Life is a planetary-level phenomenon and the Earth has been alive for at least 3,000 million years. To me, the human move to take responsibility for the living Earth is laughable–the rhetoric of the powerless. The planet takes care of us, not we of it. Our self-inflated moral imperative to guide a wayward Earth or heal our sick planet is evidence of our immense capacity for self delusion. Rather, we need to protect us from ourselves.
Lynn Margulis. The Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998), p.115
