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Show 262. was not the first organism to expand its realm and become aggressively yang. The death of many species in the past testified to a passive yin side of natural history. The harmony of this flow could be imagined as incorporating strife, as Heraclitus conceived: "Opposition brings concord. Out of discord comes the fairest harmonies." Nevertheless, it required some ingenuity to arrive at this point of view. Visualized as a food chain, the harmony of strife may have had its origin in the eighteenth century metaphor of the "great chain of being." Man might stand at the top of this chain, or pyramid, as it is now visualized. Or he could stand at the bottom of the chain, waiting with an open mouth while all of Nature's concentrated energy flowed into him. Muir tended toward the latter view, imagining that Man was in a sense the sum total of all species which preceded him, and which he now consumed. Contemporary genetic and brain research tends to confirm this view in principle, with some reservations. Or one might see the opposition between species as a competition for food. In this case, each species occupied a "niche," so no two species could occupy the same position. One would survive by "competitive exclusion." Muir must have been sufficiently aware of this phenomenon as he watched his employer's sheep destroy the forage which bear and deer ate in the past. He also spoke of the bear as king of the forest, but witnessed the regicide man committed. When a man killed a hear, he was involved in an act of imperialism. He was guilty of the same act when he brought domestic sheep into the meadows of the Sierra. Wild sheep did not naturally compete |