Sublime

cannot be ignored when it comes to our political actions. Legal representation, reckoning and protection are founded upon human ideas of individuality and identity – but these are anathema to an ecological accounting of the more-than-human world.

“Life is a copiously branching bush,” Gould writes, “continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.”

Natural selection has made us a cultural species by altering our development in ways that (1) slowed the growth of our bodies through a shortened infancy and extended childhood but added a growth spurt in adolescence, and (2) altered neurological development in complex ways that make our brain advanced at birth yet both highly expandable and enduri

The thing we call culture is always an aggregation of individual human behaviors, and if taste were the mere product of random idiosyncrasies and irrational psychologies, culture would display no patterns, only noise. The fact that preferences in these disparate fields follow a similar rhythm of change suggests there must be universal principles of

Markets are driven by the actions of countless individuals, each reacting to his or her whims, the weather, and the news of the day. Remarkably, just as with army ants, out of all our individual actions emerges a higher order, a set of prices that allows us to buy and sell whatever we may desire.

When we contemplate nature (a forest in the autumn, for example, or the reproductive cycle of the salmon), we are thinking about rules that in their broad, irresistible structure apply to ourselves as well. We too must mature, seek to reproduce, age, fall ill and die. We face a litany of other burdens too: we will never be fully understood by other