The blue-green sphere falls off its axis, bounces across the desk. I catch it after a couple of tries. What to do with the Earth in my hands? I try to change its shape without breaking it, spin it, compress it to see if something comes out of it. What if I invert the poles? What if Africa and South America were the north? I dip a finger in the Atlantic Ocean, the jungles here join the gulf there, and I imagine the world when all the emerged lands were a single supercontinent, before the dinosaurs. 

Next to my scaled planet I keep seeds, feathers, volcanic stones, leaf skeletons, snail fossils, I like to keep pieces of the world, memories of the living. I take the pressed flower of Passiflora mariquitensis that Adriana gave me the day we met. Its petals are no longer white nor is its crown golden, it is the flower in another dimension that refuses to disappear, fragile, like the possibility to continue existing. 

For the last two hundred and thirty years no one had seen the flowers of the mariquitensis, the plant was believed to be extinct. The last record came from drawings made by Francisco Javier Matiz for the Botanical Expedition, the first scientific project that, starting from Mariquita, tried to recognize the nature of the Neo-granadian territory. In those times, it was not thought that a complete species of living beings could disappear from the Earth, the word dinosaur did not exist and the word fossil referred to extracted minerals, not to vestiges of extinct organisms. Only when Mary Anning, the mother of paleontology, found in the XIX century the first complete skeleton of a living being that nobody knew about, were we able to broaden the interpretation of the history of the planet, we began to understand that the Earth and life have had multiple versions and that extinction is indeed a possibility. 

I spin my planet, I look for the center. I know that curved surfaces are formed by points that follow each other, and that each point is at the same distance from the center, but where is this convergent point? What is the center of the world? The word center comes from the Latin centrum, which means the fixed branch of a compass on which the other branch rotates. When the first Greek geometricians wanted to draw a circumference, they improvised a compass with a wooden stake, stuck the sharp end in the ground, tied a string to it and spun it around to draw the circular outline. Sometimes, we are like stakes, we fix ourselves on a point, we establish our center, we run the risk of losing sight of the external points of our own curvature. 

I play at pointing out random spots: Kalahari, Chiribiquete, Manizales, Malabo, Amazonas, each place becomes, for a moment, the center of the world. I search in the tropics, in the heart of Colombia, between the Magdalena river valley and the Andes mountain range. Mariquita is not marked. I mark a point where it could be. 

***

Walking through any urban center in the world, it is hard to imagine that there are still spaces of land without cement, but the houses in Mariquita still have gardens with trees, possums, birds, mushrooms and insects, green belts that connect with the Municipal Forest. However, urban expansion threatens to devour them, as it did with squirrel monkeys, crimson-backed and golden-hooded tanagers, and squirrels, which are no longer seen in these decimated corridors. 

The word cement makes me think of cementery. They are not words of the same family, there is no etymological relationship, but the possibilities for life to manifest itself are buried under it. They say that the amount used each year in the world for construction would be enough to build a belt around the Earth. It is the first time that most humans live in urban areas, agglomerated, un-earthed. It is also the first time that the life of many humans extinguishes in cities in complete loneliness, without anyone missing them, without anyone noticing their death. 

Three o'clock in the afternoon, the sun warms up to the bones. Adriana's house is old, thick walls, high ceilings, a corridor with arabesque tiles that connects all the rooms and at the end, where the cement ends, the Earth is reborn. Adriana's garden is like looking out the window of an airplane over the jungle or diving to see corals, which are the jungles of the sea, or like looking closely at the cracked bark of a tree, with islands of lichens, mountains of mosses and forests of ferns. A coca, the sacred plant of the Andean peoples, has grown like a tree. Iraca palms sway in the wind that comes down from the mountain range. Bluebirds and blackbirds splash on hollowed stones with rainwater. Orchids sprout from coconut pods like starfish. Anthuriums glow red in the shade. Lianas of curare and pipevines embrace a tatamaco and a Colombian madruno. A row of ants outlines a map of fertile soil on the leaf litter. Fungi, grecian shoemaker butterflies, insects, transparent lizards, life flickers luminous as points of a constellation. 

Along the way, I imagined a biologist's garden to be a garden of organized and labeled plants, but in Adriana's garden the native life grows free, resembling a forest more than a collection. Being here I stop feeling the emptiness that I cannot define when I am in the city. Denying fraternity with other living beings separates us from nature, drowns us in an existential lack that is difficult to name. 

Adriana tells me that for the last eight years she has been on an expedition in the mariquitensis territory in search of native and endemic plants in risk of extinction. Her purpose is to reproduce them in the garden to conserve at least one individual of each species and to carry out studies that contribute to their conservation. Expedition comes from the Latin expeditio, which expresses the desire to open ways, to break through, to overcome resistance. 

The word sepulcher has no antonym. But the opposite idea is expressed in gardens like this one, open to the sky and the earth, oases for life that resists urban pressure, opportunities to resume the ancestral dialogue between humans and nonhumans, lights in times of extinction. 

