The
Creator has selected carbon containing molecules to build the life
on Earth. Where they just handy or does the Earth’s overall composition
make it mandatory?
The
essential fact which emerges ... is that the three smallest and most
active reservoirs [of carbon in the global carbon cycle], the
atmosphere, the plants and the soil, are all of roughly the same
size. This means that large human disturbance of any one of these
reservoirs will have large effects on all three. We cannot hope
either to understand or to manage the carbon in the atmosphere
unless we understand and manage the trees and the soil too.
Freeman
Dyson: From Eros to Gaia, Penguin Books, London, New York,
1993.
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