Gather Light

gather light
Originally uploaded by inverted reptile

I've been thinking about the ethics of being a consumer of energy, in the ecological sense. I feel like we are, or at least I was, taught that there is a hierarchy of life. Animals are the 'most evolved', whatever that means, and then there are plants, and fungus, and then there are all those microscopic swimmy things (many of which are actually animals and plants, or plants and fungus, or some combination of the two), but . Despite the best efforts of biology professors to quash this notion (as you can see if you take a look at wikipedia's history of the phylogenetic tree ) it still gets betrayed by phrases like "top carnivore" (referring to those animals that eat everything else). And obviously, we are the top top carnivore. Not only can we kill off lots of top carnivores, but we can even afford not to eat them.
The concept of trophic levels*", the way that ecologists look at energy dynamics in an ecosystem, is more helpful. Trophic levels describe the energy efficiency of an organism in relation to available energy (unless you are a deep-sea vent microbe, this is defined as the amount of solar energy hitting the earth). Every step in the food chain is about 10% efficient.
Now, most of us know that more or less all of the Earth's available energy is made available by plants. Ecologists talk about Foundation Species, usually some ecosystem-altering dominant tree, kelp, etc. It now seems astonishing to me that I've never really seen anyone, even the most edgy scifi writer, describe Earth as being essentially a plants' world. Le Guin edges towards it at times, especially in The Word for World is Forest, a novel about a forest culture who's consiousness is linked somehow to the forest?(which I now think I should go re-read) and "Vaster than Empires," a short story about a planet with a single plant-based consiousness, (and whose title is taken from an excellent line in an obnoxious poem, "To His Coy Mistress": "our vegetable love would grow / vaster than empires, and more slow." )

Of course, there are always the folks who came up with the World Tree. A bit more sensible.

But where does that leave us, as far as organizing idea systems go? I could talk about entropy, which is probably pointless and which I will probably get wrong anyway, and about deforestation and civilization, fossil fuels and global warming, and all the other ideas about ethics and energy and loss which are spinning in my head. Its not that I want to idealize plants, either. Every plant out there is pretty much constantly engaged in all out chemical warfare with all of its neighbors.
I wish I could photosynthesize. Maybe some day I'll be able to approximate it with solar panels. But there is still a lot we can learn from plants. Persistence. Dormancy. Exuberant growth. I like to think of us as being like invasive species like ivy and blackberry, doing our best to make the world uniform and predictable, and maybe we can learn from that in a different way, as we try to eradicate it. Endless variety--every flower more absurd and beautiful than the last.
The thing I keep coming back to, though, is that if there is a good way to model your life, it is to try to be like a tree. To subtly alter your environment, to create shade, sugar, shelter. To transform the energy that comes your way not just for your own use, but in a way that can benefit the rest of the world.

*Wikipedia totally failed me on the trophic level thing. Their entry was AWFUL. One of these days I need to get a wikipedia account...