. That’s their charm, really. Whereas I’m always indebted to them for sharing their knowledge so freely, they seemed grateful for being heard by someone who, while not in their discipline, was genuinely interested in what they had to say. It worked, and wonderful worlds of biology, botany, geology and other natural disciplines unrolled for my awed regard.

About this book, then.

I was having a discussion with a friend who’d been deeply religious but had abandoned his belief. Given the vastness of the universe, he reasoned, how could there be a god transcendent to all that? If there was, it was silly to think he or she would have any interest in us. I agreed, but suggested a different angle.

I’ve walked alone through the sweat of the earth’s rainforests, travelled over the skin of her deserts, looked deeply into the eyes of her wild and beautiful creatures and heard the planet humming in the ice fields of Antarctica.

This has left me convinced that earth is a living thing: Gaia – the idea that the living and nonliving components of earth function as a single system – and that we’re part of its being. We’re not separate, unique, special in any particular way. We’re simply part of earth’s awareness of itself and, if we need a god that made us and cares, it’s all around us. This planet is our mother, our father and our lover.

It occurred to me that this love affair had been going on for some time in columns and stories I’d been writing for magazines like Getaway, Travel Africa, High Life, Africa Geographic and many newspapers and websites. Fortunately, I’m fastidious about electronic filing, so I began trawling through stories to see if they fitted into some sort of pattern. The result is this book.