***

Adriana has traversed the municipal forest since she was a child, growing up she would go on hikes and explorations with her father, Don Orlando, who for a long time was a hunter, but witnessing the destruction of the forest and the disappearance of life led him to share his knowledge, to become a protector and forest ranger. Together they have understood the intimate relationship between the existing, the balanced chaos that unites the life of the planet as a single organism. 

In 1967, the scientist Lynn Margulis proposed a revolutionary theory that led us to rethink the interpretation of the Darwinian theory of the evolution of species. Margulis managed to establish that cooperation among living beings is the basis of their organization and one of the most powerful evolutionary triggers. The power of life does not reside in the strongest, an inaccurate interpretation by social Darwinists, but in symbiosis, in the support of cooperation, in the richness of community life. 

This new perspective led Lynn Margulis to support atmospheric chemist James Lovelock's Gaia theory. According to this theory, life on Earth is sustained by the interdependence of ecosystems, phenomena and organisms that make up the Earth. A planetary self-regulating capacity similar to the mechanisms of the human body to maintain a constant temperature. 

In The nation of plants, plant neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso, drawing on Lynn Margulis' "Endosymbiotic Theory" and James Lovelock's "Gaia Theory", reminds us that: "The strength of ecological communities is one of the driving forces of life on Earth. At all levels, both microscopic and macroscopic, it is communities —understood as relationships between living beings— that enable life continuity (...) Communities are the basis of life on Earth." 

In times when neither don Orlando nor Adriana knew the theories of Margulis and Lovelook, they had already reached the same conclusion: the planet Earth behaves like a gigantic living being and all her beings are part of the same community, of the same superorganism. 

Don Orlando and Adriana feel as mariquitensis as all the other beings that evolved in this point of the Earth, they know themselves to be part of the Earth.

***

The perfect symbiosis of the forest still moves Adriana as it did when she was a child. Listening to her reminds me of forest ecologist Suzanne Simard. In a talk I saw on the internet, Suzanne tells how as a child she used to accompany her grandfather to the forest and that one day, while watching him dig a hole to rescue their little dog that had fallen, she was surprised to see the roots of the trees threaded like a net through the earth. Years later, as a researcher, Suzanne would verify that what she had seen was the communication network of the forest, the biological pathway of fungi and mycorrhizae that allows trees and plants to behave as a single organism. 

When we walk through the forest and see mushrooms, we actually see just a part of them, underneath the ground their mycelium expands over the roots in a mutualistic symbiosis of interaction. The mycelium connects trees and plants of the forest, it is the bridge to exchange resources, nutrients and information. 

During their research, Suzanne Simard and her team observed that plants send each other chemical messages of danger and cooperate with each other, such as the spruce tree that was cut off from the water supply but survived for years thanks to neighboring trees sending what was needed. They also found that mother trees nurture young seedlings in the understory as they reach the light needed to make their food, they create a framework around their offspring that reduces competition from their own roots, and, before they die, they send messages of wisdom to the next generation. 

Like planet Earth, forests are not just a collection of trees with individual life processes, forests behave as a single organism that communicates through the fungal network that connects all the roots. In the subterranean mycelial network lies the intelligence of forests, the strength of their plant community. 

***

Adriana's expeditions have paced her steps to the beat of the planet's sap. She has seen the foliage grow in search of the sun, she has followed the trails of sky left by the trees between their crowns, she has learned to know plants, animals, fungi and insects. But it was flowers who aroused her curiosity the most. Why do they have so many shapes? What determines their aroma, their color?

Following the path of tiny pioneers adhering to rocks and cliffs, life emerged from the sea to the surface, the planet became green and the sky blue. At first, plants entrusted their seeds to air and water, but their ingenuity became flowers. It is believed that the first plants flourished one hundred and forty million years ago in the tropics, where the sun encourages life all year round. The oldest plants on earth, such as mosses, ferns and pines, were already home and food, but the intelligence of flowers was the link of correspondence between plants and other living beings, the communion of ecosystems. 

For this reason, we find flowers like the Victoria amazonica that displays its white flower with the scent of ripe fruit in order to attract beetles that it then imprisons at night so that they leave the pollen they bring from other flowers and impregnate them with their own pollen when they leave; or the corpse flower that smells of rotting flesh to attract the flies that pollinate it, or the orchid bee that disguises itself as a female to attract males, or the bergamot and myrtle that emit bright ultraviolet colors to guide their pollinators. 

Thanks to flowers, relationships of mutual benefit among beings were strengthened, the diversity of communities was detonated, our evolutionary paths were united. 

