Exuberance: The Passion for Life Read Online Free Page B

Loveliness”
     

    (photo credit 2.1)
    I n the exuberance of nature begins our own. And nature is self-evidently exuberant.One pair of poppies, given seven years and the right conditions, will produce 820 thousand million million million descendants. A single pair of spiders over the same time period and under ideal circumstances will give rise to 427 thousand million million more spiders.The fertility and diversity of nature are staggering. In a sliver of Brazilian forest only a few kilometers square, scientists have counted more than1,500 species of butterfly.Lichens, among nature’s oldest and slowest of living things, grow nearly everywhere—together with blueberries under the snow, onstained-glass windows of churches and cathedrals, in deserts and in birch woodlands, on the backs of tortoises—and an individual community of lichen may survive longer than most human civilizations. (One in Swedish Lapland is thought by scientists to have begun its collective life nearly nine thousand years ago.) The 13,500 known species of lichen are as exuberant in color as they are diverse in form and habitat, showing themselves in scarlets, snow whites, emerald greens, blacks, and sulfur yellows.
    The abundance of nature is most obviously seen in the diversity of species, those “endless forms most beautiful” before which Darwin stood in awe. There area million and a half species of fungi, eight million of insects (including 350,000 varieties of beetles alone), andmore than a million species of bacteria. Nowhere is the exuberance of nature more apparent than in the tropical rain forest. Tens of thousands of species of animals and plants live on or under the forest floor, twine around the trees, or perch in the branches. Vines and orchids and fruits and flowers proliferate wildly under the canopy of the high trees. The rain forest is, as E. O. Wilson puts it, a “green cathedral,” a teeming marker to nature’s fullness and variation. But it is not the only luxuriant place. John Muir wrote of the layered richness of the Yosemite wilderness: “How deeply with beauty is beauty overlaid! The ground covered with crystals, the crystals with mosses and lichens and low-spreading grasses and flowers, these with larger plants leaf over leaf with every changing colour and form, the broad palms of the firs outspread over these, the azure dome over all like a bell-flower, and star above star.” Each place he looked, everywhere in the mountains and valleys, Muir saw examples of nature’s exuberance.
    Nature’s lavishness is not limited to the rain forests or to the Sierra Nevada, of course, although in those places it is spectacular. It is also evident in the dispersal of plants and animals across the earth and throughout the seas, in the snowflakes that fall by the skyful, distinct yet innumerable, and inthe thickness of thestarfields.Astronomers live among numbers that are unimaginable, fabulous, and terrifying. The universe, they believe, containsat least 10 21 stars—1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000—and is home to more than 125 billion galaxies.The Milky Way alone, scientists reckon, contains10 41 —100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000—grams of diamond dust; or, differently put, a million trillion trillion trillion carats. Nature is impossibly fertile.
    “Exuberance,” derived from the Latin
exuberance—ex
, “out of,” +
uberare
, “to be fruitful, to be abundant”—is at its core a concept of fertility. Exuberance in nature is defined by lush, profuse, riotous growth; it is an overflowing, opulent, and copious abundance. Early uses of “exuberance” in English were mostly in the context of descriptions of nature, of profuse crops or of kinetic natural phenomena such as shooting stars, sulfur springs, and waterfalls. A fruitful outcome of an alchemy experiment, for instance, was characterized as “exuberated earth” in 1471, according to the
Oxford English Dictionary
, and in 1513 a particularly