Case 3

Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan, The Garden of Microbial Delights: A Practical Guide to the Subvisible (Kendall/Hunt, 1993).

With her son Dorian (by the astrophysicist Carl Sagan (1934-1996)), Lynn Margulis published this fascinating book describing the microbial world. It is regarded an excellent introduction to the numerous, yet poorly known, organisms found in every conceivable part of the earth's surface and deep within its oceans and soils. Sagan and Margulis cover everything from viruses to lichens, including such weird life forms as mycoplasmas, methanogens, slime bacteria, crypters, ray beings, slime nets, cellular slime molds, sea whirlers and chytrids. In the 1970s, Margulis was instrumental in developing with James Lovelock the Gaia Theory--a scientific program for investigating the Earth as a self-regulating organism. In this work, they drew upon the ideas of Vladimir Vernadsky and inspired the Deep Ecology Movement.