***

One morning in 2016, Adriana went into the forest, the deafening music of the last house that invaded it was left behind. She felt birds, frogs, wind among the foliage, the nascent water, her steps among roots, mushrooms and dry branches. She saw guayacán seeds float like butterfly wings. She drew a yarumo next to a lichen microforest on a rock. Suddenly, the lianas on a tree reminded her of the iconography of the Passiflora mariquitensis painted by Matiz, who Alexander Humboldt called the best flower illustrator in the world. It also resembled the specimens she collected with her father and Professor John Ocampo in 2014, but since it did not have flowers this time either, she could not be sure which plant it was, so she approached it, asked for permission, took a cutting and planted it in the backyard of her house. 

Flowers are the hallmark that identifies plants. The leaves vary a lot, but the flower structure is more stable. To know which species a passiflora belongs to, it is necessary to see the flower, but it is not easy because of its ephemeral nature, that is why finding flower fossils is as difficult as finding endangered endemic passifloras.

Adriana took care of the cuttings as if it were a child. She kept a diary with her observations, prepared rooting agents, organic fertilizers, transferred to a container the eggs that butterflies left on its leaves, watched them hatch, become caterpillars and fly away. She saw when the stem gave up its vertical firmness to let itself loose in lianas over a tamarillo. 

One morning in October 2019, three years after she had set the cutting in her garden, she found the first buds, her heart beat faster, her eyes watered, she could finally confirm if this was the plant taken as extinct. The next day, white petals opened like a skirt from a golden fringed belt, their anthers rising like dancers towards the sun. Adriana felt as if she were at the center of the world and the forest moved towards her, converging in her garden the paths of all her expeditions. She felt united to the existing, as if she was blooming too. It was the Passiflora mariquitensis. The news of its reappearance was national. 

That same year, during excavations seeking to understand forest reactions during other periods of global warming, Colombian paleobotanist Monica Carvalho found the fossil of a flower.

***

When I met Adriana, I asked her to tell me her story with the Passiflora mariquitensis. We spoke several afternoons about her expeditions, her love for flowers, for the Earth and about the drive that forces her to persevere. We also spoke about sadness and helplessness. Finding the Passiflora mariquitensis, reproducing it in her garden, seeing it in newspaper articles, does not guarantee its survival, nor that of its forest or its community, all of which are becoming extinct at this very moment, as I write these words. 

The Passiflora mariquitensis is an endemic plant, a living being that evolved in only one place on the planet: the Mariquita Municipal Forest. Although it was declared a Natural Reserve in 1960, human constructions have invaded more than 500 hectares, only ninety hectares remain. The orders of the Colombian justice system to recover the forest and relocate the homes of human beings who live there, without public services, without security or legality, remain unfulfilled. 

Adriana always wonders: what would the Passiflora mariquitensis be like in its endemic habitat? Who would feed on its nectar and fruits? Who would spread its seeds? With whom did it travel the evolutionary path that made it what it is? What void does it leave in the community of the forest, in the community of living beings that inhabit this territory?

***

One afternoon in September I received a call, thePassiflora mariquitensis had bloomed again. I was able to see it too. Its lianas wove a path of vines to the top of the tomato tree and bloomed like a waterfall cascading over the earth. I was shaken by its existence. Wasps and a hummingbird surrounded it. I thought of the paths that brought us all to it. Maybe there are seeds left and Adriana can try, once again, to germinate life one step away from darkness. So far she has not succeeded. She knows that plants that survive far from their natural community are like sterile islands, expressions of life condemned to disappear, like the wax palms that, among pastures, await death without descendants, far from their fog forests, from their yellow-eared parrots, from the beetles that evolved precisely to carry their seeds.

It is true that extinction events are part of the history of our planet, but never before have so many species been lost in such a short period of time as in our time, the Anthropocene. We ignore the fact that mass extinction not only disarticulates the functioning of ecosystems, but also that these ecosystems are the providers of vital services that sustain human life. Despite the information that circulates, we remain lost in self-destructive imaginaries of consumerism and development, without taking into account that the same cause of the extinction of nature also displaces human groups from their territories and destroys cultural diversity. As ethnobotanist Wade Davis explains, half of the world's languages are in danger of extinction and "A language, of course, is not just a set of grammatical rules or a vocabulary. It is a glimmer of the human spirit, the vehicle through which the soul of each culture reaches the material world. Every language is a primeval forest of intelligence, a landmark of thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities."

***

I return home at night. I turn on the lights. I take the Earth-shaped sphere, the point I had marked seems so small, but every sphere needs each of its points to exist, just as every living being needs its community and its point in the world to exist.

We are all part of the planetary macro-system which, like an individual organism, needs complete interaction to self-regulate, to maintain its planetary homeostasis. The Earth, Gaia, we all lose something vital with each species that disappears, extinction breaks the evolutionary symbiosis, extinguishes a luminous point in the constellation of life. To extinguish the fire, to make the light cease, that is what exstinguere means in Latin, the origin of the word extinction. 

Seen from space, the Earth also looks like just a point, our endemic point, the only known point capable of sustaining life.