Heaven’s Breath: A Natural History of the Wind by Lyall Watson (New York Review of Books, 2019)
Wind is a life-giver, a fire-bringer, an unseen force that shapes the earth by moving soil and by lofting insects, seeds and pollen, sometimes great distances. It wears away mountains, shapes landscapes and carries death in the folds of its invisible cloak. It is a fact of life in West Marin, where for most of the year it is a benign neighbor, capturing moisture as it crosses the immense Pacific and bringing cool, onshore, fog-rich breezes, a vital component of our ecosystem.
As the recent high-wind events and subsequent power outages reminded us, at this time of year our prevailing westerly breezes swing to the east, bringing dangerous dry conditions and the increased risk of wildfire to a parched landscape. These, of course, are the notorious Diablo winds and Santa Ana winds. If we did not dread them already, we are quickly learning how destructive they can be.
We live with the wind, but as Lyall Watson notes in “Heaven’s Breath: A Natural History of the Wind,” it is invisible. No one has ever photographed the wind. Like a spirit, with which it shares etymological roots across many languages, the wind quickens the world unseen.
Originally published in 1984, Watson’s masterpiece is an erudite and enjoyable compendium of wind-lore, science, myth, history and the occasional joke. It opens with a simple but stark declaration: Without wind, most of our planet would be uninhabitable. The tropics would be too hot to sustain life and, except for narrow coastal margins in higher latitudes, the rest of the planet would be trapped in a perpetual deep freeze. Earth would be a desert world.
As far as beginnings go, this one is hard to beat. Wind is an ideal protagonist: a figure that helped transform a lifeless world into one teeming with life. Learning how it did so is one of the pleasures of reading this book, but “Heaven’s Breath,” though rich in fact, is not strictly devoted to science. Watson delights as much in retelling myths and in conveying the religious significance various cultures have invested in this silent, life-sustaining emissary as he does in cataloging how various plants pollinate with the assistance of the wind.
This delight often unravels in long inventories, full of marvelous facts and casual asides that display a joyous knowledge.
In one example, Watson writes how the Berbers, in the belief that movement is attractive to the wind, petition the breeze by “suspending a beetle from the branch of a tree so that it would wave its legs.”
Later, he writes of the arctic daffodil, “whose fruits stand up on several smooth feet that carry it for several kilometers across the ice like tiny skis.” And he discusses life in the troposphere, where one can find bacteria and viruses, spiders and insects traveling sometimes for months on end, and extra-planetary life smuggled into our atmosphere by meteors. This “rich and potent brew,” as he calls it, seethes with life and meaning.
The science that Watson does bring into the book is, as one might expect of a polymath and explorer (as he was described in an obituary), written with verve and a perhaps surprising and prescient embrace of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis’s Gaia hypothesis that the Earth and its organisms are not only mutually dependent upon each other, but reinforce life through dynamic interplay.
In Watson’s words, “life defines the conditions necessary for its own survival and somehow makes sure that they stay there.” The atmosphere, he argues, “cannot be just a fortunate one-off emanation from some ancient rocks.”
Instead, the evolution of our atmosphere, which made life possible on the planet, “begins to look… like an artefact, like something made by, and maintained by, living things for their own ends.”
What to some readers may sound unscientific or even mystical is for Watson a framework within which the wind’s inextricable relationship with life on our planet makes logical sense. At the very least, this stance is one marked by humility—and one that is evident from the beginning of the book.
Rather than insisting this natural history of wind is the last word on the subject, Watson insists there is still much to learn. Like the wind, certain knowledge remains elusive, ungraspable. It is best when approaching the complexities of life to avoid fixed theories, and to find some joy in the way that people, animals, and plants are shaped by and themselves shape this improbable life-sustaining planet.
In this way, “Heaven’s Breath” acts a vivifying breeze that, like some of the best writing on the environment being published today, clears the air, allowing us to reconsider a view that may have become overly familiar.
Stephen Sparks is a resident of San Rafael and a co-owner of Point Reyes Books. His writing has appeared in Tin House, the Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere.