A short history of nearly everything – Bill Bryson
This book questions what we think and presume we know. As well as being a brilliantly written and witty read, Bill manages to put forward clearly what he has discovered about science.
Heavens Breath – Lyall Watson
ISBN 0-304-38263-5
A book by the same author as Supernature published in 1984, how many pages could you write on the wind and its effects?
Lyall crams 384 pages full.
Ask all the advocates of wind farms how many pages they could write? Once again we are messing with Natural Systems we do not understand. The energy of wind generates the planets weather, now we are going to steal that energy?!?
Here is an extract from the opening paragraph of the book, excuse its long windedness…
“On the Wind If the trend toward specialisation in science is defined as knowing more and more about less and less, then this is its logical conclusion. Everything you always wanted to know about nothing. It began as an essay on experience of the ineffable, but grew, as wind will, to have a life of its own. As it gathered strength, drawing on surprising resources, it became apparent that wind is far from hollow.
It is the most vital of metaphors.
Part of this vigour is revealed in language. In Arabic, the wind is ruh, but the same word also means ‘breath’ and ‘spirit’. While in Hebrew, ruach enlarges the sphere of influence to include concepts of creation and divinity. And the Greek pneuma, or the Latin animus are redolent, not just of air, but of the very stuff of the soul. Without wind, most of the Earth would be uninhabitable. The tropics would grow so unbearably hot that nothing could live there. and the rest of the planet would freeze. Moisture if any existed would be confined to the oceans, and all but the fringe of the great continents along a narrow temperate belt,- would be desert. There would be no erosion, no soil, and for any community that managed to evolve despite these rigours, no relief from suffocation by their own waste products. But with the wind, Earth comes truly alive. Winds provide the circulatory and nervous systems of the planet, sharing our energy and information, distributing both warmth and awareness, making something out of nothing.
All winds properties are borrowed. Our knowledge of it comes at secondhand, but it comes strongly. And this combination of a force that cannot be apprehended, but nevertheless has an undeniable existence, was our first experience of the spiritual. A crack in the cosmos that widened to let the tide of consciousness flow through.
We are the fruits of the wind – and have been seeded, irrigated and cultivated by its craft.
This is a natural history of that process. It is acknowledgement, and a celebration, of an awesome debt. Lyall Watson – Kyoto, Japan; 1983″