The resilience of life can be quite amazing, as any gardener knows. Turn up a piece of ground and seedlings will appear everywhere - often of plants not seen in that space for many years, if ever. Turn over a garden bed thoroughly, two or three times, and still, just as your delicate brassica seedlings are appearing, all sorts of other sprouts will explode out of the ground and race skyward.
In the Blue Mountains there are plants that qualify as delicate elsewhere, but here, once entrenched in a garden, will never leave. Potatoes and strawberries in the vegetable garden, or violets in the shady corners, or buttercups anywhere, will seem to succumb to the hoe or spade, but, as soon as the gardener's back is turned, they will spring up again.
Bushwalkers can testify to the number of toppled trees, torn from their place by storms and tossed flat on the ground, that suddenly send up vertical shoots along their trunk to form a new grove - not to mention the vigour with which giant orb spiders will replace a massive web that was cleared from a walking track only the previous afternoon. Never walk away from the camp site without a torch, thinking that the track will remain clear once darkness falls.
Fragments of willow branches need only to land in a spot that will remain damp for a few weeks, and a new tree will soon be growing. Last year, Council inspected our neighbours across the creek and ordered the removal of a long clump of bamboo that grew along their bank. It was sad to see it go, as it screened part of our yard from view, gave us the feeling of living in a clearing in a rainforest, was a lovely windbreak, and provided safe haven to a family of black ducks as well as other birds.
The neighbours complied, and after the next rains, complied again - most of the bamboo has fallen to the repeated onslaughts of chainsaws, chippers, and spray, but even in this droughty, frosty winter, enough little shoots persevere to make me think that the bamboo is plotting its return. The bare ground, despite the amount of poison hurled at it, is being colonised anew by other species, too.
Likewise can the angler testify to the times when a fish is landed that has a great scar, or even a scalloped bite missing from part of its body, that has healed over - the fish having escaped a larger predator and continued on with its life. One eyed or one legged birds seem to keep up with the flock, spiders with fewer than eight legs continue to stalk their prey - life, as the man in the movie said, persists.
The persistence and resilience of life in the face of all sorts of hazards and assaults is a remarkable thing, and so it should disturb us all the more when we see species of any life form becoming extinct at the hands of our species. Life on this planet has pushed through, and flourished after, all sorts of catastrophes, from massive ice ages to enormous cometary impacts and their subsequent fire-storms.
It doesn't seem right that a complex web of life that has survived and recovered from everything the universe has thus far thrown at it might be failing at the hands of one of its own very prolific and resilient progeny - for if the web collapses, it is certain to take us down with it.
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