Observations placeholder
Watson, Lyall - The dependency between the Air and Reproduction systems
Identifier
020345
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Activity dependency – example air systems and reproduction
There is a dependency between the systems of the air and on the system of dispersal of organisms – reproduction
A description of the experience
Lyall Watson – Heaven’s Breath
The impetus for most work on invisible particles in the air continues to come from medicine or agriculture and their joint concern about airborne disease, but this obsession with ‘germs’ conceals the fact that only a tiny fraction of everything blowing in the wind is inimical. The truth is that air supports an unseen ecology that is every bit as rich and varied as a rain forest or a coral reef.
The census of microscopic species in the air has only just begun, but already includes a host of viruses; close to 1000 varieties of bacteria; 40,000 species of fungi; hundreds of different kinds of algae; mosses, liverworts, ferns and protozoans in at least some stage of their life cycle; and more than 10,000 species of flowering plants that are wind pollinated.
Many of these species are only a temporary part of the aerial community, present as relatively inactive cells or small groups of protected cells called spores.
Some bacteria, many fungi and most mosses, ferns and flowering plants use the air purely as a means of dispersal for these seeds of new life elsewhere, but a large number of species take to the air as active adults.
Within the boundary layer [of air systems] the sheer quantity of living things is phenomenal. Over every square centimetre of land surface, there must be an average of something like 10,000 microscopic organisms. That is fifty to a hundred million above every square metre or, if you like, a tower of roughly thirty million living things balanced on your shoulders in a precarious column 1000 metres high.