In the wake of Margulis's work, it is clear that relentless competition is not the sole theme of life. We have to acknowledge symbiosis as a key operating principle of life on Earth and install that operating principle within our culture.

Biologist and geoscientist Lynn Margulis composed a grand and powerful view of the living and the non-living through her uncanny ability to lean forward and see the smallest inhabitants of the Earth and then to leap back at the speed of thought to conceptualize the entire planet. This seeing from soil to space marked a unique scientific endeavor.