More than 90 percent of the living matter on earth consists of microorganisms and viruses, she liked to point out. Still, she couldn’t help regarding conservationists’ preoccupation with the fate of birds, mammals, and plants as evidence of their ignorance about the greatest source of evolutionary creativity: the microworld of bacteria, fungi, and protists. Margulis was no apologist for unthinking destruction.
Hey, Charles, she would call out, are you still all worked up about protecting endangered species? She knew I was interested in ecology, and she liked to needle me. Until Margulis’s death last year, she lived in my town, and I would bump into her on the street from time to time. A researcher who specialized in cells and microorganisms, Margulis was one of the most important biologists in the last half century-she literally helped to reorder the tree of life, convincing her colleagues that it did not consist of two kingdoms (plants and animals), but five or even six (plants, animals, fungi, protists, and two types of bacteria). THE PROBLEM WITH environmentalists, Lynn Margulis used to say, is that they think conservation has something to do with biological reality. (This essay was a finalist for a 2013 National Magazine Award in the Essay category.)
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