A cellular view of life

I don't know if Richard Dawkins and Paul Hawken know each other personally, but they are in close physical contact on my book table and they both present a compelling vision of community, but in an unexpected scale. Dawkins, in The Ancestor's Tale, talks about genes, not as a coding device for building a creature, but as a community of cooperators working (not consciously of course) for their own common benefit to create a congenial environment for themselves and their offspring that may be called a cell or a beaver or a pond, depending on your point of view. Hawkens, in Blessed Unrest, expands that vision, starting with the notion that humans are ourselves mostly made up of other life forms, chiefly bacteria that perform many of our vital functions, and then expanding that notion to encompass the thousands of community groups and interests, whether fighting for indigenous peoples or endangered species or threatened places, that keep the planet healthy in the face of a relentless pressure from global capital to create a uniformity that, in his view, is has the same effect economically and culturally as monoculture has environmentally. In diversity is strength and in uniformity is fragility and ultimately danger.