Our world hums with creative energy, glorying in improbable assemblies of unlikely chemicals. Anarchy is loose in the land and succeeds, somehow, in countering chaos. And the result, against all the odds, is order. The ocean heaves and turns, rain falls, land rises, winds blow and life blossoms — all because something keeps our environment stable despite the vagaries of Sun and time. It looks astonishingly well organized, more like an artifact than an accident. Which may be exactly what it is, an ecosystem created and maintained by life for its own ends.
— Lyall Watson, Dark Nature