planet earth is much more farout than the human brain
three billion human brains

a very slow increase in illumination                     of light                     of algae

the increase in the intensity of illumination, of life in the last ten million years is enormous in comparison with all the time preceding it
now we have many different kinds of animals that have become much more intelligent:
whales, manta rays, dogs and carnivores, elephants
there’s been a big jump in intelligence on the earth, not just man but other creatures too

if you were looking out thru all the creatures on the earth somehow so you could participate in all their experience
bacteria, amoeba, fungi, worms and you could do this say for all the time life’s been going on the earth

Man’s eco-system up to now has been like a big cushion that protects him from his own blunders
no matter what he did he couldn’t fuck things up enough to make the earth uninhabitable
I mean for most of human history we’ve been staggering around like a bunch of drunks and
if you take man out of the living world and put him in a world of machines you essentially
remove all his cushions

one of the first principles of ecological stability is diversity
the more diverse an ecological system is the more stability it has
the more diverse a species the more chance that species has of surviving because
whenever new conditions come along something will be preadapted for it and it means a wider range of adaptability
now a thick population density in any species will set up competition within the species and you lose diversity
and this is happening now in much of the world
people are being forced into a narrower and narrower vault
they have to live a certain pattern of life because of the pressures of government which may ultimately be the pressures of human neighbors

any kind of wise management of the world’s resources has to go beyond national boundaries
people who think mainly within terms of national boundaries are going to say well what do we care as long as
we make a profit
the Pacific Basin is certainly a good unit
you could have an orientation which would tend to maintain the health of each area
as a unit while allowing the most effective cooperation between them
in other words it would be analogous to various organs in the body
some of these areas may be very important quite outside their own domain
the Amazon Basin has probably the largest bio-mass of plant life anywhere on earth
it may be that without these vast forests of the Amazon Basin the oxygen balance
may be shifted of the whole earth
in other words this may be a major respirator for the whole earth
if you destroyed the Amazon rain forest the biosphere on earth
the edge of life on earth
might be in the situation of a man with a chronic lung disease
we might not have enough plant life
to return the carbon dioxide to oxygen and nobody
knows when this point is reached

My life regresses back to primordial reminiscences—

```
                                    I hang from the bough with my animal cries.
```

She the ash from whom I bloomed

```
                                                     offers me myself to eat.
```

I cannot drop & skitter away

```
                                         or drop & stay and there take root
```

or just shoot past the sleeping snake around her trunk

```
                                                     and explode into her sappy eye
```

and there snatch my immortality.

```
             I cry the same birth first cry as I fall upon her roots and die:

                                                     Why?
```