James Lovelock

Life clearly does more than adapt to the Earth. It changes the Earth to its own purposes. Evolution is a tightly coupled dance, with life and the material environment as partners. From the dance emerges the entity Gaia.

Between 1939 and 1945 you produced weapons and war equipment valued at thirteen billion dollars, 70 per cent of which you shipped to your allies. The same process is going on today in Canada's much larger and growing industry.

It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits.