To describe the overwhelming life of a tropical forest just in terms of inert biochemistry and DNA didn't seem to give a very full picture of the world.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
It's hard to appreciate the importance of the rainforest because it seems so far away, but it's vital to the survival of the planet as we know it.
It's always been a dream of mine, of exploring the living world, of classifying all the species and finding out what makes up the biosphere.
You think of the rainforest as this incredibly abundant place of fauna and animals and flora. This great, rich wilderness. And yet it is such a biological battlefield in which everything is competing.
Most people know that forests are the lungs of our planet, literally playing a critical role in every breath we take. And that they're also home to incredible animals like the orangutan and elephant, which will go extinct if we keep cutting down their forests.
For millions of years, this world has been a great gift to nearly everything living on it, a planet whose atmosphere, temperature, air, water, seasons, and weather were precisely calibrated to allow us - the big us, including forests and oceans, species large and small - to flourish.
The tree of life was always there. Evolution just fills in the gaps.
It's fair to say when you go out and walk in the woods or on a beach, the most conspicuous forms of life you will see are plants and animals, and certainly there's a huge diversity of those types of organisms, perhaps 10 million animal species and several hundred thousand plant species.
At the deepest level, all living things that have ever been looked at have the same DNA code. And many of the same genes.
I was in my yard and thought that the tree was a living being. We take trees for granted. We don't believe they are as much alive as we are.
A tree you pass by every day is just a tree. If you are to closely examine what a tree has and the life a tree has, even the smallest thing can withstand a curiosity, and you can examine whole worlds.