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The essence of the Earth’s beauty lies in disorder, in the disorder of grasses strewn in a meadow, the blotching of green lichen on a tree trunk. A fascination with what he called the "jumble and disorder of nature" possessed internationally acclaimed photographer Eliot Porter all his life. His photographs in Nature’s Chaos span thirty-five years and five continents: from the Antarctic ice floe to the American desert to the Icelandic lava field. They feature the wildness -- and chaos -- of mountains and forest regions, plains and deserts, rivers and coastlines, illuminating in mesmerizing ways what scientists are beginning to see for themselves -- that irregular orders emerge from pure disorder, and that patterns repeat themselves naturally on small and large scales.
James Gleick, author of the best-selling Chaos, has provided an accompanying text which describes the links being forged between the abstractions of science and vivid images of natural beauty. In this beautiful and fascinating book, science and art combine to teach us to see patterns, relations and interactions present in nature’s disorder and wildness.
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