All around us, still clumsily drifting about in its primeval soup of culture, is another replicator.

The Eastern Hemlock forest is being considered in some ways the last fragments of primeval rainforest east of the Mississippi River.

Even so, about four percent of the primeval Redwood rainforest remains intact, wild and now protected entirely protected in a chain of small parks strung out like pearls along the north coast of California, including Redwood National Park.

And in the last two to three summers, these invasive organisms, this kind of Ebola of the trees, as it were, has swept through the primeval Hemlock forest of the east, and has absolutely wiped it out. I climbed there this past summer.